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2021 | Buch | 1. Auflage

Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene Kapitel lesen Erstes Kapitel lesen

International Relations in the Anthropocene

New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches

herausgegeben von: David Chandler, Franziska Müller, Delf Rothe

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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This textbook introduces advanced students of International Relations (and beyond) to the ways in which the advent of, and reflections on, the Anthropocene impact on the study of global politics and the disciplinary foundations of IR. The book contains 24 chapters, authored by senior academics as well as early career scholars, and is divided into four parts, detailing, respectively, why the Anthropocene is of importance to IR, challenges to traditional approaches to security, the question of governance and agency in the Anthropocene, and new methods and approaches, going beyond the human/nature divide.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
1. Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene
Abstract
This introductory chapter is organised in three sections. Firstly, we introduce the concept of the Anthropocene as not merely a question of pressing problems, such as climate change and extreme weather events, but also a matter of the tools and understandings that are available to us: in other words it is a matter of how we know—of epistemology—and also of what we understand the world to consist of—that is questions of ontology. The second section provides some background to the disciplinary history of International Relations, which could be understood as moving from an ‘inter-national’ or state-centred focus during the Cold War to an increased interest in the Anthropocene, understood as a ‘planetary’ challenge to liberal universal assumptions. The third section explains the contents of the book on the basis of the distinct parts and chapters and highlights the pedagogic aspects which are included uniformly across the chapters.
Delf Rothe, Franziska Müller, David Chandler

Open Access

25. Correction to: Security in the Anthropocene
Maria Julia Trombetta
PDF Zum Volltext

Part I

Frontmatter
2. Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene
Abstract
This chapter discusses the multiple ways in which the emergence of the Anthropocene challenges International Relations’s (IR’s) dominant structures and practices as both a field of knowledge and institutional practice. It identifies the intellectual and organisational limits that prevent IR from effectively addressing the planet’s new geological conditions and highlights the urgency of developing a politics for the Earth, suggesting possible pathways for the future. Four major limitations are addressed, namely IR’s state-centrism, which precludes it from building the necessary planetary picture of reality; positivist and rationalist paradigms, whose assumptions of a stable and predictable world hinder the field and policymakers’ capacity to recognize non-linearity and uncertainty; the nature-society dichotomy, a core dogma of the prevailing scholarship and politics; and anthropocentrism, which ignores the entanglement of human and non-human life. The cases of climate tipping points and the water and biodiversity crises are used to illustrate the Anthropocene’s distinctive character and the urgency of rethinking and transforming IR’s prevailing beliefs and practices, so that they match the planetary real.
Joana Castro Pereira
3. Encounters between Security and Earth System Sciences: Planetary Boundaries and Hothouse Earth
Abstract
This chapter analyzes how the research community in Earth System Sciences (ESS) describes the existence, the forms, and the prospects of environmental destruction and the risks related to this in a distinctive security logic. By analyzing central concepts, outlined by ESS, such as “Planetary Boundaries” and “Hothouse Earth”, it shows how the key values and assumptions regarding security, existential threat, and emergency response can enable new approaches in the field of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies. Earth System Sciences and IR, seemingly so different—one reliant on the natural sciences the other on the social sciences—are, in the Anthropocene, increasingly focusing on understanding and responding to similar processes and interactive effects. The chapter concludes with the proposition of some common research directions that could enable ESS, IR, and Security Studies scholars to jointly engage in an effort to address both the so-called “hard” sciences and “hard” or Realpolitik of IR in the Anthropocene.
Judith Nora Hardt
4. The Nuclear Origins of the Anthropocene
Abstract
This chapter outlines the intimate connections between the militarization of the planet during the Cold War and the advent of the Anthropocene. International Relations (IR) theorists have been slow to subject the geological association between the nuclear age and the Anthropocene to theoretical and empirical scrutiny. One of the reasons for this neglect may be that most Anthropocene-interested IR theorists have been keen to stress that our entry into the Anthropocene represents a sharp break with the past. Yet history has a role to play in the rekindling of theoretical and political imagination, not least because many of the central issues we discuss today under the heading of the Anthropocene share important features with earlier debates about nuclear weapons. Such overlapping concerns include the complex relation between warfare and global ecology, the importance of theorizing (human) extinction as a distinct political category and the possibilities and limits associated with attuning or up-scaling politics and ethics to a planetary level. Historical engagements with these issues can serve as inspiration—or, at the very minimum, provide caution—to a critical IR scholarship adamant on finding possibilities for a new politics in the Anthropocene age.
Rens van Munster
5. Decolonizing the Anthropocene
Abstract
The growing realisation in the global North that capitalism and the conditions of the Anthropocene no longer create the conditions for life represents a profound unsettling of the philosophical foundations underpinning ideas about modernity and progress. However, for millions of people around the world this is nothing new, since colonized peoples have experienced this reality since the advent of capitalism. The dominant presentation of the Anthropocene ignores the role of systems, such as colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy and erases the racialised history of extractive colonialism that has given rise to this form of globalism. In response, this chapter discusses the significance of decolonizing the Anthropocene and the challenges this poses, in particular, for postcolonial theory. It discusses the ways in which postcolonial theory problematizes the Eurocentrism of and the epistemic violence created by framing the Anthropocene as a universalizing and silencing concept.
Cheryl McEwan
6. Geoengineering: A New Arena of International Politics
Abstract
This chapter introduces geoengineering as a new arena of international politics and explains why hopeful technical explorations of alternative climate strategies have not properly factored in the international. It asks how international politics might affect potential development and deployment of geoengineering techniques, and conversely how their emergence could change the international system itself, introducing new dilemmas and modes of interaction characteristic of the Anthropocene. Throughout, the chapter draws on two high-profile areas of geoengineering research, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), to illustrate some of the issues that geoengineering poses for International Relations (IR), both theoretically and in practice. The chapter proceeds via three sections addressing three key questions. First, what are geoengineering technologies? Second, why has the international not been factored in properly? Third, how might global climate intervention interact with the international? It concludes with a consideration of what ‘the international’ implies for theorising IR in the ‘Anthropocene’ more widely.
Olaf Corry, Nikolaj Kornbech
7. Genealogies of the Anthropocene and How to Study Them
Abstract
This chapter takes a closer look at the conceptual roots of the Anthropocene. Tracing the history of the Anthropocene concept helps in explaining how certain political imaginaries have found their way into new forms of Anthropocene governance. Using the approach of genealogy, it holds that the production of discourses is inherently tied to forms of political power. A genealogical perspective asks questions such as ‘How did it become possible to conceive of the Earth as an interlinked system and of humanity as a geological actor in the first place?’ In four sections, it first briefly summarizes the debate on the origins and historical predecessors of the Anthropocene concept, then introduces Foucault’s concept of genealogy and outlines an analytical framework to operationalize it. The third section illustrates how to use this approach in practice by taking the Whole Earth movement as an example. The concluding section summarizes the findings and discusses their relevance for International Relations.
Delf Rothe, Ann-Kathrin Benner

Part II

Frontmatter
8. Environmental Security and the Geopolitics of the Anthropocene
Abstract
No longer can states, corporations or people assume that environmental conditions from the past are a reliable guide as to what to expect in the future. This new environmental context is raising profound questions about how to secure food, water and other environmental necessities and forcing us to reconsider the traditional themes of international relations. Survival and security is not now just about individual states and the dangers they may face from other states; it is now about much more. To explain what this new age of the Anthropocene means for world politics this chapter first turns to the history of environmental security, a term that emerged in the 1980s, and then analyses the problems of living in an increasingly artificial world where decisions over industries and technologies are now key to providing security. The last section of the chapter emphasizes that security and international politics have to be rethought for these new circumstances.
Simon Dalby

Open Access

9. Security in the Anthropocene
Abstract
Environmental issues, ranging from climate change to scarcity of resources and diminishing biodiversity, present a set of challenges that suggest that we are now living in the Anthropocene. Many of these issues are expressed in security terms, with a growing emphasis on energy, environmental and water security. Analytical frameworks and existing institutions become dysfunctional, and problems cannot be dealt with in the old ways. Security needs to be rethought. This chapter provides an overview of the attempts and the challenges to reconceptualize security in the Anthropocene. How does a growing awareness of complex relations involving humans, non-humans and things question the very subject of security? Whose security is at stake, against what threats, by what means? It engages with the challenges that environmental problems pose to the discipline of international relations, its ontological and epistemological foundations and its categories of analysis and to security studies more specifically.
Maria Julia Trombetta
PDF Zum Volltext
10. Security Through Resilience: Contemporary Challenges in the Anthropocene
Abstract
The concept of resilience has rapidly spread throughout the policy world, driven by the desire to use systems theories and process understandings to develop new security approaches for coping, bouncing-back and adaptive improvement in the face of shocks and disturbances. However, this chapter argues that under the auspices of the Anthropocene, the assumptions and goals of resilience become problematic. This is because external interventions often ignore feedback effects, meaning that attempts to resolve problems through focusing upon enabling and capacity-building can be seen as counterproductive “fire-fighting” rather than tackling causation. Even more radical "alternative" or "community-based" approaches, relying upon interventions to enable so-called "natural" processes, either through an emphasis on local and traditional knowledge or new monitoring technologies, constitute problems for resilience advocacy: firstly, the problem of unrecognized exploitation; and secondly, the problem of continuing to sacrifice others to maintain unsustainable Western modes of consumption and production.
David Chandler
11. Protecting the Vulnerable: Towards an Ecological Approach to Security
Abstract
The Anthropocene is something of a ‘game-changer’ for the way we can and should view international relations. It suggests the need to step back and reconsider some of the core assumptions we have about the way the world works. In the context of the Anthropocene, this means that the environment is no longer a background to geopolitics, but rather a dynamic force that impacts global politics. This chapter makes the case that the Anthropocene compels us to view and approach security not through the lens of how we might protect human collectives or institutions, but how we might protect ecosystems themselves. Consequentially, this points to a defence of ecosystems, in particular their functionality in the face of ongoing change. For doing so, the chapter outlines the contours of an ecological security discourse, emphasising its focus on the resilience of ecosystems and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable.
Matt McDonald
12. Caring for the World: Security in the Anthropocene
Abstract
This chapter explores an alternative logic and ethic of security—care—that may represent the unique conditions of the Anthropocene age. It begins by providing an overview of how a specific ethical injunction—to care—has historically emerged within feminist discourses and how it has slowly been adopted by International Relations (IR) scholars. It then moves to discuss how care can be used as an ethical and political concept for addressing new types of avoidable (and unavoidable) threats arising from diverse sources entangled with human action. Finally, it explores the unique benefits and potential pitfalls for engaging with the concept of care in securing our new world. Rather than re-using traditional security concepts, which have been constructed from a belief in a violent estrangement between competing units, care allows us to see security as a radical entanglement between humans, nonhuman animals, seeds, bacteria, materials, and technology.
Cameron Harrington

Part III

Frontmatter
13. Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecology and Global Politics
Abstract
In recent years, together with the influence of complexity thinking, actor-network theory and critical animal studies, posthumanism has advanced as a new concept within International Relations. Posthumanism can be considered as providing a challenge to anthropocentrism, that is, the idea that the human is the centre of all things, whereas nature is seen as something outside and apart from human experience. Across the disciplines, anthropocentric thinking has been a central feature, though we would argue that international relations has been particularly negligent in this regard.
This chapter makes two key claims which provide a direct challenge to the ways in which international relations have been studied. First, it argues that posthumanism challenges the human-centred focus of international relations. Second, it points out that posthumanism has an ethical imperative—that our responsibilities are not only to our kin, nationality and species, but also across the species barrier.
Erika Cudworth, Stephen Hobden
14. Agency in More-than-Human, Queerfeminist and Decolonial Perspectives
Abstract
The Anthropocene poses a challenge to international relations theories. However, International Relations’s (IR’s) engagement with the Anthropocene condition is still pervaded by modernist/Holocene limitations, visible for instance, when upholding traditional analytical categories such as ‘the state’, ‘the system’ or ‘agency’. Indeed, much of the debate in IR seems to be stuck in Holocene thinking and tends to feed the assumption that harmful ecological effects were in principle governable and manageable.
In response, this chapter first explores how these limitations prevent IR from theorizing the Anthropocene condition. It then zooms in on dissident debates that seek to decentre the human perspective, the Western perspective or cis/masculine perspectives. Queerfeminist and decolonial approaches as well as more-than-human approaches reframe human agency and relationality in the Anthropocene and provide suggestions for overcoming IR’s holocene limitations.
Franziska Müller
15. Disrupting the Universality of the Anthropocene with Perspectives from the Asia Pacific
Abstract
The universalising tendency of the Anthropocene as a concept overshadows the injustices and inequalities in human history. Those most responsible for the causes of the Anthropocene are less likely to bear the brunt of its consequences, while those who are least responsible are the most vulnerable. Furthermore, the unsustainable conditions in the Anthropocene may amplify present injustices and inequalities between and within societies. This chapter adds to the critical analysis of the Anthropocene by highlighting the Asia-Pacific region. The Asia Pacific tells more than a single ‘Asia-Pacific story’. Its diversity reflects the heterogeneity of the Anthropos—of humanity in the Anthropocene. By demonstrating its distinctiveness compared to other regions this chapter aims to disrupt universal narratives about human-nature relationality, attesting to the plurality of the Anthropocene. Without falling into regional exceptionalism, drawing on different regional perspectives allows us to make sense of the complexity of the Anthropocene.
Dahlia Simangan
16. Challenges to Democracy in the Anthropocene
Abstract
Life in the Anthropocene entails moving beyond Holocene institutions, modes of thought, or policy options—a radical transformation that is riddled with political contestation and struggle. As societies experience on-going ecological emergencies and try to adapt to swiftly changing physical conditions, some important political questions arise about what kind of transformations should be sought after, what policies and practices would achieve these transformations, and who participates in making these decisions. This also means reconsidering conceptions of power, justice, and democracy, the last one of which is the subject of this chapter. In doing so, this chapter recaptures the earlier International Relations (IR) debates on democracy, discusses new challenges to democracy, and finally provides suggestion for reimagining democracy in the context of the Anthropocene.
Ayşem Mert
17. Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene: Challenges, Approaches and Critical Perspectives
Abstract
The Anthropocene is seen as a fundamental challenge and transformative moment for environmental governance. Embedded in Holocene institutions and ideas, the argument goes, existing concepts and practices of environmental governance can no longer be seen as an adequate response to the new reality of the Anthropocene. Rather, environmental governance must be reconsidered as Anthropocene governance. This chapter takes up and discusses these calls for a renewal of environmental governance in the Anthropocene. To this end, four fundamental challenges to environmental governance in the Anthropocene are described. Next, an overview of the various goals and means of Anthropocene governance is provided, and two particularly prominent approaches, "Earth System Governance" and "Ecological Reflexivity," are presented in more detail. Taking a critical perspective, two avenues for advancing the concept of Anthropocene governance are outlined.
Basil Bornemann
18. Experimental Government in the Anthropocene
Abstract
The effects of modern liberal capitalism such as climate change, environmental degradation, and infrastructural fragility are seen as requiring the recalibration of modern governmental frameworks. This chapter traces two tendencies within this attempt to rethinking government for the Anthropocene and explores the perceived problems of modern government that they address. First, it briefly discusses proposals for planetary earth systems governance and efforts to maintain global safe operating spaces. Second, it shows that some of the most profound governmental transformations are being forged more concretely at the scale of the city. Cities are seen as both drivers of climate change as well as especially promising sites for building resilience to it due to their ability to respond quickly via situated experiments that incorporate diverse publics and nature. The chapter concludes by discussing the resilience assemblage stitched together across these two tendencies and the interlinked, eco-technical-cybernetic vision of life forwarded therein.
Stephanie Wakefield

Part IV

Frontmatter
19. Collaging as a Method for IR in the Anthropocene
Abstract
The image of methods as being mainly (or even exclusively) about statistical techniques is surprisingly tenacious in the study of International Relations (IR). The disciplining effects of such reductive understandings of methods are debilitating. They transform methodology from the heuristic device it should be into a policing technology that blinds and blocks, impeding IR scholars from working with the Anthropocene. Disrupting this narrow understanding of methods and its effects by showing that there are alternatives is therefore of fundamental importance. The chapter focuses on one specific alternative: the method of collaging. This method allows IR scholars to contribute to the multi-disciplinary efforts that go into co-producing an understanding/image of the Anthropocene. It makes it possible for sustained critical IR scholarship to re-problematize the performative consequences of these images and also generates awareness of the possibility and forms through which IR scholars might engage in re-designing politics in the Anthropocene.
Anna Leander
20. Knowing of Ontologies: Map-Making to ‘See’ Worlds of Relations
Abstract
The research method outlined in this chapter started from a question of whether agribusiness companies had a different understanding of what land ‘is’ than farming communities in Sierra Leone. From there, I ran into a ‘problem’ in research design: what kinds of methods can social scientists use to investigate these diverse experiences of being? If there is a radical difference in understanding the nature of being, then the ability to experience that difference—to truly know it—is hardly resolvable. However, it is possible learn about these diverse understandings. This chapter illustrates this with a method of ‘community mapping.’ Rather than a ‘flat map’ produced on a surface, this is a ‘living’ map of relationality. In the method, relations between people, ancestors, crops, chickens, goats, and stones (among others) are ‘acted out’ for the benefit of me, the researcher. Though acting out these relations, communities can ‘show’ other understandings of the nature of being.
Caitlin Ryan
21. Spatializing the Environmental Apocalypse
Abstract
Depictions of life in the Anthropocene often envision a future of environmental catastrophe where natural resources have been depleted and the Earth has been ravaged by storms and drought, finally turning into uninhabitable wasteland. The term ‘environmental apocalypse’ has been coined to highlight the similarities between the current environmental condition and biblical descriptions of the end of the world. This chapter shows that notions of environmental apocalypse are strongly related to a modernist understanding of linear time. Through an engagement with postcolonial theology, this chapter argues that a more politicized understanding of the environmental apocalypse comes about when the end of the world is conceived as variably distributed across geographical, social, and material divides in the present. To highlight the importance of spatializing the environmental apocalypse, this chapter introduces examples from the field of biodiversity preservation, specifically, the politics of seeds.
Suvi Alt
22. The Weather Is Always a Method
Abstract
The engagement with the Anthropocene is a form of methodological trouble for International Relations (IR). Interrupting human-nature binaries and subject-object divides requires work. As an example of a possible methodological approach in/of the Anthropocene, this chapter focuses on the weather—not simply as an object of knowledge but as a material knowledge system in the making and unmaking of IR itself. This chapter shows how the weather is always a method in international relations and its study. There are three parts to this chapter. The first part thinks with rice as a commodity of monsoonal spaces, bringing it in conversation with the spatio-temporalities of IR. The second part engages with Black Studies and scholarship that examines the lives and afterlives of transatlantic slavery and how some of that scholarship, embedded within IR, thinks of the weather. The third is an invitation for speculation with the knowledge systems in/of airborne matters we have come to deeply know.
Harshavardhan Bhat
23. Thought Experiment as Method: Science-Fiction and International Relations in the Anthropocene
Abstract
Science-fiction (SF) provides much-sought inspiration on both methodologies and perspectives for IR in the Anthropocene. SF’s thought experiments can reveal or provide insights into the possibilities of alternative futures. SF approaches can thus be seen as a method of opening up our thinking of the human condition. This is often mediated through two main frames of reference: firstly, humanity seen through the lens of technological advance and geo-engineering dreams of control and manipulation of nature; and secondly, via the establishment of (global) governments and hierarchical structures suppressing the people, on the one hand, and of global corporations putting financial interest ahead of that of the planet, on the other hand—both being a threat to human and non-human inhabitants.
Isabella Hermann
24. Disrupting Anthropocentrism Through Relationality
Abstract
Literatures on the Anthropocene in International Relations (IR) (and elsewhere) often cite the conceptual and ontological separation of humanity from nature as fundamental to the dominant modern worldview and generative of the many ecological crises characteristic of this epoch. One central entailment of this worldview has been anthropocentrism, which expresses the idea that humans are the most important beings on the planet and even in the cosmos. As a way to defamiliarize ourselves from anthropocentrism and begin exploring some possible alternatives, this chapter will focus on interrogating what we call fundamental ontological assumptions about the primordial conditions of existence. The chapter looks at two complementary opposite sets of assumptions concerning the basic conditions of existence: separation, and what we call robust relationality or interconnection. It elaborates how we understand these contrasting sets of assumptions and their consequences. Finally, it examines how these assumptions inform different possible ways of approaching, understanding, and responding to the crises of the Anthropocene.
Jarrad Reddekop, Tamara Trownsell
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
International Relations in the Anthropocene
herausgegeben von
David Chandler
Franziska Müller
Delf Rothe
Copyright-Jahr
2021
Verlag
Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-53014-3
Print ISBN
978-3-030-53013-6
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3

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