Violent Atmospheres: Livelihoods and Landscapes in Crisis in Southeast Asia

In Southeast Asia, atmospheric violence emerges from the haze plumes of burning of palm oil plantations, the invisible but powerful spread of viral flows, and the subordination of upland farmers who have long depended on fire to clear land for new crops. Yet only recently have political ecologists drawn attention to such events’ volumetric social and environmental character. Violent Atmospheres brings the political ecology of crisis to bear on atmospheric violence in Southeast Asia. The theoretically innovative and ethnographically grounded chapters address the internal contradictions of capital accumulation and how resource conflict triggers atmospheric crises. Violent atmospheres are volatile mixes of political-economic and biophysical ruptures encompassing surficial and gaseous matter across scales. Over the past several decades, violent atmospheres have increased in frequency and intensity throughout the region.

While political ecologists have long examined violent environments emerging from conflicts over resources in intensifying capitalist political economies, they have given less attention to the implications of the volumetric character of livelihoods and landscapes in crisis. This collection expands theoretical and empirical framings to account for the volumetric drivers and consequences of atmospheric violence. The essay contributors explore the scaled dimensions of atmospheric-induced violence and how the material and discursive production of crisis intersects with rural and urban socio-politics, economies, and environments. Collectively, the volume offers a framework for the political ecology of violent atmospheres through original, ethnographically grounded chapters based in Southeast Asia, a region with contrasting histories, peoples, and geographies.

• Wolfram Heinz Dressler, Editor

  Wolfram Dressler is professor in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

• Mary Mostafanezhad, Editor

  Mary Mostafanezhad is professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Contributors

• Annie Shattuck
• Alison Copeland
• Anthony Bebbington
• Franck Billé
• Helena Varkkey
• Sango Mahanty
• Carl Grundy-Warr
• Kimberley Anh Thomas
• Carl Middleton
• Tim Werner
• Alya Shaiful Bahari
• Wolfram Heinz Dressler
• Mary Mostafanezhad
• Ian G. Baird
• Jenny E. Goldstein
• Philip Hirsch
• Lisa C. Kelley
• MCGREGOR, ANDREW
• Fiona Miller
• Sarah Milne
• Muhamad Muhdar
• K. B. Roberts
• Tessa D. Toumbourou

• The contributors to Violent Atmospheres drag us through the mud, smoke, and swamps of Southeast Asia, unraveling emblematic and violent volumetric socio-environmental crises. They dissect and recombine the multidimensional and temporal processes at work in viciously complex political ecologies of extraction, overaccumulation, and ongoing dispossession affecting everyday lives across the region. The book’s interdisciplinary focus on the volumetric brings a new vision to our understandings of resource territorialities and a new conceptual tool for analyzing the productions of sterile bodies and barren landscapes.
  —Nancy Lee Peluso, University of California, Berkeley
• The conceptual terrain addressed by the volume is expansive: atmosphere is both affect and materiality; violence is both slow and eventful; and space encompasses volume, verticality and flow. By approaching this terrain though fine-grained studies grounded in the histories, ecologies, and entrenched inequalities of Southeast Asia, the contributors render the multidimensioned violence of our time palpable. Let’s hope they also render it more difficult for techno-optimists and profit-seekers to ignore.
  —Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto
• Embodying the best of what the ‘volumetric turn’ in socio-environmental studies has to offer, this carefully edited book provides deep insights into the structural factors and lived experiences of agrarian communities facing livelihood and landscape crises in Southeast Asia. By connecting the subterranean, terrestrial, and aerial spaces and temporalities of abandoned coal mines, failing hydropower dams, palm oil plantations, or peatland fires, contributors expose the brutal multidimensional impacts of capital overaccumulation. This is a major contribution to studies of climate change, extractivism, and political ecologies of violence.
  —Philippe Le Billon, The University of British Columbia