Illinois Global Institute

In this talk I examine how environmental defenders in Honduras resist large-scale energy and extraction projects that are backed by armed state security and military forces. With focus on land occupations that halt these projects, I ask how the material conditions of such resistance efforts impact community relations no less than individual sensibilities toward the material and ecological world. I argue that in Honduras these occupations are often more than situational, and have transformed ideas of citizenship, community, and landscape at a moment when the crises of late-liberalism enclose collective life with the threat of violence, incarceration, and ecocide. What futures become thinkable, then, from within occupations as socio-environmental experimentation?