Combustion Regimes: Fire, Carbon, Energy Demand and the Political Ecology of Capacity (Mitchell, Pyne, Moore, Wilhite, Shove, Horta, Bouzarovski, Thapa) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Combustion is an infrastructural regime that reorganises political power, social practice, spatial form and the conditions under which life becomes possible. Timothy Mitchell’s “Carbon Democracy” demonstrates this with exceptional precision by following coal and oil through the technical networks that extract, transport and convert energy. Fossil fuels do not simply supply an external resource to political systems; their material properties and logistical arrangements shape the forms of collective leverage, interruption and democratic possibility available to workers and states. Coal’s concentrated labour networks enabled particular forms of political mobilisation, while oil’s differently engineered circulation reorganised power through pipelines, shipping, finance and geopolitical control.