Commanding the Environment or Green Dictatorships? Nature-Culture – Nature-Society Relationships in Authoritarian Regimes

Our interdisciplinary research initiative aims to study the evolution of authoritarian systems through the prism of how these regimes relate to their physical environment. Our team argues that there is a need for collaboration between environmental historians, researchers of other fields of humanities and social scientists dealing with environmental issues in order to be able to better understand how authoritarian regimes construct and modify their attitudes, rhetoric and policies towards nature and environment. We want to pursue this goal with colleagues on the following topics:
• Perception of the environment: ideology, rhetoric, politics, culture and education
• Environmental management: change and continuity
• Civic response: actors, networks, action-models
• Pressures of the spatial context: international – regional – national – local perspectives
Our first step was to organize the ”Commanding the Environment or Green Dictatorships? Nature-Culture – Nature-Society Relationships in Authoritarian Regimes International Seminar” at the Aleksanteri Institute on April 27-28, 2017.
The next step is the launch of Helsinki Interdisciplinary Environmental Hub for Authoritarian Regimes (HIEHAR) at the end of the April 2017 workshop. The hub will generate international collaboration on the topic of the culture-nature / society-nature relationship in past and present authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.