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In 2012, SCOR, one of the world's largest reinsurers, sued the French state, challenging a public–private natural disaster insurance scheme, called the "cat nat" regime. It campaigned in favour of a "real" natural disaster insurance market. The purpose of this paper is to grasp the logic of this litigation. It reveals growing tensions regarding the insurance of natural disasters, against the backdrop of climate change. To make sense of this, we will build on Christian Parenti's theory of the "environment making state". This approach aims at understanding the interaction between capitalism, states, and nature. The question we will pose is: what happens to "environment making" institutions in times of crisis? Crisis leads to the "politicisation" of "environment making": decisions concerning the management of natural hazards are increasingly taken by the executive branch. This "politicisation" may represent an important evolution in the relationship between capitalism, states, and nature in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using an empirical method to investigate the occupied site of a renowned airport mega‐project near Nantes (so‐called Notre‐Dame‐des‐Landes, France), the paper examines the socio‐spatial effects of territorial mobilisation. We consider how the territorial embeddedness of a struggle helps reshape the relationship to space for the occupants of the contested zone. Starting from an analysis of the forms of "inhabiting" and "cohabitation" of the heterogeneous "occupying‐inhabitants" in the disputed zone, we stress how the relationship with others and to space operates over the long term. More attention is paid to describing the plural representations of the territory, which clash, converge and are unified alternately, ultimately creating a "territory of struggle(s)", which has become iconic in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the programme of redeveloping housing estates in France overseen by the Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Under this programme social housing reconstruction is undertaken in a nationally coordinated fashion in order to 'valorize', 'secure' and socially 'mix' estates. The paper highlights the political and neo-colonial aspects of this programme and the wider state spatial strategies it is part of. Redevelopment projects not only further gentrifying land-rent valorization, state rescaling and territorially stigmatizing symbolic violence; they also reorganize territorial relations of domination in multiple, also racialized, neo-colonial and partly hegemonic ways. In a longer view, they respond to the 'urban revolution' of 1968 (Garnier) and to the 'anti-colonial revolution' of independence and anti-racist movements (Khiari). The paper builds on a framework that articulates marxist (Lefebvrean) and anti-colonial (Fanonian) lineages while drawing on research on the neo-colonial aspects of the French state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the rise and decline of social movements in Amsterdam and Paris, focusing in particular on the organizations of left-wing immigrant workers. These organizations performed crucial roles for new social movements in the 1970s and 1980s but were isolated and coopted in the 1990s and early 2000s. To explain why this is so, we engage in a dialogue with Jacques Rancière and develop an understanding of cities as strategic sites for both politicization and policing. Cities serve as sites of politicization because they are incubators of the relational conduits that enable activists from different sectors to engage with one another's struggles and look beyond narrow temporal and spatial horizons. However, cities also serve as sites of policing because authorities constantly attempt to reconfigure governmental arrangements in such a way that civil society serves as an extension of the government and comes to fulfill an instrumental role in the development and implementation of policy. Just as politicizing implies the widening of temporal and spatial horizons, policing implies the narrowing of such horizons. The analysis shows the social movements of the 1960s lost steam in two of the major hubs of the new left and reveals some of the more universal mechanisms through which cities generate or quell dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]