Energopolitics

At the end of 2010 the British Museum unveiled the final artefact in their exhibition ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’: a portable solar powered lamp designed for and sold to people living without access to mains electricity in Africa and Asia. Solar powered lights have become iconic objects of social entrepreneurship in Africa and Asia and this article explores the work involved in producing them as humanitarian goods. Following the 100th object from its conception in a Stanford University classroom to points of sale and use in rural India the article explores how it has been made to materialise both an ethic of care and an ethic of commercial interest. Drawing from traditions in the social study of technology and the conceptual vocabulary of Michel Callon the article argues that the significance of objects like the ultra affordable solar lamp lies in their capacity to make and define markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’.

ABSTRACT This essay analyses how the relation between food and fuel shapes the practice of collaborative food governance. Dominant explanations for the persistence of global hunger often point to the influence of political-economic inequalities on the production, distribution, and governance of global food. The causes of the 2007–2008 global food crisis, however, suggest the need to examine the entanglements between food and other forms of ecological extraction. I draw on the concept of ‘energopolitics’ to demonstrate how changing material processes of energy extraction condition the calculative logics through which transnational food governance is constituted. An energopolitical analysis, I argue, illuminates how collaborative food governance supresses the conflict between food and fuel that it was developed to mediate. In an era of climate change, such an approach reveals the links between food and broader struggles over carbon-fuelled inequalities.

21st Century ‘Energies’
Review essay on ‘energy’ and the humanities:
- Cara Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
- Michael Marder, Energy Dreams: Of Actuality (Columbia University Press, 2017).
- Dominic Boyer and Cymene Hower, Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (Durhem: Duke University Press, 2019).
- Anson Rabinbach, The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor (New York: Fordham Univ Press, 2018).

This article argues that the prepaid energy system put into operation in Medellín and across Colombia worked as an expression of ‘energopower’; that is, energy as a means to govern societies. The article uses press archives and company statements, official statistics and group interviews to show how energopower operates in Medellín along three lines: that Empresas Públicas de Medellín, the city's public utility company, encouraged disconnected and displaced people as new buyers of prepaid energy services instead of citizens entitled to those services; that the implementation of the prepaid energy system coincided with the vertiginous capitalisation that allowed the city to fund its ‘Social Urbanism’ and EPM to expand operations across Colombia and other countries in Latin America; and, that prepaid electricity as a tool of energopower subjugated displaced and disconnected populations to new forms of affordability that prompted barrio women to understand and oppose its disciplining methods of domination.

This essay analyses how the relation between food and fuel shapes the practice of collaborative food governance. Dominant explanations for the persistence of global hunger often point to the influence of political-economic inequalities on the production, distribution, and governance of global food. The causes of the 2007–2008 global food crisis, however, suggest the need to examine the entanglements between food and other forms of ecological extraction. I draw on the concept of ‘energopolitics’ to demonstrate how changing material processes of energy extraction condition the calculative logics through which transnational food governance is constituted. An energopolitical analysis, I argue, illuminates how collaborative food governance supresses the conflict between food and fuel that it was developed to mediate. In an era of climate change, such an approach reveals the links between food and broader struggles over carbon-fuelled inequalities.

In the small-island developing state of Mauritius, energy security depends on a socially combustive mix of petrochemicals and renewable energy. One such renewable, sugarcane biomass—discards of the sugarcane plant after sucrose extraction—has been recently championed as a modern, sustainable biofuel. This reimagining of plant waste into energy feedstocks capitalizes on mounting demands for environmentally friendly sources of power in an ecologically fragile island context.  By concentrating on the realization of Mauritian waste-to-bioenergy schemes, this paper traces the material and figurative transformation of plant excess into potentialized energy. I pay particular attention to how such models of cash crop exploitation capitalize on the generative capacity of plants, rendering new forms of value out of biowaste. By studying leftovers of sugarcane, I focus on how trajectories of colonial-era commodity crops come to matter in conversations with and in ‘doings’ of postcolonial energy production. As a result, I try to make sense of the possibilities and constraints of using discards of sugarcane, a plant rooted in colonialism, as feedstock to actualize energy futures.

’The digital’ is becoming as much a part of our renewable energy infrastructures as water, wind and sunlight, electromagnetic fields and electrons, metal and plastic, wood and wire, light and heat, policy and legislation, technical models and economic theories, fantasies of autonomy and resilience, order and control. The refitting of a hydroelectricity system in rural Scotland offers a novel entry point for probing the ontology of the digital and what we might call 'the renewable human'.

In electronics the word current is used to describe the flow of electricity or the movement of electrically charged particles around a circuit. Across much of India current is a vernacular keyword for talking about the flow or movement of electricity from networks of pylons and wires into everyday life.

This article argues that the prepaid energy system put into operation in Medellín and across Colombia worked as an expression of ‘energopower’; that is, energy as a means to govern societies. The article uses press archives and company statements, official statistics and group interviews to show how energopower operates in Medellín along three lines: that Empresas Públicas de Medellín, the city's public utility company, encouraged disconnected and displaced people as new buyers of prepaid energy services instead of citizens entitled to those services; that the implementation of the prepaid energy system coincided with the vertiginous capitalisation that allowed the city to fund its ‘Social Urbanism’ and EPM to expand operations across Colombia and other countries in Latin America; and, that prepaid electricity as a tool of energopower subjugated displaced and disconnected populations to new forms of affordability that prompted barrio women to understand and oppose its disciplini...