Visions of Global Environmental Justice : Comunidades Negras and the War on Drugs in Colombia

Abstract

Focusing on the lived experiences of Afro-Colombians processing and resisting violence against their ecological communities, Visions of Global Environmental Justice employs accounts of the supernatural narratively and analytically to frame a contemporary struggle for environmental justice. The book applies Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics to the environmental racism of the US War on Drugs in Colombia, specifically the aerial eradication of coca in the comunidades negras of the Pacific Coast. Through critical examination and deconstruction of transnational mythmaking and local oral tradition, Visions of Global Environmental Justice illustrates that non/humans rendered expendable by US-driven drug (necro)politics are indispensable to both the conceptualization and the realization of environmental justice globally. Far from being a study singularly focused on the symptoms of environmental issues, this book creatively guides us toward a broader understanding of environmental racism and justice across geographic scales and non/human agencies. “A powerful and creative articulation of how accounts of the supernatural function as cautionary tales about socioecological limits and human/nonhuman relations. Huezo’s push for a new global environmental justice studies framework is long overdue.”— DAVID NAGUIB PELLOW, author of What is Critical Environmental Justice? “In this remarkable, completely original examination of the War on Drugs in Colombia, Huezo employs supernatural visions in fascinating and innovative ways.” — ULRICH OSLENDER, author of The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space “A truly original and inspiring monograph, pushing the boundaries of environmental justice to consider globalization, the War on Drugs, and the supernatural.” — MICHAEL MASCARENHAS, author of Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War