Time, transition, and planetary decolonial justice as invention

• Published in: Environmental politics Vol. 33; no. 7; pp. 1265 - 1285
• Main Author: Agathangelou, Anna M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 09.11.2024; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Accumulation; Capital; Classification; Climate change; coloniality; Colonization; Debates; decoloniality; Decolonization; Deployment; ecological transition; Frantz Fanon; Governance; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; invention; Justice; Marginality; planetary justice; Time
• ISSN: 0964-4016; 1743-8934
• DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2024.2404377

Contestations over temporal categories are marginalized in transition debates. This article reorients such debates by exploring the structural relationship between time and just transition or planetary justice. I demonstrate how transition, defined as governments and inter-state institutions' efforts to shift to a lower carbon future, is inscribed with categories of time and certain notions of justice. I argue the recent acknowledgement of the link of colonization with climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not necessarily disrupt the deployment of a linear and recursive (universal) notion of capital time nor does it challenge the co-constitution of racialized accumulation institutions and governance power technologies, with dire effects on a 'just transition.' I then draw on Frantz Fanon's idea of invention as an event without sense or content, a decolonial violence whose subject plunges into an abyss and whose 'measure' or possibility is always unprecedented.