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This interview discusses energy justice, the university, academic research and autonomous politics. This dialogue expresses concern with energy, but also environmental, justice scholarship and movements. This entails the failure to adequately connect the continuity between (neo)colonialism, capitalism and statism in theory and action, which simultaneously subordinates anti-authoritarian and autonomous politics to liberal academic frameworks (e.g. recognition, procedure, distribution). Extractive development is not adequately challenged by energy justice, meanwhile academic decolonial theory tend to ignore combative struggles and discussion in the Global South or North. Academic decolonial theory remains selective about struggles, simplifies them and/or remains detached from societies-in-movement, which results in tokenizing and ignoring the complexities of autonomous and insurrectionary struggle. Discussing a range of intense topics, this dialogue suggests the need to advance decolonial and anarchist critique of energy and environmental justice scholarship, suggesting the need to move away from justice framings and towards autonomous political conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the paper is to expand the concept of energy justice by considering the struggles over coloniality and cultural identity in the Global South and their interactions with the spatial and historical development of energy systems and the ongoing forms of energy transitions. The article argues that the current conceptualizations of energy justice cannot be separated from the politics of incumbency as, without a decolonial critique, they tend to reproduce rather than transform hegemonic power relations. To be transformative, energy justice must be articulated from the politics of actually existing unsustainability. In other words, the starting position for energy justice must be that energy injustices are already embedded in existing energy systems and energy policies. Drawing on Latin-American decolonial thought, and the work of political ecologists around energy, this article advocates looking beyond a universalized conception of justice towards an approach where justice is based on a sense of place and is informed by the community's relationship with the land. Using the concept of energy landscapes, the article puts forth an alternative way of understanding energy systems and conceptualizations of justice in decolonial settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]