طبیعت ریسک : سرمایه، قانون و محصول تفاوت

This purpose of this paper is to propose starting points for a critically informed understanding of the role of risk in contemporary environmental practice, and to flesh out some preliminary implications of the work risk does as a logic though which environment is managed. Taking cues from scholarship interrogating the production of capitalist natures (e.g., Smith, 1984/2008; Braun, 2000 and Heynan et al., 2007). I ask what it means in environmental terms to put risk at the intersection of capital and rule--to conceive of it as something that to paraphrase Dillon (2008, p. 319) makes the combination of capital and rule possible, and to interpret risk as something which (as Martin (2007b, p. 67) has suggested) undertakes to create the very conditions that make new wealth possible. I argue that in order to understand the intersection of capital and rule in environmental terms, risk must be understood as an epistemic framework and political ontology consistent with the advent of capitalist political economy--not as an occasion of danger or geographical condition of insecurity. Using difference as a starting point to attempt to think through connections between risk and accumulation I suggest that risk is a knowledge practice instrumental to accumulation and the politics of rule that secure it, which obscures the functioning of difference and processes of differentiation.