Steve Vanderheiden

International justice: Rights and obligations of states

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:50:40 +0000

International justice: Rights and obligations of states Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:50

International justice: Rights and obligations of states

By: Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

A preliminary question to its application concerns whether or not justice can defensibly be extended to relations between states, as the notion of “international justice” supposes that it can be. Philosophers and political theorists have long assumed that some ethical norms govern the conduct of nation-states in international politics, occasionally prescribing limits on state actions beyond those inscribed in law or justifying international responses to transgressions of these norms. Strong environmental protections might be advocated from the weaker sense of justice that is coextensive with human rights doctrine, although with the somewhat more modest goal of ensuring that all meet some threshold of access to environmental goods and services, or are not put at risks that exceed a similar threshold by the acts of others. An alternative formulation to distributive justice principles that have developed around the ideal of equity, which lends itself to several problems in global environmental politics, is one that is instead built around ideal of responsibility.

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Climate justice and equity

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:49:21 +0000

Climate justice and equity Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:49

Climate justice and equity

By: Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

Equity serves as a key ideal in the normative assessment of anthropogenic climate change as well as in the evaluation of responses to it. This chapter examines this ideal in light of commitments within the climate treaty as well as in principles of remedial justice.

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Climate change equity and extreme vulnerability

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:45:38 +0000

Climate change equity and extreme vulnerability Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:45

Climate change equity and extreme vulnerability

By: Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

Climate justice scholars have called for equity to serve as a guiding ideal in international responses to climate change, typically noting that the countries and peoples most vulnerable to climate change are often among the least responsible for causing it. Typically, vulnerability to climate change has been associated with claims on international adaptation finance to facilitate vulnerability reduction, but extreme vulnerability (i.e. a very high impact on social and economic systems of climate variation) may resist standard adaptation measures. Whereas extreme vulnerability has in the climate justice literature been associated primarily with small island states or coastal regions that are vulnerable to sea level rise, in sub-Saharan Africa, it challenges the notions of how vulnerability is to be treated under equity norms, since it involves disruption to different systems and requires different kinds of remedies. Here, I consider how sub-Saharan Africa's vulnerabilities compare and contrast with those of more commonly theorised regions or peoples and propose several ways of accommodating the unique nature of its dependence on a stable climate system.

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Mitigation duties of poor and vulnerable countries

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:43:47 +0000

Mitigation duties of poor and vulnerable countries Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:43

Mitigation duties of poor and vulnerable countries

By: Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

Following the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, national responsibilities to contribute toward climate change mitigation have been guided by that treaty provisions that parties contribute on the basis of their ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ (or the CBDR+RC principle). Initially, this was though to entail that developed country parties to the convention be exempted from any mitigation responsibilities, as they were under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. This so-called ‘Bali firewall’ has remained controversial despite the Paris Agreement move away from centrally assigned and binding mitigation commitments, which has been maintained through the 2021 Glasgow Accord, with the ethical question of whether and how much such parties ought to contribute toward global mitigation efforts despite their relatively small historical or current responsibility for climate change remaining central to the normative basis of climate justice itself. This chapter explores this question, proposing and defending a framework for specifying such remedial obligations and considering the various ethical issues that such mitigation burden-sharing involves.

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Hope Springs Eternal?

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:42:09 +0000

Hope Springs Eternal? Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:42

Hope Springs Eternal?

By: Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

As Darrel Moellendorf observes in Mobilizing Hope, climate change and poverty are intertwined in various ways, including the facts that climate impacts threaten to exacerbate global poverty as well as that financial resources devoted to climate change mitigation could be diverted from being used to alleviate global poverty. A decade ago, concerns about the latter motivated ‘additionality’rules that prohibited donor countries from diverting or merely rebadging development aid as financing for climate change mitigation or adaptation, acknowledging the tension. Moellendorf here moves beyond it and aims to integrate climate imperatives with those of development in a more symbiotic or mutually reinforcing relationship, rather than accepting the competition between them that was originally envisaged.

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Incorporating Equitable Carbon Access into Carbon Taxes

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:39:42 +0000

Incorporating Equitable Carbon Access into Carbon Taxes Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:39

Incorporating Equitable Carbon Access into Carbon Taxes

By: Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

As climate change mitigation measures, carbon taxes ought to assign the burdens associated with decarbonization equitably and should at least aim to avoid perpetuating wide inequities in carbon access. While several popular carbon taxation schemes incorporate “feebate” or other redistribute adjustments designed to offset the regressive impacts of rising energy costs, seeking to neutralize the burden-sharing inequity of such policies, they can also contribute to inequities in carbon access, which constitute a second kind of inequity that offsetting schemes may not neutralize. Attention to resource-sharing principles that capture this latter equity objective suggests a comparison between downstream rationing schemes that allocate carbon access among persons and at the point of consumption, thereby instantiating resource-sharing equity, and the carbon pricing schemes that require extensive modifications in order to approximate such equity ideals. In this paper, I compare the two for purposes of focusing on this neglected second equity concern in the design of carbon pricing schemes like carbon taxes as well as on incorporating other justice-related advantages of downstream rationing into such a scheme.

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Unequal Futures: Spatial Patterns of Environmental Injustice Across Three European Case Studies

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:38:27 +0000

Unequal Futures: Spatial Patterns of Environmental Injustice Across Three European Case Studies Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:38

Unequal Futures: Spatial Patterns of Environmental Injustice Across Three European Case Studies

By: Aine Santala, Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

“Sacrifice zones” is a term that has evolved to refer to sites of concentrated environmental hazards resulting from extractive forms of land use. Much of the current literature explores the establishment of such places in Latin America and the United States, where legacies of settler colonialism interact with extant patterns of socioeconomic inequality and sociopolitical marginalization, but what drives their creation in Europe? This study examines three cases (a Roma community in Sajokaza, Hungary, the Kallak mining project in Sami lands, and the Jadar Valley lithium mining project in Serbia) to offer a theoretical analysis of how sacrifice zones are identified and constructed along the peripheries of power. Exploring economic drivers and socio-political dynamics, this paper seeks to understand both the commonalities and differences between places and communities marked for ecological violence.

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Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. By Omer Aijazi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 284p.

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:35:39 +0000

Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. By Omer Aijazi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 284p. Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:35

Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. By Omer Aijazi. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 284p.

By: Steven Vanderheiden

Abstract:

Ethnographer of disaster and decolonialism Omer Aijazi book Atmospheric Violence aims to capture the “feel and mood of life” in the borderland pahars (or mountainscapes, home of the ethno-linguistically distinct Pahari people) of Kashmir. Since the 1990s, the Line of Control has demarcated sections of this contested territory controlled by Pakistan from those controlled by India. Liberation movements against India occupation are ongoing, with the region and its people having long suffered from colonial violence. Compounding these troubles were the impacts of a devastating 2005 earthquake, which killed 80,000 people and injured another 138,000, leaving 3.5 million without shelter and destroying buildings, infrastructure, livestock, and livelihoods. The combined effects of these natural and human disasters offer a glimpse into the lives of some of the planet most marginalized communities, whose resilience and efforts at repair and a kind of flourishing have attracted the interest of scholars like Aijazi. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the Neelum Valley of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir from 2014 through 2022, the book seeks to tell the story of this unique place and people.

Rather than focusing on state violence, its victims, or resistance campaigns to it, Aijazi writes about the people of Kashmir in their efforts to go on living in its wake. As he writes, his aim in the book “is to sharpen our view of how people live, refuse and flourish amid everyday suffocations and environmental ruin, while in the shadows of empire” (p. 5). While subject to violence, he backgrounds it by locating it within the “atmosphere,” described as “an emplacing arrangement to appreciate life textures and tonalities” (p. 6), focusing in the foreground on “the labor of life within everyday chronicity in the pahars, where violence constitutes the very atmosphere” (p. 14). This allows him to focus on the “repair work” undertaken in response to violence and disaster, and through that develop a sense of flourishing, understood as “the ethical and moral risks people take in their daily life that carry political and existential stakes and offer clues on the aesthetics and poetics of desirous futures and wanting pasts and presents” (p. 11).

The book core is thus comprised of a series of “scenes,” or “framing devices through which specific aspects of the feeling world are rendered palpable” (p. 24). Each of the five chapter-length ethnographic studies of individual protagonists residing within the region but in some way also marginalized from their already-marginalized communities reveals a character, but also their community and culture through their individual and collective struggles to go on living in the midst of atmospheric violence and despite having suffered tremendous loss. Interlaced with theoretical musings and reflections on his own outsider status, cultural misunderstandings from sharing food and other gifts to the effects of monetary payments to research subjects, and the role of academics in liberation movements, each scene paints a rich tapestry inspired by its focal character, as well as conveying mood and affect emanating from the life of the communities of those under study and the circumstances in which they now find themselves.

Characters in each scene are compellingly sketched in terms of their histories, relations, fears, and aspirations while avoiding cliches and archetypes. Niaz, confined to a wheelchair, has trained to become a teacher but is unable to find work, yet perseveres and hopes against all odds to recover from his disability. Parveen, a midwife with one of the few paid health care positions in the only clinic near her village, gifts others with kindness and compassion after her children had grown and left and her husband had passed. Sattar Shah, the tenant farmer and voluntary outcast whose renunciations serve Allah but keep him at a distance from others, prioritizes the spiritual over the social. Abrar, whose father owned the guesthouse where Aijazi stayed during his years of fieldwork, searches for work beyond Kashmir and embodies the tension between rootedness and desires for connection. Chandni Bibi, who stubbornly attributes her blindness to the 2005 earthquake but refuses to be defined by it, finds purpose and support through caregiving to her brother family. All are affected by the area geopolitics, endemic poverty, and aftermath of the earthquake, but none are defined by it, instead drawing their breath (a rich metaphor that Aijazi uses throughout) from their relations with others in the community and their unique topography.

As an ethnography of ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances (of natural disaster and empire), Aijazi scenes portray their characters sympathetically and with deference to their self-understandings rather than through patronizing caricatures or embellishments. He resists the temptation to use them as pawns in a larger narrative, or to draw conclusions (about Kashmir and its future, about natural disasters, about decolonialism) from them. As he writes in the book concluding chapter, he understands his task as an ethnographer to be “to enlarge and expand the frames of legibility of Kashmir, to stretch the relation between possibility and desire, and to prod and poke the realisms of imperial cartographies, borders, and boundaries” (p. 217). In this, he responds to Rob Nixon call to bring those suffering from slow violence into view (in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011), telling their stories in part so that readers can better appreciate how global forces connect victims with those contributing toward their victimization. However, Aijazi does not view or treat them as victims so much as people whose horizons as well as current predicaments are shaped by forces beyond their control but who nonetheless manage to carry on living within domains of autonomy and with resources that are available to them. The violence and deprivation come across as no less real to the reader, even as they are mostly relegated to the background in favor of a focus on the resilience of humanity.

Readers from political science might be disappointed by the backgrounding of politics and government. However, those concerned with decolonizing the discipline, and indeed those critical of the constraints of academic disciplines and seeking examples of social science work that challenges disciplinary boundaries, will find ample provocation in several extended reflections on the possibilities and constraints therein. Likewise, for those enamored with all kinds of theory, from the normative to the critical and interpretive; from decolonial to feminist and critical race theory, from theories of disaster and repair, of affect, of culture and identity, and of world systems. Aijazi interprets the social world that he encounters through a running dialogue that moves effortlessly between sometimes disparate theoretical voices, most of which are mobilized sympathetically, as expressions of what he wants his readers to understand or what he himself is struggling to understand. For those who study borderlands and the marginalized people that reside within them, or even for those who reflect on the challenges or importance of doing so, the book offers itself as a guide, a scholarly and personal resource, and a model for how to engage in such difficult but vital and edifying work.

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Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis: by Chris Armstrong, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2024

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:34:28 +0000

Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis: by Chris Armstrong, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2024 Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:34

Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis: by Chris Armstrong, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2024

By: Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

Anthropogenic environmental change, especially when of a scale that could without hyperbole be called a crisis, provides interesting fodder for the application of global justice theories. Insofar as human drivers of the crisis or its expected impacts are differentiated in terms that coincide with existing patterns of advantage and disadvantage, such crises may aptly be

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Transforming Texas-style commodification: Sovereignty, resilience, and energy justice

Avery Lord — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:20:08 +0000

Transforming Texas-style commodification: Sovereignty, resilience, and energy justice Avery Lord Wed, 06/17/2026 - 11:20

Transforming Texas-style commodification: Sovereignty, resilience, and energy justice

By: Whiskey Sours, Steve Vanderheiden

Abstract:

We examine the 2021 collapse of the Texas electrical grid as a case study of vulnerabilities introduced by the commodification of energy systems. While theories of commodification do predict several of the observed impacts of this experiment in privatization and deregulation of public utilities, we attribute these impacts to a tendentious conception of “Texas-style” sovereignty that is not captured by existing accounts of energy justice. By supplementing existing conceptions of energy justice with an evolved conception of sovereignty, we hope to provide a more capacious and defensible normative foundation for energy systems than is available elsewhere, and one capable of diagnosing and avoiding the trappings of Texas-style energy ideals.

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