From derisking to green extractivism: The Rioni Valley Movement and the coloniality of renewable infrastructure in Post-Soviet Georgia

Abstract

Based on an analysis of the Rioni Valley Movement and the historical transformation of energy politics in Georgia, we challenge prevailing explanations of the promotion and contestation of hydropower infrastructure as driven by homegrown authoritarianism or Russia's (neo)imperial politics. Instead, we propose a framework of coloniality of infrastructure and green extractivism to study Georgia and other parts of the postsocialist East alongside the postcolonial contexts of the global South. The East increasingly resembles these contexts, exhibiting new iterations of coloniality in relation to the West/North, and serves as one of the frontiers of green extractivism. We argue that derisking has become integral to the mode of regulation that underpins green extractivism – a mode of capital accumulation by dispossession and appropriation in peripheries. Derisking creates an unequal distribution of risks and returns by requiring states to commit their fiscal capacities to future-proof investor returns at all costs. It assures that renewables are not just extractive, or harvesting energy, but extractivist, or serving distant people and geographies while aligning with the profitability needs of financial capital and the consumption needs of decarbonizing classes. Derisked renewables inflict harm locally and deepen the subaltern integration of (sub)national and world-regional peripheries within the capitalist world-ecology.