Authoritarian Regimes and the Environment

Course goals

Learning goals:

1. Knowledge of the origins, development and effect of right- and left-wing authoritarian regimes across the globe in the 20th century at an advanced level
2. The ability to analyze the origins, development and effect of 20^th-century autocracy by applying theories, concepts and methods as elaborated by environmental historians
3. The ability to communicate research results and the underlying knowledge about the politicization of nature and the ecological dimension of political regimes to non-specialists
4. The ability to form and defend an opinion based on solid argumentation

Content

What does an authoritarian regime look like when examined not from the traditional perspective of economic crisis, forms of coercion, or associations, but from that of the natural world and its various forms? How does nature give shape to authoritarianism, and how is the natural environment itself shaped by political decisions? How have categories like ‘nature’, ‘climate’ or ‘environment’ emerged and been understood under authoritarian regimes?

This course focuses on the environmental history of dictatorships and explores the cultural and material role played by nature in 20^th-century authoritarian regimes in domestic and colonial settings. Right-wing and left-wing authoritarianisms waged wars against allegedly unproductive environments; launched campaigns of social, economic, and ecological reclamation; implemented extractive and autarkic policies.

This course understands dictatorships as polities featuring both oppression and modernization and enters into the following representative laboratories of reactionary modernity. It explores authoritarian forms of nature protection debunking the myth of an authoritarian environmentalism; it discusses environmental failures and consequences of authoritarian policies; it compares authoritarian and non-authoritarian environments. 

Authoritarian regimes to be explored (the list is not exhaustive): Nazi Germany, the New State in Portugal, Franco's regime in Spain, the Soviet Union, Latin American authoritarianisms, Japanese colonialism in Korea, Italian Fascist authoritarianism in Africa.

Additional information

Please note:
Only students from the MA History of Politics and Society are allowed to register for this course. All other students have to contact the programme coordinator to discuss participation. 

The language of instruction for this course is English. Tests can be conducted in Dutch in consultation with the course coordinator.