1972. Bangladesh is a new state emerging out of a national liberation war and a cyclone. Inspired by the Green Revolution, UNICEF undertook a major public health engineering project, drilling millions of hand pumps aimed at providing safe drinking water, and over subsequent years sinking private tube wells became normative practice. Although considered a major humanitarian success, it exposed a significant part of the population to ground water aquifers rich in arsenic.

To be involved in politics without aspiring to govern, governed by the best leaders, or abolish the institutions of government: such are the constraints that delineate the field of nongovernmental politics.

The past two decades have seen revolutionary shifts in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The data flows that condition much of our lives now regularly include Global Positioning System (GPS) readings and satellite images of a quality once reserved for a few militaries and intelligence agencies, and powerful geographic information system (GIS) software is now commonplace. These new technologies have raised fundamental questions about the intersection between physical space and its representation, virtual space and its realization.

Political acts are encoded in medial forms—feet marching on a street, punch holes on a card, images on live stream, tweets—that have force, shaping people as subjects and constituting the contours of what is sensible, legible, visible. Thus, these events define the terms of political possibility and create terrain for political actions.

Neither apolitical nor governmental, to be involved in politics without aspiring to govern… such are the constraint that delineate the condition common to all practitioners of nongovernmental politics [...] Nongovernmental politics can be envisioned as encompassing the political involvements of the governed, or better still, as the politics in which the governed as such are involved [...] what all these activists all have in common is that they are driven by a shared determination not to be governed thusly.

"In the first section, ‘Pessimism of the Intellect’, I adduce arguments for believing that we have already lost the first, epochal stage of the battle against global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, in the smug but sadly accurate words of one of its chief opponents, has done ‘nothing measurable’ about climate change. Global carbon dioxide emissions rose by the same amount they were supposed to fall because of it. [2] It is highly unlikely that greenhouse gas accumulation can be stabilized this side of the famous ‘red line’ of 450 ppm by 2020.

“Now if there is a law, and thus a history, for subjective wars, there is none for objective violence, which is without limit or rule, and thus without history.

RT3 January 25 – 26, 2013
Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths | London School of Economics and Political Science (detailed program and participants'bios in the right column)

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/explorations/5th-geneva-convention/

The project ‘Fifth Geneva Convention’ consists of a series of roundtable conferences designed to debate the ethical, political and material dimensions of the legal means of protection of the ‘natural environment’ in times of armed conflict as defined by international humanitarian law.

In June 2011, following the death of over 2000 migrants trying to reach Italian coasts from North Africa the migrants rights organization against NATO-EU-Frontex for non-assistance to mirgrants in the Mediterranean sea.