Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Does capitalism today face the “end of cheap nature”? If so, what could this mean, and what are the implications for the future? We are indeed witnessing the end of cheap nature in a historically specific sense. Rather than view the end of cheap nature as the reassertion of external “limits to growth”, I argue that capitalism has today exhausted the historical relation that produced cheap nature. The end of cheap nature is best comprehended as the exhaustion of the value-relations that have periodically restored the “Four Cheaps”: labor-power, food, energy, and raw materials. Crucially, these value-relations are co-produced by and through humans with the rest of nature. The decisive issue therefore turns on the relations that enfold and unfold successive configurations of human and extra-human nature, symbolically enabled and materially enacted, over the longue durée of the modern world-system. Significantly, the appropriation of unpaid work —including “free gifts” of nature— and the exploitation wage-labor form a dialectical unity. The limits to growth faced by capital today are real enough, and are “limits” co-produced through capitalism as world-ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature as an organic whole. The world-ecological limit of capital is capital itself.

Since the creation of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2008, its members evidence an endogenous contradiction in relation to the illegal drug issue. While on one hand they are demanding a new approach to the world drug issue, focused on human rights and promoting initiatives oriented to harm reduction; on the other hand, many of them are implementing internal punitive measures, based on a supply-centric strategy and criminalization of drug users. This article analyzes some important factors that increase and constrain the coordination of a joint position among South American states on the illegal drug topic through the definition of two approaches —uniaxial and multiaxial—. Those approaches are characterized by the different consideration of three elements: the current legislation that affects the states’ behavior in relation to this issue; the dimensions of the problem; and the actors who try to exercise an influence on —and at the same time are influenced by— both the legislation and the dimensions. This paper also argues that a multiaxial cooperation dynamic could represent a useful long-term strategy to counterbalance the negative spillover effects of a uniaxial war on drugs policy.

Through the perspective of world-ecology, one of the most recent approaches in International Relations, we aim to analyze global capitalism as an ecological project based on the appropriation of human and extra-human natures oriented to support the accumulation process. Agriculture, and its labor force, occupy therefore a central role in maintaining the world-system where global chains, international migrations and center-periphery relations contact and show how global processes occur there. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the analysis of the current world-system through this innovative approach and then show how its structure and its crisis have articulated a highly internationalized production model whose most significant effect has been the generation of large cheap labor migration across the planet. It is proposed as well, an analysis at a local level to highlight some examples, because the organization of work at this territorial scale is constitutive of the global agricultural production.

The article contemplates the contradiction between two opposite views of development. On the one hand, people in Rancho Grande, a rural area in Nicaragua, points out that the good life is environmentally balanced, with community relationships based on mutual support, equality between women and men, and with practices of economic solidarity. On the other hand, progress and modernity ideas promised by a gold mining site by the transnational company B2Gold in the territory, supported by government and mass media. This dispute is keeping the project on hold. From a feminist perspective, the most significant elements of the extractivist model implemented in Nicaragua as a strategy to reduce poverty are under question: the conflict between capital accumulation and life sustainability; the deep environmental and social impacts; gender inequalities reinforcement, and the links between patriarchy, capitalism, extractivism and colonialism. It also values rural knowledge and experiences as resistance practices to the official development discourse and the people’s right to participate in decisions about their territory, to reach objectives on poverty reduction, equity, and social justice.

This article proposes a debate from theoretical approaches of International Relations about the international climate architecture. It is based on the constructivist approach, especially from the perspective of Alexander Wendt, to analyse the process of construction of the Paris Agreement as a new idea. The international climate architecture developed in Rio de Janeiro and deepened in Kyoto was characterized by four logics that reproduced the conditions of the International System: the state-centrism, climate North-South gap, the confidence in the role of market mechanisms and the leadership of the European Union in the absence of the United States from Kioto. The failure of the Copenhagen Conference showed the wear of the four logics as a result of the crisis of European leadership, the pursuit of US leadership and the emergence of the middle powers hybridizing the North-South gap. The Paris Agreement evidences a new idea of international climate architecture manifested in the increased participation of non-traditional actors, the extent of mitigation commitments, the consolidation of a triangular leadership "European Union-United States-BASIC group" and the relative interpellation on market mechanisms.

Land grabbing refers to the global process of large scale land acquisitions in other states, triggered in the context of international crises convergence —food, energy, financial and ecological— of 2008. This paper analyses the reasons which turn land grabbing into a global phenomenon, irreducible to North-South logic. Additionally, its implications for Global South definition and international position are investigated. Based on ecological marxism, it is argued that land grabbing is rooted in capitalist dynamics, which turn land essential for accumulation process. The reason is that it represents a response to global power redefinition, with new actors competing for access to scarce natural goods in a multiple crisis context. At the same time, the participation of great South powers in this process contribute to the reproduction, within Global South, of patterns of exploitation and dispossession similar to North’s. For that, it is studied the China project in Xai-Xai, Mozambique.

Review-essay of: OTTO, Shawn, The War on Science, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 2016, ps. 514. BASSEY, Nnimmo, To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and Climate Crisis in Africa, Cape Town, Pambazuka Press, 2012, ps. 204.

Tatiana Nuño Martínez studied Geology at the Complutense University of Madrid and Marine Sciences at the University of Cádiz. She has a master's degree in Integrated Management of Coastal Areas from the University of Cádiz and two years of research into a Doctorate in Oceanography. On two occasions she has sailed through the seas of Svalbard, in the Norwegian Arctic, where she has been able to see first-hand the effects of thawing and overfishing in one of the most vulnerable regions of our planet. For years she has been working at Greenpeace Spain as head of climate change.

The article examines the changes in multilateralism, governance and the hegemony in the international economic structure prevailing in the second decade of the XXI century, marked by an increasing transition of economic power from the Atlantic to the Pacific axis, and consequently, by an increase in the questioning of the economic order by the emerging powers, particularly in the case of BRICS. The results indicate that the emergent economic multilateralism is minimalist in the sense that the international financial architecture continues to reflect the limited interests of the states, and given the prevalence of Western domination over its main institutions and agenda, it has not been consolidated as a framework affecting their preferences and identities. A historical milestone occurred with the economic and financial crisis of 2008, due to the recognition of the role of emerging economies in determining economic governance, reflected in the change of the G7 to G20; however this change occurred mainly in relative capabilities rather than on the ideas and institutions from the perspective of historical structures.

  This article is an historical and cultural approximation based on the teachings of native women in their struggle for social and legal recognition in Oaxaca. In parallel to the literary inheritance of the ‘Chicana’ women, the Afro-American and American-Indian women of the book Otras inapropiables. Feminismos desde la frontera, I include the voices of women and other indigenous from Oaxaca who were part of in the process of transgression of moral norms and cultures in the various spaces of power. The women interviewed share their reflexions on how they have lived, felt and experienced sexism, classism, discrimination and racism during the last four decades in the socio-historical process. They appeal to the creation of multiple citizenships, a power form of resistance in the current context of the global economy. Finally, I will try to respond to what are the political effects of the current reconfiguration of the multicultural neoliberal State of Oaxaca; as well as the violence that it generates for the indigenous people’s struggle.