There is a growing consensus in Ecological Economics that consumer preferences are neither fixed nor given, but rather endogenously determined by socio-economic and institutional factors. Hence, policy may promote “green” preferences directly. Yet any intervention in processes of preference formation seems to conflict with widely held liberal intuitions, imperfectly represented by the principle...

This paper seeks to explore the ethical implications of Carl Schmitt’s decisionism in a poststructuralist reading of Schmitt’s conception of the political as a constitutive exception. The Schmittian problematic of the exception as the constitutive principle of the political has recently made a comeback in the critical discourse, though, as we shall suggest below, the full significance of Schmit...

Rooted in a formal-legal tradition, international relationists have been thinking about anarchy and sovereignty wrong for over a century. Building on an alternative view of relational authority and recent research on the practice of sovereignty, a new conception of security hierarchy is developed that varies along a continuum from alliances at one end to protectorates at the other. This constru...

Drawing on transition theory, we conceptualize local food networks as innovations that initially function and develop in local niches within a given food regime. As niche-innovations local food networks induce socio-ecological changes on the local level and they have the potential to foster wider transformations of the dominant food regime. Many local food networks adopt the concept of food sov...

Fig 1: A village woman carrying bananas home to prepare a meal. Project: " From food security to food sovereignty. Citizens and local authorities towards a new paradigm in Europe to reduce world hunger " December 2010