Quantum Hall states are the first examples of topological insulators that demonstrate completely contrasting electronic behavior between the bulk and the edges of the sample. The bulk of the system is insulating, while there exists conducting states at the edges. Moreover, the Hall conductivity is quantized in units of a universal constant, e2/h. It became clear later on that the quantization is actually related to a topological invariant known as the Chern number. The geometric interpretation of this invariant is provided by the Gauss–Bonnet theorem, which relates the integral of the Gaussian curvature over a closed surface to a constant that simply counts the number of ‘genus’ (or holes) of the object. In solid state physics, the closed surface is the Brillouin zone, and the Gaussian curvature is analogous to a quantity known as the Berry curvature, integral of which over the Brillouin zone yields the quantization of the Hall conductivity.

In Chapter 1, we begin with a historical overview of the quantum Hall effect. The experiment and the physical systems are described with an emphasis on the two-dimensional (2D) nature of the ‘dirty’ electronic system in the presence of a strong perpendicular magnetic field at low temperature. The Hall resistivity as a function of the field shows quantized plateaus in unit of h/e2 with an accuracy of one part in more than a billion. Very surprisingly, the longitudinal resistivity synergetically vanishes at the positions of the plateaus for the Hall resistivity. This indicates the emergence of a phase with an inherent ambiguousness of being a perfect conductor and a perfect insulator at the same time. However, such an ambiguity can only be reconciled for an electron gas confined in a plane in the presence of a magnetic field.

Quite intriguingly, the presence of the perpendicular magnetic field introduces ‘another’ quantization, which replaces the band structure (energy as a function of the wavevector) of the electronic system. This quantization was shown via solving the Schrödinger equation in the presence of a Landau gauge. The resultant energy levels of this problem are the infinitely degenerate Landau levels, which slightly broaden due to the presence of impurity and disorder but still remain distinct and cause quantization of the Hall conductivity as the magnetic field is ramped up gradually.

Introduction

The Bhagavadgita is an 18-chapter philosophical dialogue between Arjuna, the despondent warrior hero reluctant to raise arms against his kin, and his divine charioteer, Krishna, who exhorts him to wage war with detachment as an instrument of divine will. It is set on the battlefield in the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, moments before the beginning of a war. The Bhagavadgita (henceforth Gita), as Richard H. Davis elucidates in his ‘short biography’ of the text, intrigued scholars with its ‘doubleness’ – ‘its historical specificity and its continuing, even eternal, life’. Its ambiguities and accommodation of multiple theological currents made it possible (and continues to do so) for the text to appeal to diverse groups of readers and commentators in medieval, pre-colonial, and colonial India and beyond. It gained a transnational community of readers in Europe and America, as colonial commentators, Christian missionaries, Romantic philosophers, and Indologists popularized it as a Hindu philosophical text at par with the Quran and the Bible. By the early twentieth century, it came to provide a wide range of Indian political thinkers, from Aurobindo Ghose to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who were occupied in anti-colonial struggle with an opportunity to ‘rethink politics in a novel language of action without consequence’. Among such engagements, M. K. Gandhi's approach to the Gita as a guide to moral action in the realm of politics has attracted maximum scholarly attention. Such works have accorded due focus to the genealogies of (mostly Western) political and religious thought that informed his readings and the innovative agency of Gandhi himself.

This chapter, however, shifts the optic from Gandhi to the Gandhian(s) to draw attention to the hermeneutics of reading the Gita through the prism of non-violence (ahimsa) that Gandhi introduces in Indian sociopolitical thought and constructs an intellectual history of such hermeneutical exercises. Through this, I wish to move beyond the individual centricity that has characterized the global intellectual history of Gandhian thought.

The contribution of colonialism and imperial expropriation to the unfolding climate crisis has been well documented on a global scale. This chapter seeks to interrogate the role of caste as a structural element in shaping environmental inequities within India and beyond. Scientists across disciplines agree that the current system of production is unsustainable at the planetary level, even if a consensus on how to address this issue remains elusive. I argue that in the case of India, accounting for historical and contemporary caste-based extraction is crucial for any meaningful realization of climate justice.

Globally, academic scholarship and policy have come to acknowledge the uneven and unjust ways in which the burden and responsibility for the current crisis are distributed across nations, ethnicities, races, and genders. There is an emerging consensus that the historical pathways of colonialism and capitalist development are directly responsible for this uneven distribution. This pattern is seen across the histories of energy production, plantation economies, and commercial agriculture, as demonstrated in the detailed work of political ecologists (for example, Li 2017). Consequently, the idea that mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building strategies must account for this historical unevenness is no longer controversial.

We see this acknowledgement in the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ formally adopted by the United Nations in 1992. Under this principle, world governments recognize the lesser contribution of formerly colonized countries such as India towards planetary environmental degradation. This can be read as an acknowledgement of the unequal distribution of political power and economic prosperity across world nations because of colonialism. Acknowledging this historicity of the climate crisis is important, but our understanding of it would remain incomplete without a serious stock-taking of those dimensions of inequality and unevenness that significantly pre-date the rise of colonial capitalism and are yet implicated in its development trajectory. These dimensions of inequality often operate at the national or sub-national levels and therefore escape scrutiny on the global stage. In the case of India, one such important and all-pervasive dimension of inequality is caste.

For decades, anthropological and historical scholarship on caste focused only on ritual, scriptural, and mythical dimensions, thus constructing the issue as a matter of religion alone. Anti-caste scholars and activists such as Ambedkar, Phule, and Periyar have resisted such ‘orientalist’ representations of caste.

Introduction

It would be a stretch to claim to write about populist philosophies or theories of history because populism does not possess the kind of reflective systematic coherence that distinguishes philosophical theories. Still, it is possible to identify, I argue, a distinct populist attitude to historiography that can be derived from a political theory of populism. This attitude to historiography is expressed by the rhetoric, speeches, and speech acts such as tweets of populists from different parts of the world and different ends of the political spectrum.*

There is a great, indeed ever-increasing, variety of theories of populism. Even within the confines of this volume, no single theory or meaning of populism is accepted by all. I have advocated a theory of populism as the politics of the passions (Tucker 2020). Accordingly, I argue that populism approaches historiography as a narrative expression of the passions projected on the past. This passionate-emotive attitude to historiography generates corresponding values that judge competing historiographies according to their passionate intensity that expresses ‘authenticity’. Finally, I consider the more recent populist use of perspectivism, constructivism, and dialectics to confuse and silence its potential critics.

Populism

Populism, as I understand it, is the rule of political passions. This fits the classical Greek understanding of demagoguery and the Roman understanding of populism with the exception that populism is not exclusively of lower classes because elites are just as likely to succumb to their passions, while the common people may project their passions on elitist leaders. These passions override political interests and shape political beliefs. Pure passions tend to be self-destructive – for example, when people become very angry and burn their homes, start wars that hurt them more than their enemies, or demand economic policies that gratify immediately but generate inflation or accumulate debts that destroy the economy. As La Bruyere (quoted in Elster 1999: 337) puts it, ‘Nothing is easier for passion than to overcome reason, but the greatest triumph is to conquer a man's own interest.’

Harry Frankfurt (1988: 11–25) distinguished first-order desires from second-order volitions, wills about desires, what a person would like their desires to be and not to be.

Setting Up Shop

I was with Momtaz Khatun inside her small shop one afternoon in June 2018, during the heart of the monsoon season. The summer humidity coupled with the thunderous bellowing of windy rain shook the open thatched dwelling as Momtaz sat at the back, crouched on a small table, intricately embroidering the sides of the dress for her friend's daughter under a lightly dimmed hariken, as her husband manned the front table. Eid was only a few days away and Momtaz had two more orders to get through before the holiday arrived. They had set up this small makeshift shop at the end of their lane under a bamboo roof without walls to take orders and sew on demand if anybody required the services. ‘There is a lot of demand around Eid time. I know many women are sewing but, in this zone, I am the only one with a shop and so many people know I am here, so they come to me if they need quick service.’ Prior to arriving in Bangladesh, Momtaz tells me that she did not ‘imagine’ ever working for an income, much less having a shop set up for her. In her hometown of Buthidaung, Myanmar, her husband Ahmed was the sole provider, working as a labourer in the village, and her responsibilities revolved primarily around childcare and taking care of the home.

‘We Are Rohingyas, We Are the Oppressed’

On a cool, windy evening in March 2018, as the light of dusk spread throughout the vast dusty camps and people began retreating to their shelters, I stood on the edge of a hill with Khatun Khalamma as she tended to a small potted plant of chilli leaves, the chillies beginning to bloom with the arrival of spring. We had been talking for hours – her stories, like that of many refugees like her, vividly encompassed a life of oppression, erasure, and ‘running’ that were etched into her memory. Tears rolled down her eyes as she fiddled with the chilli plant. She was from Buthidaung township in Rakhine State, Myanmar, and had fled with her son, daughter-in-law, and nine-year-old grandson in the 2017 mass exodus. Her three daughters were raped and killed in Myanmar, and her daughter-in-law died during childbirth once they reached the camps in Bangladesh. The pain of her immense loss and of leaving her homeland was still fresh in her mind. At one point, she began singing a tarana (Rohingya song) entitled ‘We Are Rohingyas, We Are the Oppressed’, which she had heard shared throughout the camp, composed by a fellow Rohingya refugee.

The tarana was haunting, evoking the trauma of displacement and the suppression of their voices when they screamed out to be heard. The life stories of Rohingyas spanned generations, ultimately leading to a migration that was tremendous in its scale and level of desperation. This chapter provides the context to understanding the gendered nature of violence against the Rohingyas and the chaotic nature of their displacement to Bangladesh. By situating the recent migration of Rohingyas from Myanmar to Southeast Asia within the greater context of conflict and systemic violence and oppression in Myanmar's recent history, the chapter is an introduction to the Rohingyas as a borderland people in Myanmar, their life under siege, and provides a glimpse into Rohingya gender relations and roles prior to displacement.

Introduction

For admirers and detractors alike, Donald Trump's presidency signified a rupture, whether a revelatory inflection point on the brink of a national calamity or a nightmarish transgression of norms and dereliction of duty. Back in 2015, he was the ‘chaos candidate’. Ever since he amplified and dramatized a sense of crisis with the rhetoric he unleashed to announce threats and denounce enemies, both foreign and domestic, as well as through the venues he chose to engage the public, whether large public rallies or daily cascades of tweets (Moffit 2015). The crisis turned more acute and tangible towards the end of his presidency during the COVID-19 pandemic and the eruption of protests following George Floyd's death. It climaxed with the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when belligerent language and populist rage turned into political violence.

Conflict, crisis, and the sense that a momentous shift is afoot, that the present in some sense is already historic, prompted an intense, both overt and implicit, engagement with the past in American public life. Allusions to the past proliferated in an effort to justify, condemn, or simply comprehend Trump, his politics, and his demeanour. The past, its memory and pedagogy, the meaning of national symbols, and questions about the mnemonic function of the state fed heated disputes and political skirmishes, especially over race and the legacy of slavery. While history was deployed in a volatile political landscape, invocations of the past – from whatever political camp – also indicated a desire for legibility and predictability, facing perceived threats, endemic insecurities, and a perennial gap between expectations and the reality of American life.

This chapter employs Trump and his tenure in the White House to explore the contours and content of the populist historical imagination in the contemporary United States of America (USA). A populist streak is discernible in American politics dating back to the 1830s. Historically, the term ‘populism’ carried a somewhat different valence in Europe, Latin America, and the USA. However, the current political moment signifies a convergence, exemplified, for instance, by Trump's cult of personality and authoritarianism; both were less pronounced in previous iterations of American populism.

Introduction

‘Climate change seems to be the last of the priorities of the state and central government. Despite various climate plans, we continue to privatize coal and divert forest land. How does one reconcile these decisions with the objectives of the climate action plan?’ asked a senior administrative officer in the Odisha Revenue and Disaster Management Department when questioned about the auctioning of new coal blocks and the state's climate action plan. His grim observation points to the political and economic barriers against implementing an effective climate policy that addresses climate justice in India.

In this chapter, we argue that India's climate policy fails to adequately address difficult political questions related to climate justice and rising inequality. As our analysis of state and national climate action plans show, India's engagement with questions of climate justice remains merely symbolic. This directly follows from the country's stance in international climate negotiations, during which it has shied away from undertaking rigorous domestic climate action citing high levels of poverty and a need to focus on economic growth (Kashwan and Mudaliar 2021).

Our analysis of India's national and state climate action plans offers insights into the often-unstated normative principles that guide decision-making on climate change within the country. In this study, we demonstrate how, if at all, these action plans incorporate questions of justice and equality. We argue that most of India's climate action plans demonstrate a superficial understanding of socio-economic inequalities and hence fail to adequately address the disproportionate impact of climate events on the poor and marginalized.

We begin by discussing the principles that guide climate policy internationally and domestically. We then provide a critical overview of national and state climate action plans. We then scrutinize these action plans in terms of substantive equality and climate justice criteria, namely caste, gender, poverty, and co-benefits for development. We then analyse the action plans with regard to their treatment of these substantive criteria, the limitations in their approach, and possible strategies to address these limitations.

Background

Internationally, India is known to have pioneered the approach of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which allows developing countries to prioritize poverty alleviation and economic growth over climate mitigation.

Introduction

Populism rarely travels alone. As cases such as Narendra Modi's ‘Hindutva’, Brexit's ‘Take Back Control’, and Donald Trump's ‘Make America Great Again (MAGA)’ show, populism often travels with nostalgia. In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's authoritarian populism takes its fuel from neo-Ottomanism, a nostalgic rewriting of the Ottoman past, exemplified by the Conquest Rallies, massive public manifestations commemorating the conquest of Constantinople; the government-endorsed television series Resurrection: Ertuğrul, depicting the modest beginnings of the Ottoman Empire; and the Panorama Museum of Conquest, a state-led interactive museum, intended to ‘transport’ audiences back to 1453. How does authoritarian, right-wing populism pair so well with nostalgia? What is the ‘lost state’ that the Ottoman nostalgia so yearns to bring back, and what emotions go into its making? This chapter answers these case-specific questions while extrapolating that both nostalgia and populism, specific to and exemplified through this case, rely on binaries such as good versus evil, us versus them, and a glorious past versus a crumbling present. Together, these nostalgic and populist binaries create an ideal type, namely nostalgic populism. Nostalgic populism is a common modality of populist historicities and therefore requires close attention. Drawing from the 2020 reconversion of the Hagia Sophia to a mosque, I argue that the nostalgic populism in Turkey, which operates simultaneously through nationalist and imperialist logics, showcases three discursive characteristics vis-à-vis history:

• 1. Legalization of history: Nostalgic populism uses history as a legal precedent and as a legitimizing mechanism for policy. In the case of the Hagia Sophia, the regime refers to national sovereignty and Mehmed the Conqueror's will regarding the Hagia Sophia to present the reconversion decree as lawful.

• 2. Monopolization of history: The regime asserts its claim as the only legitimate one, declaring continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. Because Mehmed the Conqueror saved the Hagia Sophia, a marvel, from the state of decay and ruin – the result of Byzantine neglect – Turkey, as the heir of the Ottoman Empire, reasons it has the main claim on this monument.

• 3. Revivification of stolen history: While other countries and the previous regimes in Turkey neglected Ottoman history, the Justice and Development Party, or the AK Party (hereafter AKP), gives the people the ‘right’ kind of history, a history the people have been deprived of thus far.

Introduction

The renewed and persistent interest in the Mahabharata in the twentieth century has most often been linked to the rise of the Indian national(ist) movement in general and a specific nativist and parochial understanding of nationalism in particular. Seen from this perspective, the interest in the Mahabharata stands for an understanding of modern India that is based on the presumption of an ancient and everlasting homogeneous identity of the Indian people as well as a forced equation of ‘Indian’ with ‘Hindu’. While this standard account of the relationship between the Indian epics and right-wing nationalism has been as influential as it is convincing, it fails to analyse the larger historical and epistemological changes that provided the background for the renewed interest in the epic as form. In order to address this epistemological aspect, I propose to look at the larger history of the epic and the construction of a national identity in a global context in order to ask what prompted the interest in the epics on a functional level. Why were they read and retold so many times apart from the certainly true but hardly sufficient reason of them serving as a reminder of and evidence for the existence of a historical basis for the allegedly homogeneous identity in question?

In order to engage with the global significance as well as the philosophical and political implications of the relationship between the epic and nationalism, I look at three specific actors and at how they drew from, as well as referred and contributed to, the discourse on the epic form through their specific reading and reception of the Mahabharata: Friedrich Schlegel's analysis of the allegedly shared roots of Indo-European philosophical thought in ancient folk literature (specifically in his book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808), Maithilisharan Gupt's attempt to recount the history of India as the history of the Aryan race from the mythico-historical times of the Mahabharata to the future of an independent India in his long narrative poem Bharat Bharati (1912), and Jawaharlal Nehru's seemingly uneasy (as well as rather sporadic) rejection of any form of a potentially political engagement with the Mahabharata as inevitably contributing to a parochial and Hindu supremacist notion of Indian nationalism.

Before meeting the jhupri labourers, I had heard of Kawran Bazaar's reputation through old colleagues and friends. On the few occasions I had visited over the years, I had seen that by day it was a chaotic bazaar. By night, I was warned, it was one of the most dangerous places in Dhaka. I was unclear where this reputation came from and had heard only vague descriptions of badmash (criminals), mastan (gangster, thugs) or that ‘there's lots of politics there’. I was thus surprised after getting to know the jhupri labourers to see little sign of violence other than the scuffles between labourers trying to reach trucks, and was told there were plain-clothes police stationed nearby, keeping a watchful eye over the market. I hence began to formulate questions about some of the terms my colleagues had used or that I had seen opaque references to in academic literature. Are there mastan here? What do mastan do? These questions largely fell flat. Some pointed my attention to the young thieves who stole mobile phones from passengers at the nearby Tejgaon railway station, some of whom I knew.

It was when I began to ask what the bazaar used to be like that replies became animated. Over subsequent years of research, labourers and political leaders here have conveyed consistent and evocative descriptions of the 1980s to 2000s: this ‘was a time of chaos’, an ‘underworld’ (aparadh jagat), an era ‘of terror’, a time when ‘the whole bazaar was held hostage by gangsters’ and ‘guns were like toys’. A Jubo League activist well established in the area put it like this:

Much before the Western radical youth ‘invented’ Occupy politics of 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St Paul) in the West, inspired largely by the Arab Spring, there were instances in the Global South where precarious workers and communities unleashed their agency with unpredictable outcomes. What Hardt and Negri (2012) attribute to Occupy politics – their imaginations, revolts, slogans, movements and insistence on democracy as characteristics of multitudes – was also relevant for the subaltern struggles in the Global South. It is remarkable how the multitudes, both in the West and in the Global South, though spatially and temporally distinct, declare historically evolved truths through imaginative interventions towards a more egalitarian way of living. In South Asia, they also practised it as social movement identity politics in a world where corporates, often with the support of the state, threatened their rights to the commons, including their traditional environmental rights to land and water resources, and their human right to a decent living,3 thus bearing wider connotations than the Western-style Occupy protests. Latin American and African resistance movements such as the Landless Workers Movement in Mexico and Zapatistas/Chiapas in Brazil, and those in Buen Vivir (Ecuador), Cochabamba (Bolivia), the Estallido Social (Social Uprising) in Chile, and Ongoni (Nigeria) share similar traits in the way they assert and attribute new meanings to land rights, autonomy, food, water, environmental sovereignty, and identity. As a critical complement to the earlier-mentioned literature, the present monograph examines the livelihood, environmental, and identity struggles of the marginalized with a focus on Kerala, the state known for its twin legacies: the communist experiments and social development.

More on Premises

The protests, struggles, and movements in the Global South challenging corporate capital and the state, and even the mainstream male-led trade unions, take the form of what I would refer to as ecospatial struggles, resulting in the conceptualization of political ecospatiality in which ‘eco’ represents the varying dimensions of critiques of economics and ecology/environment and ‘spatiality’, the power relations ingrained in the social body politic (see Raman 2020b; Peluso and Watts 2001; Wapner 1996; Lefebvre 2011; Massey 1994; Harvey 2000).

Introduction

Graphene is formed of C atoms. C is an element in the IVth column of the periodic table and has four valence electrons in the outermost shell. It can make two types of chemical bonds, namely sp3, which results in diamond known from ancient times, and a more stable sp2, which results in graphite that is known for the last 500 years. A quick look at the discoveries of different allotropes of C is available in Table 4.1. The sp2 hybridization causes planar configuration involving 3 of the 4 electrons, which are 120° apart and are bound by σ bonds that add stiffness (and flatness too) to the linkage between the C–C atoms, while the fourth electron bound to the C atoms via the π bond projects out of the plane, and is available for conduction. Thus, the electronic structure that we shall be discussing elaborately is due to these π electrons.

Graphene was the first discovery of atomically thin perfect two-dimensional (2D) material. Andre Geim and co-workers successfully exfoliated graphene from graphite [2, 3]. Some of the remarkable properties of graphene (which, unfortunately, we shall not worry too much about) include its strength, impermeability, very large thermal conductivity (at least one order larger than copper), as a molecule sensor, transparent (for its usage in displays), in the field of biology, such as neuron growth and DNA sequencing, and many more. Owing to the tremendous fundamental and technological applications of graphene, the discovery earned a Nobel Prize to A. Geim and K. Novoselov, both from the University of Manchester in the UK in 2010.

Introduction

There was a time in political science and in political philosophy when emotionality and rationality were regarded as opposites and when the presence of emotions as such (especially of ‘passions’) in politics was seen as inappropriate, if not as outright suspect. Since the nineteenth century, many even liked to think that emotionality in politics was a preserve of unruly mobs and crowds. In democratic theory, politics was predominantly conceived as an arena in which various actors were basically pursuing their interests in a deliberate and rational way. Therefore, rational choice theory and coalition formation theory came to be seen as the best instruments to explain democratic politics according to most political scientists.

Since the ‘affective turn’ started in politics and in political thinking in the 1980s – spearheaded by philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum and Chantal Mouffe – this time is no more: emotions are increasingly appealed upon and taken seriously as objects of analysis (Nussbaum 2013; Mouffe 2005). Since then it is no longer possible in politics to criticize political opponents by simply unmasking that their beliefs and actions are based on emotions – and this obviously also holds for right-wing, exclusionary populism because political feelings are as old as modern politics itself (Frevert et al. 2022). Instead, the task of the critics of populism is to analyse the emotional repertoire used by populists in a comparative-historical perspective and to explain why it is successful in terms of mobilizing electoral support (Tietjen 2022; Demertzis 2019).

In this chapter, I address these issues by asking whether the emotions that populism appeals to form a specific set that distinguishes populism from other ideologies or discourses, especially from ethnic nationalism and nativism. However, in order to answer this first question, I first need to clarify the definitions of populism, ethnic nationalism, and nativism that I adopt. I depart from the well-known definition of populism formulated by Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Kaltwasser and indicate the problems connected with this kind of definition in the light of ethnic nationalism. Then I elucidate the concept of ethnic nationalism and its relationship to populism because at least in Western Europe and in the United States of America (USA) they both appear to be very closely related.

My ongoing engagements with international and national debates on climate justice are a result of an intellectual journey over the past two decades that has brought me time and again to the complex intersections of environmental protection and social justice. Market-based solutions became the backbone of ostensible global responses to climate change at the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007. The sense of excitement among environmental economists then is difficult to describe from where we are today. However, to those of us who had spent time in the field, this euphoria was evidently and grossly misplaced. The journey that marketbased solutions would have to take, from Bali to places like Bastar in Chhattisgarh, where they would be eventually implemented, is not paved with the freedom of choice that pro-market advocates like to celebrate.

Markets are designed to facilitate the accumulation of surplus in the hands of those who can channel it higher up in the ‘food chain’. In most cases, the market ecosystem is essentially a centralizing force and does not work for the poor and marginalized. Unfortunately, this argument often falls through the cracks due to the lack of interdisciplinary work that is needed to produce knowledge that may help inform public debates on these complex questions. The market-based solutions institutionalized at the Bali climate conference, especially carbon offsets and carbon emissions trading, have proven to be colossal failures.

Perhaps even more embarrassingly, the advocates of market-based climate solutions lost the battle of ideologies to right-wing reactionary forces. Even in the supposedly knowledge-driven market economies of the Global North, ultra-conservatives have been successful in labelling neoliberal policies, such as offsets and cap-and-trade policies, as part of ‘the radical Left's progressive wish list’. This is not surprising to many on the left but this also offers much food for thought for students of policy analysis, who focus rather narrowly on coming up with ‘efficient solutions’. While smart analyses can be helpful, the belief that such analyses are sufficient to drive policy change has proven to be a chimera. This is why it is necessary to cultivate a strong awareness of the extent to which the beneficiaries of the status quo use their political and economic power to thwart sensible debates on the unprecedented environmental and social crises.