Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty: Smuts Lecture Series (Lecture 3)

Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty (University of Chicago)

Since the nineteenth century, and especially since the Cold War, economic growth and access to cheap energy have created infrastructures for boosting human population, living standards, and longevity. Global ideas about the good life for humans and how best to support these aspirations assume narratives of continuous growth. The same infrastructures, however, have interfered with the long-term earth-system processes that support all forms of life, including that of humans. The three lectures analyse this contradiction that constitutes the climate crisis and highlight the sense of facing a predicament that marks all climate debates - from politics to policy.

The series consists of three lectures that are free and open to all. Tickets via Eventbrite:

• Smuts Memorial Lecture One: Questions Concerning Longevity

• Smuts Memorial Lecture Two: The Sky and the Planet: A Cultural Critique of Technology

• Smuts Memorial Lecture Three: Wars on a Climate-stressed Planet

Lecture Three Abstract: Wars on a Climate-stressed Planet (Wednesday 29th October)

This lecture takes as its thematic contemporary wars that are typically discussed in climate-neutral terms of justice, human rights, global institutions, and resources. A warming planet makes such climate-neutrality untenable. If wars are a constant of human existence, how do we rethink them for our times?