New directions in environmental justice studies: examining the state and violence

Abstract

The field of environmental justice studies has blossomed into a multidisciplinary body of scholarship in the last few decades with contributions across the social sciences, humanities, law, and the sciences. Our framing of environmental justice scholarship centers on the necessity of examining the role of state and institutional violence in producing environmental injustice through interlocking systems of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and enslavement. We link themes of violence and the role of the state in the expansion of environmental justice studies to the major topics of land and resource conflicts, prisons and incarceration, and emotions. We draw on this scholarship to explore how theories and politics of environmental justice are inflected by the constraints and leverage points within racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the afterlives of enslavement. This paper offers an assessment of theoretical advances, and charts a course for next possible stages of the literature’s development and EJ activism.

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