The devil in the number: Rethinking Garrett Hardin’s The tragedy of the commons and global overpopulation crisis

<p>Critiques about the misconstrued thesis of Garrett Hardin’s (1968) classic essay entitled <i>The Tragedy of the Commons</i> are well documented. However, little is known of the remote and proximate causes of the pejorative confusion about the vital essay. This article engages the discursive reconstruction of the thesis from the management of the commons to the original intent about the unscrupulousness of unchecked population growth as a critical factor to the looming collapse of the earth. Deploying an eloquent metaphor, <i>the devil in the number</i>, the article reinvents the illogic of overpopulating the world while simultaneously pursuing the technocratic solutions to nature’s burden. The article reports four marked factors that swayed perception away from Hardin’s thesis. The significance of Hardin’s essay for the overburdened ecosystem as the harbinger for the socio-economic and governance crisis across the global divides is also discussed.</p>

The devil in the number: Rethinking Garrett Hardin’s The tragedy of the commons and global overpopulation crisis

<p>Critiques about the misconstrued thesis of Garrett Hardin’s (1968) classic essay entitled <i>The Tragedy of the Commons</i> are well documented. However, little is known of the remote and proximate causes of the pejorative confusion about the vital essay. This article engages the discursive reconstruction of the thesis from the management of the commons to the original intent about the unscrupulousness of unchecked population growth as a critical factor to the looming collapse of the earth. Deploying an eloquent metaphor, <i>the devil in the number</i>, the article reinvents the illogic of overpopulating the world while simultaneously pursuing the technocratic solutions to nature’s burden. The article reports four marked factors that swayed perception away from Hardin’s thesis. The significance of Hardin’s essay for the overburdened ecosystem as the harbinger for the socio-economic and governance crisis across the global divides is also discussed.</p>

Feminist Accountability

The book is divided into three sections: The first section, Cultivating Feminist Accountability, explores practices of accountability that embrace critical engagement of the power lines that shape our identities, relationships, and communities as we engage in feminist movement building and social change. The second section, Building Community Accountability and Transformative Justice, explores the concept and practice of community accountability and transformative justice within the context of U.S.-based feminist antiviolence movements. It introduces the feminist-of-color led efforts to shift from the dominant paradigm of institutionalized social services and carceral legal reform to community-based support, intervention, accountability, and transformation. The third section, (Re)Imagining Feminist Solidarity Politics, explores how a framework of feminist accountability can serve to disrupt and disentangle US-based feminist storytelling about the issues facing women of the global south from US imperial logics. Such a shift is essential for making visible the deep and historic relationship between and across these global divides and for creating possibilities for a solidarity based in mutuality, reciprocity and respect.

The Biopolitics of International Exchange: International Educational Exchange Programs – Facilitator or Victim in the Battle for Biopolitical Normativity?

This article addresses how international educational exchange programs are increasingly used as political, and particularly bio-political, tools to promote ideologies of biological normativity. Such programs have historically been promoted by national and international institutions as means to increase participants (and therefore the sending institution’s) knowledge of the world and transfer favorable values through individuals. us and eu exchange programs with Russia in particular have been focused on achieving a ‘mutual understanding’ or promoting ‘common’ or ‘shared values’ across countries; however, a tendency of educational institutions to select like-minded individuals and countries for participation has arguably complicated rather than mended global divides. The difference in values associated with biological practices in Russia, the us, and the eu related to traditional gender roles, marriage, nuclear families, birth control, etc. have become more apparent with the spread of information and globalization. The main argument of this work supports that attention to the promotion or cancelation of certain exchange programs can be used to better understand larger patterns in international relations and the modern system of global governance. An investigation into the founding ideologies behind programs such as flex and Fulbright (by the us) and Erasmus + (by the European Commission) and their politicization exemplifies how educational programs can become ‘battlefields’ for ideologies of biological normativity. The example of the cancelation of the flex program by the Russian Federation is used to understand key relationships between biopolitics and geopolitics, modern and post-modern, and value transfer and human capital.