In July 2020, Germany adopted the Coal Exit Law, which requires all existing coal power capacity to be phased out by 2038, at the latest. This coal exit plan was sudden and unexpected, as the idea of phasing out coal was far from the political agenda in recent years. By putting into conversation theories of capital devaluation, critical energy studies, regulation theory, and debates on the socioecological fix, this dissertation analyzes the political-economic conditions that explain why and when the Coal Exit Law emerged. This research introduces the notion of moral devaluation, which can inform empirical research on the institutional arrangements through which the phase-out of fixed fossil fuel capital is resisted and organized in different contexts. This project was based on 21 months of fieldwork and a multi-method approach that included 90 interviews with actors related to the German coal phase-out process, as well as an historical examination of periods of coal devaluation. The resulting analysis reveals the continuities between Germany’s Coal Exit Law and its long tradition of delaying the devaluation of coal. Beyond dualistic market- vs. policy-based interpretations of coal exit drivers, the multistakeholder and consensual approach used in Germany is described from the perspective of its mediating role in addressing an ongoing devaluation affecting the energy industry and managing a dual legitimation crisis affecting the federal government.

New Mexico is notable within the Western U.S. for its network of acequias, irrigation ditches brought by Spanish colonists through which communities of irrigators collectively manage their water resources. This thesis considers acequias as a site of struggle for Mexican-Americans in New Mexico via a case study of the unincorporated South Valley outside Albuquerque. I show how U.S. water law historically acted as a vehicle of dispossession, as New Mexico’s newest sovereigns implemented private property rights in place of traditional Indigenous and Hispano systems, including via the 1923 creation of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District encompassing the South Valley. Yet the same legal codes are now being repurposed by acequia irrigators to contest prior dispossessions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, I attend to organizing among South Valley acequieros in the last two decades to demonstrate an inversion of water law amid a robust social movement centered on these old ditches.

The kafala system, the legal regime that governs transnational labor migration across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates – binds migrant workers’ legal status to their employers and systematically institutionalizes conditions of racialized labor dependency and control. Although recent legal reforms, such as Saudi Arabia’s Labor Reform Initiative and Qatar’s FIFA-driven labor regulations, are internationally acclaimed as structural advances in labor market modernization and migrant rights, these reforms operate as strategies of containment that are strategically calibrated to absorb international scrutiny by satisfying the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and U.S. Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report compliance benchmarks, which deflects attention away from the structural asymmetries that sustain the Gulf political economy. By shifting governance responsibilities onto private actors, subcontracting networks, and humanitarian intermediaries, these surface-level reforms continue entrenching employer dominance by obscuring state accountability and reproducing selective enforcement mechanisms (Zhang et al., 2024; Al-Esmael et al., 2017; Jureidini, 2010; Rohendi, 2023). Reform efforts perform compliance as action rather than dismantling the foundational racial and economic hierarchies that render migrant workers disposable, which reinforces the Gulf’s integration into global supply chains while simultaneously maintaining the underlying colonial logics of labor exploitation. Therefore, Gulf labor governance must be understood as an integrated technology of global racial capitalism that converges legal, corporate, and humanitarian mechanisms to stabilize and perpetuate extractive labor relations under the guise of progressive reform – not as a series of isolated legal updates that incrementally advance worker protections or meaningfully redistribute power within the global economy.

In the last decade, the demand for lithium has skyrocketed after it was discovered that it was efficient for making batteries. Lithium’s tremendous growth forecast going forward is characterized by the coming together of energy, automotive, and technology industries to foster the future of renewable energy. While this global commodity market may present the opportunity for a sustainable future, the extraction of lithium is unsustainable in the local context. The teleconnections framework provides a lens to understand how political and economic processes—spatially distant to the site of extraction—accelerate biophysical changes at the local scale. This thesis examines the role of the provincial government as an actor and stakeholder in lithium mining projects and the extent to which this translates to land use changes in Jujuy, Argentina. I approach the role of Jujuy’s provincial government as modeling the neo-extractivist logic of development. Based on a review of relevant national and provincial legal and political frameworks, I explore the various ways in which the state—as a governing authority and stakeholder—justifies the intensification and exploitation of lithium mining as a model of development. I suggest that Jujuy’s provincial government is motivated by the short-term socio-economic benefits of lithium mining, but it is at the expense of long-term environmental damage. Next, using publicly available, high resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth Pro, I quantify the biophysical changes of neo-extractivism in Jujuy over a four-year period—from 2016 to 2020. I focus on the Sales de Jujuy lithium mining project in Jujuy to identify the change in land use for mining operations. The area change in surface mining operations illustrates that land use can undergo large area transformations reflective of shifting political and economic conditions at varying scales. By addressing both the human and environmental dimensions of lithium mining in Jujuy, this thesis calls attention to the global market conditions and organization of Argentina’s lithium mining sector (through its policies and governance structures), which give rise to the environmental problems directly impacting the local scale.