Like many cities, the City of Ottawa got interested in climate change early on. It set ambitious targets, only to realize they were extremely demanding if not impossible to meet. It thus scaled back its ambition, and the history of its response at the overall level of the City Council can be characterized in two ways. On the one hand, it responded to the emergence of city networks on climate change to do enough to report to the network of Canadian cities – the Partnership for Climate Protection – and meet its expectations. But these expectations have throughout been minimal – to create inventories of emissions, develop plans for them, and monitor progress. On the other hand, the City has, episodically, generated moments of enthusiasm for action on climate change, developing more overarching plans and a variety of specific initiatives. These bursts of energy occurred around 1991, 2004, and 2012–13. But in none of them did the burst of energy turn into sustained attention. We focus our analysis on the period through to 2014 when the Air Quality and Climate Change Management Plan (AQCCMP) was adopted.1 In part this is because the main patterns are easily identified up to this date, and in part because Chapters 5 and 6 discuss two particular aspects of the more recent politics (Complete Streets, and intensification) in more detail.

This traces the UN’s involvement in Rwanda from the build-up to the genocide to the creation of the tribunal and the archive. It examines why, having been willing to stand by during the genocide, an international court came to be seen as a solution to the genocide, and what this reveals about the politics and purpose of the archive. I argue that the introduction of the legal terminology of ‘genocide’ during the violence was a key turning point in the UN’s intervention, as the violence became something that targeted the international community as a whole. The chapter also offers a brief overview of the ICTR and the archive, and here shows that, at the start of the tribunal, a very broad set of strategies underpinned the archive and emphasised the tribunal’s role in determining individual responsibility, establishing the truth, providing a space for victims to testify and reconcile with their pasts, and contribute to the development of international criminal law and international peace and security.

In Chapter 2 we saw the limits of thinking about climate politics only through the notion of politics as a site or arena. There are two main aspects to this argument. One is that we miss lots of what ought to be regarded as political activity on climate change with this sort of one-dimensional account of politics. But the other is that the site itself becomes thought of as static, simply ‘there’. But political sites are historical creations, and are constantly, if often subtly, being remade. This chapter focuses on two, intertwined aspects of how Ottawa as a city is being made and remade as a political arena through climate change politics. The first of these is the entanglement of the City in a set of networks of municipalities, both generally and specifically on climate change. The second is through the principal governance strategy of these networks, carbon accounting, a strategy that is widely understood as depoliticizing. Both of these have structured how the City has dealt with climate change in specific ways, explored throughout the chapter.

To think politically about climate change, we need to elaborate the arguments I sketched out via the University of Ottawa divestment story in Chapter 1. First, we need to conceptualize explicitly what we mean by politics. Second, we need to think about the political drivers of (and obstacles to) climate change action, a question I will suggest can be understood via a notion of cultural political economy. Third, we need to think about the dynamics that arise out of these first two, which I take to be two-fold: On the one hand a recurring dynamic between depoliticization and repoliticization, and on the other hand a tension I characterize as ‘purification vs. complexity’, between the instinct to want to find simple ‘solutions’ or enemies to fight, and the multidimensional qualities of the high carbon world that needs to be transformed. To start, however, it is perhaps worth thinking a little about how climate change is commonly conceptualized and framed, in public discourse as well as across various academic disciplines, in order to tease out what the politics of these specific climate change frames are.

This chapter focuses on the archive’s concepts and objects. This first examines how the tribunal’s legal rules shaped the archive, setting out how the court’s statute and ever-evolving jurisprudence created the framework through which the archive’s records were produced. Beginning to get to the political nature of this imagining, the chapter also demonstrates how certain interpretations of the law ended up preventing records from being produced – such as about the international nature of the genocide from entering the archive – and cemented the use of trials as a key governance tool within the international community. The second part zeros in on arguably the two most important objects for the archive: victims and perpetrators. Exploring how these were constituted in particular ways points to how this produced distinctive visions of community and also how this resulted in a number of conflicts between the archives strategies.

In April 2016, the University of Ottawa made a curious decision regarding climate change. The previous couple of years saw campaigning by student groups, supported by some academics, to get the University to divest the holdings in its pension funds and endowments from fossil fuels. This was in common with divestment campaigns on many other university campuses across North America and beyond, as well as in churches and some larger institutional investors. In response, the University announced that it would not divest from fossil fuels but later on in the report making this announcement, it stated that it would take the investments out of the various fossil fuel companies it had holdings in, and shift that money into ‘clean energy’ investments. In other words, it decided to divest from fossil fuels but would not accept publicly that it was doing this (see Chapter 8 for a longer discussion of this episode).

While I was finalizing the first draft of this book, in early 2019, the world saw an upsurge in radical protest activity over climate change. Extinction Rebellion, centred on the UK but spreading, the school strikes for climate initiated by Greta Thunberg but now occurring worldwide, the Sunrise Movement in the US, declarations of ‘climate emergency’ by municipalities worldwide and some national governments, and the radicalized vision of climate change (at least relative to previous incarnations) embodied in the Green New Deal (GND): All have repoliticized climate change in the terms I have been discussing, by bringing climate change squarely into the realm of public collective decision-making, articulating their activism as opposition to powerful forces destroying the climate, and emphasizing the conflictual qualities of climate change. This is of course against a background of recurrent activism that has similarly repoliticized climate change: At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conferences of the Parties from the Hague in 2001 onwards; in organizations such as Plane Stupid and Climate Camp; over oil pipelines in Western Canada and elsewhere, coalmines in Australia, fracking in many places; over divestment from fossil fuels in universities and churches; and in new coalitions in international climate negotiations led by radical governments in Bolivia and Ecuador.

It was in the context of codification that struggle over the internationalisation of protection against rebels played out in its most explicit confrontation, culminating in the League of Nations’ Codification Conference held at The Hague in 1930. If the rules coming out of the arbitral practice rested on shaky and contested authority, and were inextricably tied up with practices of intervention, formal multilateral codification offered Latin American international lawyers a means to set clear and mutually agreed standards that would restrict occasions for intervention. At the same time, Anglo-American international lawyers sought to codify responsibility on their own terms. This was codification as the technical practice of elite lawyers, simply a continuation of arbitration and scholarship – a surreptitious means to universalise US ways of doing things. The attempt to reconcile the two contrasting approaches to codification and responsibility ended in stalemate at The Hague.

This chapter looks at how other ICTR actors influenced the way in which the archive was contested. It begins by returning to the themes set out at the end of Chapter 2 and explores how the legal actors of the court initially pursued an expansive approach to the trials in search of truth, justice and reconciliation. However, this approach to prosecutions changed over time as the tribunal began to focus simply on getting as many verdicts as possible, as quickly as possible. As such, the conception of justice underpinning the archive became far more restricted and more closely resembled a more traditional form of retributive justice. This, then, shows the fragmenting of the tribunal’s initial purpose. This chapter identifies three main factors behind this shift: the solidification of the legal rules that underpinned the trials; the relationship between the tribunal and other UN organs – and particularly the Security Council’s decision in early 2000s that the tribunal had to close down as quickly as possible; and the ICTR’s acquiescence to the RPF’s demands that the tribunal halt investigations into RPF crimes during the genocide.

If the University of Ottawa exemplifies the ways that public institutions have focused on energy demand management and new forms of infrastructure (in their case, innovations within buildings), we also saw in Chapter 7 that there has been significant activity by community and private sector initiatives focused more on changing energy supply. Here we focus in more detail on one particularly prominent initiative, the Ottawa Renewable Energy Cooperative (OREC).

Chapters 4 and 5 explore how various subject positions (or what Foucault describes as enunciative modalities) influenced how knowledge was produced within the archive, from which perspective records were constructed and, ultimately, what was to be archived. In Chapter 4, ‘Contesting the Archive’, I focus on the witnesses, who played a far more significant role in constructing the archive than scholars normally credit. Whilst this shows how legal actors constrained what witnesses could record within the archive, it also demonstrates how witnesses were able to contest these parameters both in terms of which crimes would be recorded, but also how the law was to account for violence. This contestation also destabilised many of the objects and subjects that the legal discourse tried to produce, such as what constituted a victim or perpetrator.