Forthcoming in Antipode 55(2) in March 2023, and available open access online now, Razmig Keucheyan’s “The ‘Environment Making State’ and Climate Change: The French ‘Cat Nat’ Reinsurance Scheme Under Strain” makes the case for Christian Parenti’s theory of the “environment making state” as one of the most interesting approaches to understand the complex relationship between capitalism, states, and nature. As the author tells us,

The purpose of this article is to use it in a context—contemporary French society—and a domain—climate risk insurance—that will help broaden its scope. Understanding the “environment making state” is not only an analytical task, in the narrow sense. For it has obvious political implications. With rising natural catastrophes due to climate change, people will need financial protection, i.e. insurance, so as to be able to reconstruct their lives as quickly as possible after disasters hit. Thus, insurance will be an important part of adaptation to climate change. A crucial question, then, is the following: What will be the most politically just and efficient insurance system for the future? Will it be a private one, a public-private partnership, or a 100% public one?

Razmig Keucheyan is Professor of Sociology at Université Paris Cité and a member of the Centre de Philosophie, d’Épistémologie et de politique (PHILéPOL). His work, which draws inspiration from classical and contemporary Marxism, can be accessed through https://razmigkeucheyan.wordpress.com/ and you can see him talking about his open access Antipode article, “The ‘Environment Making State’ and Climate Change: The French ‘Cat Nat’ Reinsurance Scheme Under Strain”, below.