Dr. Clemens Hoffman, a member of the SiC political economy of multipolarity working group discusses his research project on the geopolitics of decarbonization in the Middle East.
Dr Clemens Hoffmann (DPhil International Relations, University of Sussex) joined the Division of History and Politics at Stirling University in 2016 from Bilkent University, Ankara in Turkey. His research interests include Political Ecology of the Middle East, Political Economy of Turkish Foreign Policy and Historical Sociology of International Relations. He currently works on a project exploring the “Geo-Political Ecology of the Middle East” criticizing conventional notions of resource scarcity and abundance as environmentally deterministic. His research proposes a careful historicization of the geo-political, postcolonial and political economic conditions of possibility within which developmental states emerged as the main arbiters of society-nature relations. He currently works on two co-authored book manuscript. One concerns itself with the historical origins of Turkey's Foreign Policy and Political Economy in tandem. The other one compares the ‘Divided Environments’ of Israel-Palestine, Cyprus, Sudan and Syria, demonstrating the complex social (rather than purely environmental) causes and consequences of conflicts. In all his work, Dr Hoffmann understand nature, i.e. the flow of energy and matter across time and space, as intrinsically social relations and political processes, rather than as an apolitical, pristine 'nature' that never was.
