„Unruly Climates, Contested Futures II“ – Imaginaries, Framings, and Politics of Resistance in the Majority World

Editors: Antje Daniel (University of Vienna), Marie Jasser (University of Vienna), Frank Adloff (Futures of Sustainability), Laura Affolter (Futures of Sustainability), Juneseo Hwang (Sungkonghoe University, Seoul)

The future — as a research orientation and as a field of activist imaginaries, framings, and politics of resistance — is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. Since the increasing awareness of the climate crisis the question of how climate-just futures can be defined and created, what emotions and images of the future are associated with it, and what sustainable transformation strategies exist, has increasingly become the focus of current analyses all over the world. The present crisis is becoming the starting point for exploring what is desirable and possible in the future. Since the climate crisis is unfolding differently, having significant impacts on world regions such as Africa, Asia or Latin America it is even more urgent to analyze their political struggles surrounding the environment and climate. Hence, with this book we are referring to these most affected regions by using the notion majority world to express that these people and countries whose perspectives and interests represent the majority of humanity, yet are often underrepresented in global governance but also in academia (Crowford et al. 2024). An analysis of these activisms is not only important against the background of the globality of the climate crisis and increasing inequalities between the majority and minority world, but also because in the majority world activism might be differently resulting from another understanding of the relationship between humans to nature due to the particular historical, cultural, social and political contexts. 

This book is interested in two dimensions of a critical diagnosis of the climate crisis: On the one hand, it is a creative source for imagining futures that are constructively contested considering contradictions between radical transformation, post-growth and green modernization or post-development. On the other hand, future imaginaries can guide action, provide impetus for collective forms of self-organization and politics of resistance. Collective forms of self-organization range from the climate justice movement, struggles on extractivism to spontaneous forms of resistance such as guerrilla gardening, to permanent and self-referential forms of self-organization such as ecovillages. While some activisms actively engage with institutional politics through mass mobilization or resistance through civil disobedience, others create (partially) autonomous structures. 

The book aims to provide an overview on the future imaginaries and politics of resistance of different collective actors in the majority world. In order to pursue this goal, the book will first show that the still young field of studying future imaginaries is an analytically fruitful approach for the analysis of current social conflicts and the resulting transformations. Second, the book aims to analyze the relationships between future imaginations, concepts of nature and politics of resistance in its particular contexts. This diversity of collective actors as well as the complementary and overlapping framings of the climate and related strategies illustrate the field of future contestations. Third, another aim of this book is to shed light on the entanglements and complex relations between climate movements in the majority and minority world. Climate activism is globally entangled and embedded in global structures providing opportunities and solidarities but also bearing the potential for a (re)production of global inequalities. 

Unruly Climate, Contested Futures II shall provide the readers with a collection of critical reflections on the challenging questions raised below. We are interested in theoretical and conceptual contributions concerning the work of imagination and transformation on and from a majority world perspectives, as well as in-depth empirical case studies depicting the different ways in which futures are imagined and practiced in various contexts of the majority world. In doing so, we wish to bring together scholarship on the minority and majority world. 

More specifically, we encourage the contributors to develop their papers by engaging with the questions and locating themselves in one or two sections:

Section 1: Thinking about the future

• What kind of future imaginaries do collective actors offer in the climate crises? How do different imaginaries interrelate or contest each other?
• How should we understand the future and the politics of resistance? What new theoretical approaches need to be considered?
• To what extent does the literature on social movements, climate activism or future imaginaries need to be critically reflected from a perspective of decolonial theory? Or from a majority world perspective?

Section 2: Field of contestation on climate transformations

• What are the practices of imagining climate just futures? What are related politics and strategies of resistance? Are imaginations shaped by particular alliances with other civil society actors or politicians? In what ways do they open up new horizons or foster compromise?
• What understanding of nature do the movements have which shape their activism?
• What significance did the collective actors have and how did they influence politics and society?
• How do the historical, social, political, cultural contexts shape climate activism?

Section 3: Global entanglements of climate activism

• Which differences and similarities of activism shape movements in the majority and minority world? To what extent and how are social movements globally entangled?
• How do movements between the Global South and North solidarise with one another?
• How do movements from the majority world translate to the majority and vice versa? In what ways do they differ or centre different causes?
• How and with which experiences climate activists are involved in global politics?
• How and to what extent concepts such as climate coloniality, climate apartheid or green colonialism or even majority and minority world help to understand activism?

We invite authors to submit an extended abstract on 2–3 pages by August 9 2026 to the following e-mail address: zukuenfte.der.nachhaltigkeit(at)uni-hamburg.de

Kindly name 1 or 2 sections where you would assign your abstract.

We would also appreciate receiving a short bio of 150 words.

In case of acceptance, the book chapter should then be submitted in a draft version (6.500 words) by the end of December 2026. We plan to discuss the contributions in an online workshop in February 2027. The final submission deadline for the articles is the end of April 2027. The book will be published in the series “Zukünfte der Nachhaltigkeit” by Campus Verlag in 2027 (see here).

CfP (PDF)