Sharpening the needle: A critical engagement with the call to ‘discipline energy justice’

Abstract

This commentary critically engages Festus Boamah's proposal to ‘discipline’ energy justice scholarship, examining its implications for critical, decolonial, and pluriversal approaches. While acknowledging the value of conceptual clarity and grounded analysis, it challenges Boamah's framing of critical energy justice as universalist or impractical. Drawing on grounded normativity, post-development, and pluriversal thinking, it argues that these perspectives are not utopian abstractions but vital responses to colonial, capitalist, and extractive logics. The commentary contends that epistemic pluralism must remain open to ontological dissent, refusal, and non-state alternatives. Rather than enforcing coherence through disciplinary boundaries, energy justice scholarship should remain rooted in struggle, relationality, and ethical responsiveness. The pluriverse is not a fixed model but a terrain of contestation – an insurgent horizon that resists technocratic closure and reclaims the radical promise of energy justice.