Special Issue "A Climate of (De-)Civilisation" published in CPE

The issue “A Climate of (De-)Civilisation” (edited by Bernd Sommer, Marta Bucholc, and André Saramago) opens with two essays: Adrian Jitschin reconstructs Elias’ relationship and viewpoints to extra-human nature with references to Elias' biography, while Nikolaj Schultz reflects on his class concept inspired by Norbert Elias.

In the first article, Sighard Neckel draws on Norbert Elias' understanding of social change as a long-term project and questions its feasibility in view of the social changes required to mitigate the climate crisis. Marta Gospodarczyk uses the involvement-detachment continuum to analyse droughts in Poland and farmers' responses to them. In their article, Vincenzo Marasco and Angela Perulli refer to Elias' concept of social habitus to explain, on the basis of interviews, the persistence of environmentally harmful behavior despite ecological awareness. Subsequently, Fritz Reusswig and Wiebke Lass analyse the climate crisis as a process of decivilisation and link it to the rise of populism. Kerrin Langer and Frank Reichherzer connect the historical evolution of legal norms on wartime environmental destruction with processes of civilisation. Finally, Matthias Schmelzer highlights the ambivalence of the civilicing process by discussing its long-term destabilising effects in a global capitalist system.

The issue has been published open access in the journal “Culture, Practice & Europeanization” and is based on the conference of the same name, “A Climate of (De-)Civilization?”.