The End of Normal Politics: Assemblages, Non-Humans and International Relations

The question of agency is one of long standing in the social sciences and humanities. It is often conceptualized as an attribute of rational thinking human beings, and, in so far as this is the case, such a view of agency is inescapably anthropocentric. Against this view, in this paper we advocate a view of agency as: assemblage derived, that is relational; emergent, because agency emerges through the relations that form an assemblage; and contingent, because all assemblages are only temporarily stabilized. On this account, agency is not a possession or an attribute of individual entities. Rather, our approach recognizes and emphasizes the historical specificity of agency, and requires that we attend empirically to its specific forms. We cannot know in advance the agency that assemblages such as ‘a mountain’ or ‘a human’ might have, or the differences between them—these have to be mapped in their specific, immanent, singularity. Whilst this complicates notions of ‘human responsibility’ because it also complicates any notion of simple linear causation, this does not, as we will demonstrate, mean we are unable to identify causally relevant actors, whether they are human or not.