Violent atmospheres: Political ecologies of livelihoods and crises in Southeast Asia

Violent atmospheres are volatile mixes of socio-political and economic processes as well as biophysical ruptures that encompass surficial and gaseous matter across scales. Frequently driven by political-economic crisis, violent atmospheres are increasingly anthropogenically constructed and affectively experienced. While scholars have examined how the exploitation of resources in intensifying capitalist political economies produce violent terrestrial environments, very few have addressed the volumetric characteristics through which atmospheres-as both meteorological and affective entities-become violent. Integrating emerging work on resource political ecologies with the volumetric turn in the social sciences, we conceptually develop the notion of Violent Atmospheres to account for the recursive relationship between the internal contradictions of capital accumulation and atmospheric violence. In doing so, papers in this issue reveal how violent atmospheres, in their material and symbolic form, are volumetrically constituted and frequently attributed to the precarious livelihoods of the rural and urban poor. Through seven ethnographically grounded articles, the issue contributes to emerging scholarship within the "volumetric turn" by offering a political ecology of atmospheres in Southeast Asia.