International Relations in the Anthropocene: New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches 3030530132, 9783030530136

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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches

Edited by DAVID CHANDLER FRANZISKA MÜLLER DELF ROTHE

International Relations in the Anthropocene

David Chandler  •  Franziska Müller Delf Rothe Editors

International Relations in the Anthropocene New Agendas, New Agencies and New Approaches

Editors David Chandler Department of Politics and International Relations University of Westminster London, UK

Franziska Müller Department of Social Sciences University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

Delf Rothe Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy University of Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-53013-6 ISBN 978-3-030-53014-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2022 Chapter 9 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar ­ ­methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Max Broszat — Design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction:  International Relations in the Anthropocene  1 Delf Rothe, Franziska Müller, and David Chandler Part I The Anthropocene: From the Global to the Planetary  17 2 Towards  a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene 21 Joana Castro Pereira 3 Encounters  between Security and Earth System Sciences: Planetary Boundaries and Hothouse Earth 39 Judith Nora Hardt 4 The  Nuclear Origins of the Anthropocene 59 Rens van Munster 5 D  ecolonizing the Anthropocene 77 Cheryl McEwan 6 Geoengineering:  A New Arena of International Politics 95 Olaf Corry and Nikolaj Kornbech 7 Genealogies  of the Anthropocene and How to Study Them113 Delf Rothe and Ann-Kathrin Benner

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Part II The Challenge of Security 133 8 Environmental  Security and the Geopolitics of the Anthropocene137 Simon Dalby 9 Security  in the Anthropocene155 Maria Julia Trombetta 10 Security  Through Resilience: Contemporary Challenges in the Anthropocene173 David Chandler 11 Protecting  the Vulnerable: Towards an Ecological Approach to Security191 Matt McDonald 12 Caring  for the World: Security in the Anthropocene209 Cameron Harrington Part III Governance and Agency 227 13 Posthuman  International Relations: Complexity, Ecology and Global Politics233 Erika Cudworth and Steve Hobden 14 Agency  in More-than-Human, Queerfeminist and Decolonial Perspectives251 Franziska Müller 15 Disrupting  the Universality of the Anthropocene with Perspectives from the Asia Pacific271 Dahlia Simangan 16 Challenges  to Democracy in the Anthropocene291 Ayşem Mert

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17 Environmental  Governance in the Anthropocene: Challenges, Approaches and Critical Perspectives 311 Basil Bornemann 18 Experimental  Government in the Anthropocene Stephanie Wakefield

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Part IV Methods and Approaches: Beyond the Human/Nature Divide 349 19 Collaging  as a Method for IR in the Anthropocene Anna Leander 20 K  nowing of Ontologies: Map-Making to ‘See’ Worlds of Relations Caitlin Ryan

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21 Spatializing  the Environmental Apocalypse Suvi Alt

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22 The  Weather Is Always a Method Harshavardhan Bhat

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23 Thought  Experiment as Method: Science-­Fiction and International Relations in the Anthropocene Isabella Hermann

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Jarrad Reddekop and Tamara Trownsell Correction to: Security in the Anthropocene Maria Julia Trombetta Index

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Notes on Contributors

Suvi  Alt is Assistant Professor of History and Theory of International Relations at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research is situated at the intersections of international political theory and critical perspectives on development and environmental politics. Her work has been published in several journals and edited volumes in the fields of International Relations, political theory, and cultural studies. Ann-Kathrin Benner  is a doctoral researcher within the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded project ‘The Knowledge Politics of Security in the Anthropocene’ at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg. Harshavardhan  Bhat is a doctoral research fellow with the Monsoon Assemblages project (2017–2021) at the University of Westminster, London, UK. His doctoral research is an interdisciplinary study on the politics of the monsoon. Basil Bornemann  is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Sustainability Research Group, University of Basel, Switzerland. He has an interdisciplinary study background in environmental sciences and holds a doctoral degree in political science. His research focuses on sustainability-oriented governance transformations and their democratic implications in different fields of study, such as energy and food. He is further interested in principles and practices of transformative sustainability science.

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David Chandler  is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, London, UK.  His recent monographs include Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (with Julian Reid, 2019), Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (2018), International Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997–2017 (2017), The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (with Julian Reid, 2016), and Resilience: The Governance of Complexity (2014). Olaf Corry  is Professor of Global Security Challenges at the University of Leeds, UK. He teaches international relations and studies the international politics of climate change. He is a co-principle investigator on the project ‘International Security Politics of Climate Engineering’ based at the University of Copenhagen. He has published on international theory, environmental politics, risk and security logics, and social movements and climate change. Erika  Cudworth  works in the School of Applied Social Sciences at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Her research encompasses human/animal studies, gender, the environment, and posthumanism. Her published work includes Developing Ecofeminist Theory  (2005) and Social Lives with Other Animals  (2011) and, with Steve Hobden, Posthuman International Relations (2011) and The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism (2018). She is working on a new book project looking at relationships between people and dog companions and their everyday practices. Simon  Dalby is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, where he teaches in the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He is co-editor of Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (2019) and author of Anthropocene Geopolitics (2020). Judith  Nora  Hardt  leads the project ‘Climate change in security perceptions, conceptions and practice at the United Nations Security Council’ at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH), University of Hamburg, Germany, and works as a postdoctoral researcher with the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin on ‘the economic challenges of globalization of the European Union’. She is part of the research group ‘Climate Change and Security’ at the University of Hamburg and is active in the network ‘Scientists for Future’.

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Cameron Harrington  is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, UK. His research focuses on the theories and practices of environmental security, particularly water conflict and cooperation in the Anthropocene. He is the coauthor of Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care, with Clifford Shearing (2017). Isabella Hermann  is a political scientist by training and a science-fiction fan by passion. She holds a PhD in International Relations and investigates how science-fiction presents technological progress, what effects technology has on the socio-political structures we are familiar with, and what this tells us about our present. She is a research coordinator of the interdisciplinary research group ‘Responsibility: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence’ at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin. Stephen Hobden  is Reader in International Relations at the University of East London, UK, where he teaches courses on international relations theory. Together with Erika Cudworth, he is the author of The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism (2017) and Posthuman International Relations (2011). Nikolaj  Kornbech  is a research assistant at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has worked in environmental policy as a civil society advocate and is a research assistant on the ‘International Security Politics and Climate Engineering’ project. Anna  Leander is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate Institute in Geneva with affiliations at Pontifical Catholic University (PUC), Rio de Janeiro, and the Copenhagen Business School. She is best known for work on practice theoretical approaches and methodologies and for her work on commercial security. Her research focuses on the politics of digital design. Matt McDonald  is a reader in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research is in the area of critical theoretical approaches to security and their application to issues such as environmental change—especially climate change—and Australian foreign and security policy. He has published on these themes in a range of journals and is the author of Security, the Environment and Emancipation (2012) and co-author of Ethics and Global Security (2014).

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Cheryl McEwan  is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University, UK, and author of Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development (2019). Her research includes projects on Sustainable Food Consumption in the Global South (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)) and Creative Arts, Livelihoods and HIV/AIDS Prevention in Sub-Saharan Africa (funded by Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)). Ayşem  Mert  is an associate senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Sweden, and a research fellow at the Earth System Governance Research Programme. Her research focuses on discourses of democracy and environment at transnational and global levels, political storytelling, public–private cooperation, and the imaginaries of the Anthropocene. She is the author of Environmental Governance Through Partnerships: A Discourse Theoretical Study (2015) and has published various articles on environmental politics and governance. Franziska  Müller is Assistant Professor of Globalization and Climate Governance at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany, and leader of a research group on African energy transitions. Her research covers global climate and energy governance as well as postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches towards international relations. Co-editor of Beyond the Master’s Tools? Decolonizing Knowledge Orders, Research Methods and Teaching (2020), she has published on REDD+ governmentalities and on energy justice (Journal of Political Ecology and Energy Research and Social Science). Joana Castro Pereira  is a postdoctoral researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations, NOVA University of Lisbon. Between January 2017 and April 2018, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of International Relations of the University of Brasília. Her research focuses on the governance of climate change and biodiversity in the Amazon. She is co-­ editor of Non-Human Nature in World Politics: Theory and Practice (forthcoming) and has published in journals such as Global Policy, Water Alternatives, Global Environmental Politics, and Journal of Latin American Studies. She has also collaborated with the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), the EU-LAC Foundation, and the Global Challenges Foundation. Jarrad Reddekop  is Instructor of Indigenous Studies at Camosun College in Victoria, Canada, and a research associate at the Universidad San Francisco de

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Quito, Ecuador. His research and fieldwork focuses on ontology and ethics, political thought, and Indigenous philosophy. Delf Rothe  is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH), Germany, and leader of the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded project ‘The Knowledge Politics of Security in the Anthropocene’. Rothe has published widely on issues such as climate change and security discourse, visual security, resilience, and environmental migration. He is the author of Securitizing Global Warming: A Climate of Complexity (2016). Caitlin Ryan  is Assistant Professor of International Security at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her work focuses on feminist and postcolonial security studies, the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and post-­war women’s empowerment. She works on large-scale land deals and land reform in Sierra Leone and Liberia through considering the relations of power bound up in land. She has published recent articles in the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Third World Quarterly, and the European Journal of International Relations. Dahlia Simangan  is an assistant professor at the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) and Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University in Japan. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the Australian National University and is a former Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at United Nations University in Tokyo. Her research interest in peace and conflict studies includes topics on peacebuilding, international relations in the Anthropocene, and human rights issues in the Philippines. Maria  Julia  Trombetta is an associate professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Working from a critical security studies perspective, she is interested in the securitization of the environment and of energy, with a focus on Europe and China, and in the transformations of security discourses and practices. Co-editor of the International Handbook of Energy Security (2013), her work has appeared in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Asian Perspective, and Critical Studies on Security. Tamara  Trownsell  is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include ontology, Andean philosophy, and alternative ways of being in the world.

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Rens  van Munster is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). His research explores the multiple and often surprising links between the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and the age of the Anthropocene, with a specific focus on US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. His most recent book is Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought During the Thermonuclear Revolution, with Casper Sylvest (2016). Stephanie  Wakefield is Director and Assistant Professor of the Human Ecology Program, Department of Natural Sciences, Life University, Marietta, Georgia, and also an Urban Studies Foundation International Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at Florida International University in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies and Institute of Environment. Her books include Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and the co-edited Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance and Politics at the End of the World (Routledge, 2020). She frequently publishes articles in academic and cultural journals including Political Geography, Geography Compass, Geoforum, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Place, and e-flux architecture.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 The rise of the Anthropocene concept in scientific debates since 2000. (Source: Authors based on Web of Science data) 115 Fig. 7.2 NASA’s iconic blue marble image. (Source: Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA) 121 Fig. 7.3 Cover of the last Whole Earth Catalog, June 1975. (Published under CC2.0 license, original by Akos Kokai, available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Whole_Earth_Catalog_(1975)_(15604607615).jpg)125 Fig. 7.4 Seeds of the good Anthropocenes webpage. (Source: Screenshot captured from: https://goodanthropocenes.net [31 March 2020]) 126 Fig. 15.1 Cumulative CO2 emissions by world region 272 Fig. 15.2 Annual share of global CO2 emissions, 2017 274 Fig. 15.3 CO2 emissions per capita 274 Fig. 19.1 Rosana Paulino, “Assentamento” [The Settlement]. Mixed media and video. Dimension variable. 2013, Artist collection. (Image taken at MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro)  358 Fig. 19.2 Stefan à Wengen, “The Mission VIII”, 2007; 185 x 265 cm; Acrylic on Canvas; Private Collection, Courtesy: Beck & Eggeling, Düsseldorf 362 Fig. 19.3 Tatiana Bilbao, “Ways of Life”, (image used for advertising the exhibition dedicated to Bilbao at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark [2017]) 366

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List of Boxes

Box 2.1 Box 2.2 Box 2.3 Box 3.1 Box 3.2 Box 3.3 Box 3.4 Box 4.1 Box 4.2 Box 5.1 Box 5.2 Box 5.3 Box 6.1 Box 6.2 Box 6.3 Box 7.1 Box 7.2 Box 7.3

Climate Tipping Points 27 Water Shortages and the Focus on Supply 30 The Sixth Mass Extinction 32 Evolution of Earth System Sciences. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the Basis of Steffen et al. (2020, 55) 42 The Security Prism. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the Basis of Abdus Sabur (2009, 1006) and Hardt (2018, 89–108) 46 ESS Reports: References to (Classical) Security Concepts, Categories, and Discourse. Source: Elaborated by the Author 47 Earth System Security. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the Basis of Hardt (2018, 89–108, 2019), Lenton et al. (2019), Steffen et al. (2015, 2020), and Rockström et al. (2009) 49 The Great Nuclear Acceleration 60 The United States and Nuclear Colonialism 68 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Conception of the Human as a Geophysical Force84 Gayatri Spivak’s Notion of ‘Planetarity’ 85 African Philosophies and the Anthropocene 89 Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage 98 Stratospheric Aerosol Injection 99 The UN Environment Assembly, Nairobi, 2019: The First International Negotiations over Geoengineering 104 What Is a Discourse? 116 Analytical Categories and Related Research Strategies 119 The Whole Earth Catalog122

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Box 8.1 Box 8.2 Box 8.3 Box 9.1 Box 9.2 Box 9.3 Box 10.1 Box 10.2 Box 10.3 Box 11.1 Box 11.2 Box 11.3 Box 12.1

The US Military: Insecurity Twice Over Divestment/Investment La Paz, Bolivia: Adaptation in Action Environmental Conflict Energy Security Securitization Coerced Resilience Community Knowledge Approaches to Resilience Big Data Approaches to Resilience National Security and Climate-Induced Displacement Mitigation and Ecological Security Extinction Rebellion and Ecological Security Karin Fierke on Care and the Role of Memory: The Case of Palestine and Israel The Svalbard Global Seed Vault Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Posthuman Care Donna Haraway: Cyborgs and Companion Species The Posthuman Way of War The ‘Orbis Spike’ as Alternative Start-Date of the Anthropocene Dissident Approaches to IR in the Anthropocene African Anthropocene: Fossil Dependency and Decarbonization in South Africa The Asia Pacific’s Contribution to Global CO2 Emissions The Pacific Islands in Climate Change Negotiations Examples of Ecologically Aligned Values and Practices in the Asia Pacific Moves that Can Increase the Degree of Democracy in the System Asking New Questions: Whither Democracy in a Time of Endings? Holocene Governance Earth System Governance Ecological Reflexivity Living Infrastructure Miami Beach Rosana Paulino Stefan à Wengen Tatiana Bilbao Can the River Speak? Decolonizing Methodologies What Is Eschatology?

Box 12.2 Box 12.3 Box 13.1 Box 13.2 Box 14.1 Box 14.2 Box 14.3 Box 15.1 Box 15.2 Box 15.3 Box 16.1 Box 16.2 Box 17.1 Box 17.2 Box 17.3 Box 18.1 Box 18.2 Box 19.1 Box 19.2 Box 19.3 Box 20.1 Box 20.2 Box 21.1

141 146 149 159 160 161 178 181 183 195 200 203 213 217 221 236 242 260 262 264 273 278 282 296 300 313 320 321 338 341 358 362 365 381 383 391

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Box 21.2 Box 21.3 Box 22.1 Box 22.2 Box 22.3 Box 23.1 Box 23.2 Box 24.1

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The Doomsday Vault 394 Seed-Saving at the End of the World 400 Clouds of Industrial Agriculture 412 Monuments 415 Cloud Seeding 419 Climate-Fiction 427 Missions to Mars 435 Relational, Non-anthropocentric Conceptions of the Human: An Amazonian Example 446 Box 24.2 Ayni as Mutual Nurturing450

1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene Delf Rothe, Franziska Müller, and David Chandler

Introduction In December 2020 the United Nations published its  annual  Human Development Report, declaring that international politics had entered a new ‘age of humans’, the Anthropocene, an age ‘in which the dominant risk to our survival is ourselves’ (UN 2020, iii). The Anthropocene has rapidly become a major thematic for students of international politics and one that, for many authors, fundamentally destabilises much of the traditional disciplinary concerns and assumptions. While there is growing interest in the Anthropocene in the discipline of International Relations (IR) and cognate areas of Global Politics, International Political Sociology, International Security, International Development and Environmental Politics, there is, as yet, no textbook that

D. Rothe (*) Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] F. Müller Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Chandler Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_1

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introduces undergraduate and postgraduate students to the range of thinking developing in this area and enables them to explore the ways in which it impacts upon their work. This edited collection provides an introduction to this emerging field, divided into a number of broad areas in which the Anthropocene has impacted thinking within the discipline and cognate disciplines of Political Science and Human Geography. While the 1990s and 2000s saw International Relations scholarship moving away from the ‘realism’ of inter-state relations towards the ‘liberal’ framings of global politics, the 2010s marked a shift away from universal, modernist or ‘linear’ understandings of power and agency. In a world, construed as more complex, contingent and relational and replete with crises and unpredicted ‘tipping points’—from inter-species transmission leading to global pandemics  like COVID-19 to feedback effects of melting polar ice  and  rising sea-­ levels—traditional assumptions are up-ended, and unintended consequences seem more relevant than ‘good intentions’. Concomitantly, the methodological focus has switched away from understanding the essence of entities and towards privileging the analysis of relations, networks and contexts. Key to this has been debates focused around climate change and global warming which explicitly cast policy problems not as external threats to the ‘good life’ (that requires securing) but as instead questioning the starting assumptions of separations between inside/outside, humanity/nature, solutions/problems and referents/threats. This elicits a very different way of thinking, the implications of which may not always be easy for students (and their lecturers) to grasp immediately. This book seeks to provide a much-needed basis for engaging students in this exciting and growing field, which will fundamentally influence their approach to the politics and problems of International Relations. This book contains relatively short (6500-word) chapters written in accessible ways and designed to clarify what is at stake in the chapter areas. Each explains the topic’s relevance to students of International Relations and related disciplines and why it can be seen to be particularly disruptive or elicit possibilities which readers may not have thought about before being introduced to the Anthropocene. The book is organised in four clearly distinct parts. There are separate introductions to each of the parts as a guide to the chapters and of particular use to readers new to the topic area. This introductory chapter is organised into three sections. The first section introduces the concept of the Anthropocene. In this edited collection, we refer to the Anthropocene as a condition that we are in rather than as an external set of problems which we are confronted with. Thus, the Anthropocene is not merely a question of new or more pressing problems, such as climate change and extreme weather events, but also a matter of the tools and understandings

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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. Here, we seek to briefly flag up the importance of thinking the Anthropocene in relation to the history of the discipline, which could be understood as moving from an ‘inter-­ national’ or state-centred focus during the Cold War to a global set of much broader concerns from the 1980s to the 2000s. This shift is then intensified by an increased interest in the Anthropocene, understood as a ‘planetary’ challenge to the liberal universal assumptions that followed the decline of ‘realist’ hegemony. 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.

The Anthropocene Condition The Anthropocene has been declared to be a new geological epoch, so-named because humanity—aka ‘anthropos’—has profoundly impacted our planetary conditions so much so that our species has become a geological force in its own right (Chakrabarty 2009). The importance of such a geological distinction has been advocated in order to bring home to people across the world the fact that climate change is not just something that we experience as a fact of ‘nature’ but is anthropogenic—that is, caused by the action of humans. In which case, humans have the power to change the ways in which we impact the world and how we experience our environment: things could be otherwise. Nature is not ‘natural’. The environment is not just something that we are in, like space and time, but something that we are responsible for shaping and conserving. The expected results of catastrophic climate change could be ameliorated, slowed or even reversed, depending upon the view taken of the latest statistics and of the capacities for scientific innovation, human ingenuity and political leadership. So far so good, interesting, hopefully, and, more than that, already making the Anthropocene a vital issue for scholars and practitioners of International Relations. However, the Anthropocene is not merely a new problem or threat that necessitates new thinking about international collaboration and policy action for environmental governance (Hickmann et  al. 2019). It is not just one more thing for the ‘to do’ list of international problem-solvers, lobbyists and activists. The Anthropocene is much more than a discussion of the impact of climate change and global warming on the prospects for sustainable

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development, regional security or international collaboration. We argue that the Anthropocene would be better understood, not as a problem which we are confronted with but rather as a condition which we are in. Contributors to this edited collection, while focusing on different themes and approaches, all share the view that, for scholars of International Relations, the Anthropocene era indeed changes everything. Understanding the Anthropocene as a condition—taking seriously the fact that nature is not ‘natural’ and that the environment is not a container for our human dramas but part and parcel of the performance—enables us to rethink and reconsider our assumptions of human exceptionalism and the problematic view that we could think of politics and international relations as somehow operating in a separate or distinct sphere from other agencies and concerns (Burke et al. 2016). Understood as a condition which we are in, rather than merely a set of strategic and tactical problems which we confront, the Anthropocene enables us to go beyond the traditional binaries of our disciplinary tradition. Consider, for example, the conventional understanding of security as the protection of a valued referent against external threats. The condition of the Anthropocene challenges such a notion of security. The Anthropocene as a condition problematises easy assumptions about ‘us’ as the security ‘referent’—as the object to be secured. The problematisation of ‘us’—the privileged gaze of the Western policymaking subject—opens up a substantial set of problems which deeply impact the disciplinary assumptions of International Relations. This is expressed, for example, in Bruno Latour’s concept of earthbound people, that is, an imaginary collective of people who consider themselves sensitive and responsive, due to being bound by and to the Earth (Latour 2017, 251–253). We are the problem as much as the solution, the ‘them’ as much as the ‘us’, the ‘enemy’ as much as the ‘friend’ (Hamilton 2017). On one hand, we are ‘insiders’ and on the other, we are ‘outsiders’ when it comes to the crucial questions which are posed to policy actors and academics in the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2018). We are ‘insiders’ when it comes to grasping the Anthropocene in terms of problems to be addressed or responded to, under the rubrics of climate change and environmental governance, that is, as questions of governing and policymaking (McDonald 2018; Dalby 2014). There are many ways of engaging with the Anthropocene as a materialisation of human impacts on the environment and as a causal factor in rising sea levels, ocean acidification, extreme weather events and mass species extinction. These tend to range from human-­ centred approaches of the ‘good Anthropocene’ (Asafu-Adjaye et  al. 2015) with geoengineering on a planetary scale to more human-humbling approaches which focus on adaptation and mitigation, often in terms of mobilising the

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widely distributed agency of resilient communities and societies (Chandler et al. 2020; Neyrat 2019; Rothe 2020). Yet, we are ‘outsiders’ when it comes to reflecting upon what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) argues are the ‘species’ effects of human activity on a planetary scale. When we are the problem rather than the problem-solvers, the Anthropocene raises the question of whether the Anthropocene is a product of human reason and awareness. For those who argue that the Anthropocene condition has not suddenly emerged, by accident or behind our backs, but is the consequence of the actions and agency of powerful states and interests, keen to dismiss the long history of environmental warnings and developmental alternatives on offer (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016), the discipline of International Relations appears to be merely the handmaiden of power and destructive elite interests. For many critical theorists of the Anthropocene, the condition created by climate change and global warming reveals that the modes of living and the knowledge practices of governance which IR scholarship sought to secure and sustain are part of the problem rather than the solution. This is quite a critique, however, there is also perhaps a more powerful alternative framing of the problem. If the Anthropocene, as a condition, did, in fact, arise behind the backs or consciousness of Western leaders and governments, then this suggests a much more fundamental problem at stake in our disciplinary assumptions—the problem of the modernist episteme itself. If natural processes can no longer be separated from the historical impact of human development and are no longer merely the backdrop to a purely human drama of domestic and international political contestation (Serres 1995), then the modernist understanding of the nature/culture divide, separating social and natural science, no longer holds. Nature can no longer be understood as operating on fixed or natural laws, while politics and culture can no longer be understood as operating in a separate sphere of autonomy and freedom (Dalby 2014). These assumptions, in both spheres, were central to modernist constructions of Enlightenment progress, which is now seen to no longer exist or to have always been problematic. As Michel Serres noted, the founding moments of political and international theory—the myth of the social contract, the Declaration of the Rights of Man—now have lost their standing: in constructing a world with merely human contests, they made the mistake of ‘leaving the world on the sidelines, an enormous collection of things reduced to the status of passive objects to be appropriated … Exclusively social, our contract is becoming poisonous for the perpetuation of the species’ (1995, 36). This brings into view an alternative ‘good Anthropocene’—not one that is focused on new levels of planetary power and control—but one which views

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the crisis of the modernist episteme as a vital catalyst for rethinking the disciplinary assumptions of International Relations and of the political and social thought of modernity in toto. We can see this in two disciplinary forms, the first, long highlighted by Bruno Latour, is the provocation of ‘We Have Never Been Modern’ (1993)—that rather than climate change being the harbinger of the end of modernity, contemporary problems merely reveal that modernity itself was a fictional narrative of limited use in confronting the contemporary problems of the world. Feminist, queer and decolonial thinkers have also seen the Anthropocene as a catalyst opening up the space for a range of alternative epistemologies and ontologies obscured by the hegemony of modernist thought (Grusin 2017). As Donna Haraway and others have noted, it is also the case that ‘we have never been Human’ (Haraway 2007; Gane 2006). For scholars of International Relations, the work of decolonial scholars such as Sylvia Wynter (2003, 1995) and Anibal Quijano (2000, 2007) importantly links the modernist ‘overrepresentation of Man’ as Eurocentric, white and elite, with the colonial explorations which created a global ‘world’ and the birth of the secular sciences of modernity (Jackson 2020).

International Relations The Anthropocene as a new epoch brings into question the traditional modes of conceptualising International Relations. We believe that it does this by forcing students and practitioners of IR to think through how the discipline works as a set of ideas and practices, in fact, as a way of understanding the nature of problems and policymaking per se. As a discipline, International Relations is particularly sensitive to the questioning of the Enlightenment problematic of human exceptionalism, rationalist problem-solving and liberal modernist imaginaries of progress, which have shaped the agendas of international peace, development and democracy. Beyond the dark days of the Cold War, when International Relations was essentially a strategic exercise of Realpolitik, the discipline has staked a lot on the basis that Enlightenment liberalism is the universal panacea to human ills and that irrational structures or agencies can be civilised or tamed to further the interests of humanity, both in national or global regimes of good governance and in the rule of law. It was, perhaps ironically, the transformations of the late 1980s and 1990s, in opening up the discipline, that have led to this vulnerability. In liberal modernity, the discipline of International Relations was for a long time, very much a niche area of study, concerned with the interaction of liberal

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modernist subjects forever resigned to the State of Nature or to living in Anarchy: this world was an impoverished one intellectually. The world in which, as English School theorist Martin Wight (1960) famously stated, ‘there is no international theory’. International Relations was defined by what was absent or lacking, rather than what was present. What social and political theorists have referred to as the ‘human/nature divide’ was at the heart of the discipline’s founding assumptions. The human/ nature divide—the idea that the world of Man was separate from the world of Nature—was what enabled the divide between the international and the domestic: the divide between international theory and politics. Politics was about a liberal world of progress, ethics, law and communities—international theory concerned another world; one in which these aspects were lacking. The world before the social contract: the world in which, according to sovereignty theorist Thomas Hobbes, it was a war of ‘all-against-all’, where ‘the life of man, was solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes [1651] 2017). International relations was argued to be analogous to the life of autonomous individuals in the State of Nature, but these autonomous individuals were states—banding together for self-defence (described in the realist problematics of ‘security dilemmas’, ‘the balance-of-power’ or of ‘free-rider’ problems) but unable to constitute political communities to escape the contingencies of ever-possible conflict (Suganami 1989). International Relations was a minor disciplinary area of study. Firstly, International Relations was understood as an elite or ‘top-down’ discipline, narrowly preoccupied with ‘high politics’—affairs of state—it was concerned with top-level policymaking, the actions and concerns of ‘sovereigns’ and ‘Princes’. Not only were the actors and agencies few but even these were reduced to abstractions (ignoring the huge inequalities of ongoing colonial legacies) to undifferentiated ‘states’ placed in rational choice games and dilemmas or seen to interact in systems like ‘billiard balls’, with their domestic make up and concerns ‘black boxed’ as irrelevant to the rules and laws of their systemic-­interaction. Secondly, the disciplinary concerns revolved around the seemingly timeless questions of war and peace, addressed through essentially Anglo-American disciplinary concerns with the protection and promotion of Western security and ‘national interests’. The key concerns were strategic, as Ken Booth notes, after Thomas Carlyle, International Relations was a dark and ‘dismal science’, ethno-centric and hide-bound in its concerns of nuclear strategic one-upmanship (with the gender and zero-sum connotations to the fore) (1994, 16). The ‘world’ of International Relations was very small, very white, very male and very elitist.

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Thus, as a sub-field of Political Science, International Relations was an impoverished discipline. Until the 1980s, there were very few undergraduate or postgraduate degrees in the area, International Relations was perhaps taken as an optional module. All this was to change as the discipline transitioned with what we can now perhaps understand as the early tremors that were to herald the disciplinary upheaval of the Anthropocene. Discussed under the label of globalisation, the emergence of unbounded, globally interconnected problems questioned the binary divides separating International Relations from Politics and then gradually other disciplinary divisions of the modern epoch which enabled the discipline to distinguish itself from others. At first, the seismic shifts were understood in purely internal or disciplinary ways— crudely understood as the rise of ‘liberalism’ at the expense of ‘realism’. Global problems required global solutions, or so it seemed, and thus multilateral cooperation and political integration through a kind of ‘forced cosmopolitanism’ (Beck 2004), political learning and normative transfer. The state-centric view of the international sphere began to wane as sociological, economic and political conceptions increasingly influenced thinking in the academy. New concerns and new actors appeared as International Relations began to overcome its banishment from the seemingly liberal and modern world. From the late 1980s and into the early 2000s, the explosion of interest in the discipline of International Relations has been closely linked with the erosion of the state-centred world and the imaginaries and possibilities of globalisation. From this perspective, the ‘liberalisation’ of the discipline with the forces of globalisation, meant the expansion to the world, beyond purely abstract or strategic inter-state concerns of war and peace. The context in which the discipline was situated was poorly grasped by those working within it. Ironically, rather than understanding the erosion of state-centred thinking and the international and domestic politics of left and right as problematising the disciplines’ founding assumptions, it was assumed that liberal modernist frameworks were in the ascendancy. In parallel to the rise of global governance concepts, International Relations was imagined to be in the process of becoming a field of political, social and ethical theory on a global scale. From the 1980s through to today, the discipline blossomed and diversified. Constructivist, poststructuralist, feminist and neo-Marxist approaches to global politics are now regularly featured in introductory IR textbooks, with approaches such as postcolonial studies, critical geography or political ecology also entering the discipline. While some see this as a ‘fragmentation’ of the discipline, others point to the merits of pluralist thought, resulting in multiple ‘campfires’ rather than ‘theory schools’ (Kristensen 2018). Today, International Relations commonly appears as a major in undergraduate degree

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programmes around the world and the numbers of conferences and journals have grown exponentially, reversing the discipline’s previously subordinate relation with political theory and politics. We, as editors of this textbook on International Relations in the Anthropocene, would not have written this Introduction and you the reader would not be reading it if the story of the rise and success of International Relations ended on this high note: the world of globalisation finally realising the dream of International Relations and overcoming its banishment to the sidelines. At last, so the dream would have it, liberal universal imaginaries of ethics, progress, politics and law are in the process of transforming the international sphere towards a global state writ large, making International Relations the home of political theory and progress and consigning narrow state-based politics to the past. From the vantage point of today, it is clear that this internal disciplinary understanding of the shift from state-centred approaches to the concerns of global politics—highlighted in debates on human rights, humanitarian intervention, sustainable development, cosmopolitan democracy, global governance, global civil society, liberal internationalism, climate change and global warming—as a shift from ‘realism’ to ‘liberalism’ was misleading and one-sided. Critiques of this dominant imaginary (and alternatives to it) remain siloed in competing disciplinary camps (Kristensen 2018). The long-­ praised diversification of the discipline has left it highly fragmented, which might help to explain why it has taken IR longer than other disciplines to open up to the new challenges and possibilities of the Anthropocene. Rather than there being a shift to the global—understood in liberal, modernist, universalist terms—we would suggest that the shift can be better grasped as one from a state-centred or ‘classical’ approach to International Relations to a ‘planetary’ one (Burke et al. 2016; Conway 2020; Rothe 2020; Müller 2019; Latour 2016). We want to suggest that a planetary approach differs in very important ways from the disciplinary assumptions of liberal modernist political theory that has informed International Relations up until now. From the perspective of the Anthropocene, understanding this shift as one from a state-centric to a global International Relations entirely misses the point—this would not be a shift at all. Keeping to the terminology of the national and the global constructs a framing that remains squarely within the liberal modernist framing of thought. This framing is stamped by the imaginary of the social contract and the assumption that both states and individuals are autonomous actors pursuing self-interest in a world in which humans are separate from nature. In such an imaginary, the world is conceived as a ‘one

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world world’ (Law 2015)—that is: a world which is amenable to universal understandings and capable of human direction and control. In this way, we suggest that globalisation and moves to think beyond the nation-state can be retrospectively seen as a transitional moment which problematised the assumptions of liberal modernity rather than realising them. This process did not actually scale up the territorial state to a global level. Rather, it deterritorialised the understanding of politics: territorial divides were increasingly less important as global flows of information enabled new imaginary communities of inter-connection (Scholte 2005). As Mark Usher (2019) notes, the International Relations’ focus on transborder flows and interconnections undermined the political binaries so central to the modernist imaginary: both those of inside and outside the territory of the state and those separating the formal sphere of politics and law from the informal relations of the economic and social sphere. States and ‘state interests’—the bread and butter of International Relations—were increasingly seen as constructs, simplifying reductions of a complex reality, rather than as materially important. The grounds of modernist governance were being removed, rather than constructed on ever higher levels of the global. The problems which globalisation was storing up for International Relations, or perhaps rehearsing, appeared particularly clearly in the work of global sociologists, such as Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1999), who theorised globalisation in terms of ‘risk society’ or a ‘runaway world’, exceeding the control, direction and understanding of modernist framings of power, agency and knowledge. Whereas International Relations could only grasp the global in new discourses of management and control—of the modern Leviathan writ large—in less hide-bound disciplines, modernity itself was already in question. For the sociologists of the global, the expansion of human action was responsible for removing the divide between humanity and nature. In other words, there was no ‘outside’ that could be known and discovered to enable the liberal imaginary of development and progress. Time and space were no longer considered as open containers for human expansion but were now ‘compressed’ making governance ‘recursive’ rather than ‘linear’. In simple terms, the human as agent was no longer the initiator of the process; the problems being addressed were in part caused by earlier human action so governance was recursive: following rather than initiating, adaptive rather than controlling. We were governing the unforeseen consequences of previous attempts to govern or to ‘problem-solve’. Governance was therefore working at the level of ‘effects’—contingent outcomes of previous actions— rather than at the level of ‘causes’—as if the world stood empty or passive before us. The implication of these studies was that globalisation was not a

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matter of scaling up the state from the domestic to the global level but rather a matter of needing to think beyond state-based understandings insofar as they were part of a much broader modern episteme. At stake in globalisation was therefore not just the scale of politics and the range of actors and concerns but the problem of knowledge itself (epistemology) and fundamental questions about the entities and relations of which the world consisted (ontology). The rise of scenario analysis, the focus on monitoring and mapping instruments and the turn towards predictive concepts such as ‘anticipatory governance’ illustrate the attempts to still maintain means of power and control, even under unclear circumstances. In International Relations, we tend to have an insular understanding of the rise and fall of the global imaginaries of the 1990s and early 2000s. The self-­ understanding within the discipline largely remains that of the ontology of the international and the global: that is the same problem on a different scale and the assumption that problems and problem-solving strategies are in essence scalable. If one seems more prominent, for example, if states act in contested ways people take out their crib-sheets on ‘realism’, and if there is international consensus on an issue, then the theory to-hand is ‘liberalism’. In which case, we swing from the ‘realism’ of the Cold War to the ‘liberalism’ of global concerns and ethics of human rights, then back to ‘realism’ for the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. The crisis of liberal modernity, already rehearsed in other disciplines, often seems to hardly impact us, through the fog and excitement of whatever the diplomatic disagreements or potential crises are in today’s headlines. The slowness of International Relations to react to the seismic shifts heralded by the Anthropocene has been highlighted by a number of authors in recent years (Harrington 2016; Mitchell 2017; Fagan 2017; Simangan 2020). In the 2020s, International Relations scholarship appears set to catch up with cognate disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in realising the importance of the Anthropocene. Globalisation could be integrated fairly easily into the discipline of International Relations and in fact, as described above, was welcomed as enlarging the disciplinary field and influence. The crisis in modernist thinking of governance and politics, which comes to the fore in the Anthropocene, cannot for much longer pass International Relations by. Up until now, the Anthropocene has often been denuded of its critical and radical potential (as globalisation was) and reduced to the security and national interest concerns of climate change and global warming and put in the box of global ‘issues’ that the world’s policymakers need to unite around. However, for growing numbers of scholars and policy advocates, it is no longer sustainable that the answer to the crises of the Anthropocene is more of the same approaches to knowledge and policy-practice that have brought us to the level of planetary destruction itself (Grove 2019; Latour 2018; Neyrat 2019;

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Connolly 2017; Mbembe 2019). If, as we believe, the Anthropocene does pose questions of the grounding assumptions of the discipline, in ways which make these increasingly difficult to ignore, then our frameworks need to take in the methodological and disciplinary concerns not just of the national and the global but also of the planetary.

 he Contents of the Book: New Agendas, New T Agencies and New Approaches in the Anthropocene The book is divided into four parts. Part I, ‘The Anthropocene: From the Global to the Planetary’, contains six chapters which highlight the importance of the Anthropocene as a challenge to traditional frameworks of thinking in the discipline of International Relations. Focusing on different themes—including postcolonial thought, nuclear weaponry, geoengineering technologies, cybernetic and whole-system thinking and Earth System Science—they draw attention to the distinction between international, global and planetary approaches to the discipline. Traditional IR approaches understand the world of international relations in ‘one world’ or global terms, which assume rationalist understandings—locating the human as a knowing and governing subject—these come under pressure in contemporary debates. In contrast, more contemporary approaches assume the importance of a shift towards planetary understandings, which problematise the world of rational actors and linear causality and move in directions that begin to emphasise difference, relational context and the plurality of ‘worlds’. This shift disrupts the modernist or ‘Holocene’ human/nature divide which assumes nature or the environment as a stable ‘backdrop’ to human conflicts and grants humans exceptional status, underestimating the extent to which we are entangled in relations and interdependencies with the non-human world. Part II contains five chapters which discuss the challenges of security in an entangled and interdependent world. In the Anthropocene, the importance of environmental security comes to the fore in ways which challenge the traditional categories and approaches of International Relations. Traditionally IR has assumed the existence of separate states in a stable world where human impacts on the natural world can simply be ignored. However, the point about the Anthropocene is precisely that human actions and impacts are dramatically altering how the world works and are doing so in potentially very dangerous ways for the future well-being of peoples and ecosystems across the planet. In terms of International Relations, this is especially complicated

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because the industrial production systems that are key to the military rivalries between states are mostly based on fossil fuels, and modern armed forces burn huge amounts of petroleum products. Environmental insecurity is being increased precisely because states are trying to extend their power using technologies that are changing how the earth system works. Rivalries among states and attempts by them to extend their power and influence, the traditional themes of geopolitics, are frequently thwarting efforts to grapple with climate change and contributing to the rapid elimination of many plant and animal species too. Part III, ‘Governance and Agency’, contains six chapters which discuss modes of Anthropocene governance and their policy tools and instruments with specific respect to questions of agency, democratic qualities, (the lack of ) normative foundations and strategies for re-politicisation. The Anthropocene can be read as a rallying cry for different modes of governance that aim to keep the Earth within its ‘safe operating space’. While approaches such as the ‘planetary boundaries’ concept are driven by a top-down logic, other approaches promote ever closer global/local interaction and resilient ‘self-­ governance’, which is facilitated by instruments like carbon budgeting or inter-communal policy learning. Another feature of Anthropocene governance is the reliance on emerging technologies, such as geoengineering, satellite Earth observation or the creation of environmental Big Data. Anthropocene governance, therefore, may go as far as to replace the political sphere by technological means. Critical voices highlight the built-in depoliticising and ‘post-­ social’ qualities of these approaches. They underline the need to integrate the socio-ecological dimension and to replace top-down governance by a multiplicity of localised approaches. The chapters also consider possibilities of alternative forms of Anthropocene governance—ones that open up to non-Western knowledges, reimagine democratic practice through creativity and experimentation, and allow for contestation as well as multiplicity. Part IV, the final section of the book, ‘Methods and Approaches: Beyond the Human/Nature Divide’, uses the Anthropocene as a starting point to rethink how we study international politics and discusses a range of methodologies which are important for exploring the Anthropocene condition. Contributors examine the need for alternative approaches that extend the classical role of the researcher towards one that is ‘situated’ in the respective research context and engages in the co-production of knowledge. In the Anthropocene, this may refer to ontologies, which take ‘the weather’, ‘the ocean’, ‘mining’ or ‘waste’ as viewpoints from which Anthropocene entanglements can be understood in a different way, moving beyond anthropocentric boundaries. The six chapters go beyond the established canon of quantitative and qualitative methods in the discipline, suggesting alternative

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ontologies, epistemologies, temporalities and research ethics. The authors elaborate on how art can help to make sense of the contemporary global political condition. They use storytelling as a technique of speculating about our planetary futures and use ethnographic approaches to follow the objects and artefacts that populate the Anthropocene. Using examples from their recent research, the authors illustrate how students and researchers can use these different approaches in their own work on international politics.

How to Use This Book This book provides a starting point for a broader disciplinary discussion of the challenges and opportunities which the Anthropocene enables for the discipline of International Relations. The book may be read in the traditional manner, from front to back, and to do so would enable the reader to follow through a line of argumentation from the background to the Anthropocene and more traditional concerns of International Relations, such as governance and security, towards an increasing focus on new agencies and new approaches. At the same time, each of the chapters in this volume can be approached as a stand-alone publication and understood without having read the previous parts of the book. This allows those more familiar with discussions about the Anthropocene in International Relations, or non-International Relations specialists, to dip in and to use this book as a handbook or teaching resource to focus on particular interests and concerns. Short introductions to all four of the major parts are provided to give an overview of the chapters and help to identify content of interest. By following the cross-references or using the index, readers can also create their own reading pathways through the book. Each chapter contains pedagogic features as aids to teaching and comprehension; these include a range of callout boxes with key concepts or paradigmatic examples, a summary of key points, some essential questions raised by each chapter, both as a recap and for future thinking, and a short list of key readings.

References Asafu-Adjaye, J. et al. 2015. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Available at: http://www. ecomodernism.org/manifesto-­english [accessed 29 May 2020]. Beck, U. 2004. Cosmopolitical Realism: On the Distinction Between Cosmopolitanism in Philosophy and the Social Sciences.  Global Networks 4(2): 131–156.

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Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage. Bonneuil, C. and Fressoz, J.-B. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso. Booth, K. 1994. Security and Self Reflections of a Fallen Realist. YCISS Occasional Paper Number 26, October. Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York University, Toronto. Available at: https://www.worldpulse.com/system/files/ post/1721/16244/post_document/d1dec1b98eff27dcc5916cd1a6f9652f/kenboothsecurityandselfreflectionsofafallenrealist.pdf [accessed 4 January 2021]. Burke, A., Fishel, S., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S. and Levine, D. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–523. Chakrabarty, D. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222. Chakrabarty, D. 2018. Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being Modern. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46(3): 259–282. Chandler, D., Grove, K. and Wakefield, S. (eds) 2020. Resilience in the Anthropocene: Governance after the End of the World. Abingdon: Routledge. Connolly, W. E. 2017. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Conway, P. 2020. On the Way to Planet Politics: From Disciplinary Demise to Cosmopolitical Coordination. International Relations 34(2): 157–179. Dalby, S. 2014. Environmental Geopolitics in the Twenty-first Century. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 39(1): 3–16. Fagan, M. 2017. Security in the Anthropocene: environment, ecology, escape. European Journal of International Relations 23(2): 292–314. Gane, N. 2006. When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done? Theory, Culture and Society 23(7–8): 135–158. Giddens, A. 1999. Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile. Grove, J. V. 2019. Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grusin, R. (ed.) 2017. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hamilton, S. 2017. Securing ourselves from ourselves? The paradox of “entanglement” in the Anthropocene. Crime, Law and Social Change 68: 579–595. Haraway, D. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Harrington, C. 2016. The Ends of the World: International Relations and the Anthropocene. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 478–498. Hickmann, T., Partzsch, L., Pattberg, P. and Weiland, S. (eds) 2019. The Anthropocene Debate and Political Science. Abingdon: Routledge. Hobbes, T. 2017. Leviathan. London: Penguin. Jackson, Z. I. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press. Kristensen, P. M. 2018. International Relations at the End: A Sociological Autopsy. International Studies Quarterly, 62(2): 245–259.

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Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 2016. Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a Possible Shift in the Definition of Sovereignty. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 305–320. Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Latour, B. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. Law, J. 2015. What’s Wrong with a One-World World?  Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 16(1): 126–139. McDonald, M. 2018. Climate Change and Security: Towards Ecological Security? International Theory 10(2): 153–180. Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, A. 2017. ‘Is IR going extinct?’ European Journal of International Relations 23(1): 3–25. Müller, F. 2019. International theory in the Anthropocene: moving beyond species, state and governance. In T. Hickmann, L. Partzsch, P. Pattberg and S. Weiland (eds) The Anthropocene Debate and Political Science. Abingdon: Routledge, 67–82. Neyrat, F. 2019. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. Fordham University Press. Quijano A. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South 1(3): 533–579. Quijano, A. 2007. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 168–178. Rothe, D. 2020. Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48(2): 143–164. Scholte, J. A. 2005. Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Serres, M. 1995. The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Simangan, D. 2020. Where is the Anthropocene? IR in a new Geological Epoch. International Affairs 96(1): 211–224. Suganami, H. 1989. The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. United Nations 2020. Human Development Report 2020, The next frontier: Human development and the Anthropocene. New  York: United Nations Development Programme. Usher, M. 2019. Territory Incognita. Progress in Human Geography (early view). Wight, M. 1960. Why is there no International Theory? International Relations 2(1): 35–48. Wynter, S. 1995. 1492: A New World View. In S.  Wynter, V.  L. Hyatt and R. Nettleford (eds) Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View. Smithsonian Institution Press, 5–57. Wynter, S. 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.

Part I The Anthropocene: From the Global to the Planetary

Introduction The first section of this book introduces the concept of the Anthropocene. The six chapters in this section highlight the importance of the Anthropocene as a challenge to traditional frameworks of thinking in the discipline of International Relations (IR). Focusing on different themes—including postcolonial thought, nuclear weaponry, geoengineering technologies, cybernetic and whole system thinking and Earth System Science—they draw attention to the distinction between international, global and planetary approaches to the discipline. Traditional IR approaches understand the world of international relations in ‘one world’ or global terms, which assume rationalist understandings—locating the human as a knowing and governing subject. These come under pressure in contemporary debates. In contrast, more contemporary approaches assume the importance of a shift towards planetary understandings, which problematize the world of rational actors and linear causality and move in directions that begin to emphasize difference, relational context and the plurality of ‘worlds’. This shift disrupts the modernist or ‘Holocene’ human/nature divide which assumes nature or the environment as a stable ‘backdrop’ to human conflicts and grants humans exceptional status, underestimating the extent to which we are entangled in relations and interdependencies with the non-human world. The section opens with Joana Castro Pereira’s chapter ‘Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene’. It identifies the intellectual and organizational limits that prevent IR from effectively addressing the planet’s new geological conditions and highlights the urgency of developing a

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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 the non-linearity and uncertainty of the Earth system’s processes, as well as the lack of true interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work, which prevents IR from capturing the highly complex essence of the planetary ecological crisis; nature-society dichotomy, a core dogma of the prevailing scholarship and politics that disregards the unbreakable link between the natural and social worlds, and the urgent need for transforming the current development paradigm; and anthropocentrism, which ignores the entanglement of human and non-human life, and the fact that harm caused to nature and other living beings does not happen in isolation, thus also negatively affecting, and risking, humanity’s well-being, security, and survival. The second chapter, ‘Encounters with Earth System Sciences: Planetary Boundaries and Hothouse Earth’ by Judith Nora Hardt, analyses how Earth System Science (ESS) relates to IR’s security logics and discusses how ESS might enable the development of a new conceptualization of security—one which embraces the socio-ecological entanglements and the new quality of existential threat in the Anthropocene. While taking on board the concerns of Earth System Science is vital to reshaping IR, the chapter analyses how a less human-centred and linear approach could be followed in both fields of research to grasp threats to security at a planetary scale. The analysis highlights the limits of security logics that deploy clearly defined fixed concepts and forwards the alternative approach of ‘security prism’ as a research tool. The chapter is structured in three sections: first, providing a description of the evolution, basic assumptions and central concepts of Earth System Science; second, analysing ESS security logics through the examination of recent research reports to draw out the key concepts and their interrelation; and third, advocating that the research communities that both engage ‘hard’ (political and social) sciences engage in common research, outlining some future challenges and pathways that arise at the nexus between ESS and IR approaches to security. ‘The Nuclear origins of the Anthropocene’, the next chapter, by Rens van Munster, argues that the planetary concerns at the forefront of the Anthropocene have deep roots in the Cold War nuclear arms race and the militarization of the planet. The prevention of nuclear war has been a central concern of the disciplines of IR and security studies; however, few theorists have analysed the intimate links between the military, war and the

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environment. 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. This chapter emphasizes the importance of history in enabling our 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, colonialism 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. Cheryl McEwan authors the fourth chapter in this section, ‘Decolonizing the Anthropocene discourse’, and discusses the importance of the Anthropocene for bringing decolonial approaches to the centre of IR and, at the same time, for the scaling up of these approaches to the planetary level. The chapter discusses the ways in which postcolonial theory problematizes the Eurocentrism and the epistemic violence created by framing the Anthropocene as a universalizing and silencing concept. The Anthropocene requires decolonizing theory and praxis to theorize human and non-human futures at the planetary scale. The invitation opened by Spivak’s notion of ‘planetarity’ provides one example of the search for critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in the Anthropocene. Planetarity, and what is seen as the collapse of the modernist universe, creates unique possibilities to decolonize international relations, to reflect again on who counts as human, to become attuned to the needs of non-humans and to engage with and learn from non-Western indigenous cosmologies. ‘Geoengineering: A New Arena of International Politics’, the fifth chapter, by Olaf Corry and Nikolaj Kornbech, introduces geoengineering as a new arena of international politics and explains why technical explorations of alternative climate strategies have not properly factored in the international. The chapter engages with how international politics might affect the potential development and deployment of geoengineering techniques and conversely how the emergence of these new techniques could change the international system itself, introducing new dilemmas and modes of interaction characteristic of the Anthropocene. The authors draw on high-profile areas of geoengineering research, to illustrate some of the issues that geoengineering poses for IR, both in theory and in practice. Known collectively as ‘geoengineering’ or

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‘climate engineering’, these interventions are conceived to act after excess emissions have accumulated into the atmosphere, rather than as tools to prevent or adapt to such emissions emerging. The international politics of geoengineering appears to share some of the problems of existing climate politics while also generating new ones. Not only are there potential unwanted and unknown environmental side effects, some technologies may also generate new international climate dilemmas. Given this Anthropocene dilemma, the authors suggest the standard rationalist approach to climate change in IR is not sufficient. The final chapter in this section, ‘Genealogies of the Anthropocene and How to Study Them’ by Delf Rothe and Ann-Kathrin Benner, takes a closer look at the conceptual roots of the Anthropocene. They focus upon the conditions in which contemporary forms of planetary understandings emerged, building upon and rearticulating earlier political rationalities and discourses. The chapter provides a set of genealogical tools for tracing the history of the Anthropocene concept, helping to explain how certain political imaginaries have found their way into new forms of Anthropocene governance. Just like conceptual history, genealogy is interested in how contemporary ideas and discourses evolved. However, it understands such a history of knowledge as a discontinuous, fractured and contradictory process. A genealogical approach holds that the production of discourses is inherently tied to forms of political power. The chapter starts with a summary of the debate on the origins and historical predecessors of the Anthropocene concept. The second section introduces Foucault’s concept of genealogy and outlines an analytical framework to operationalize it. The third section illustrates one way of using this approach in practice, by taking a closer look at the Whole Earth movement in the late 1960s. They highlight how a creative recombination of heterogeneous discourses and technologies, including information theory, cybernetics;, population biology and Californian counterculture, led to an entirely new understanding of the Earth and the ‘environment’ as a planetary system to be managed or ‘steered’.

2 Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene Joana Castro Pereira

Introduction As a discipline explicitly devoted to global security and survival, International Relations (IR) would be expected to place the planetary ecological crisis and the challenges presented by the Anthropocene at the centre of its research agenda. However, environmental issues remain at the margins of the discipline (Green and Hale 2017; Pereira 2017). IR’s ecological blindness is, nevertheless, unsurprising. The very nature of the crisis facing the Earth and the essence of the Anthropocene both disturb and question the discipline’s conventional structures and mainstream theories, which were constructed in and for a world very different from the one in which humanity currently lives. This introductory chapter discusses the multiple ways in which the emergence of the Anthropocene challenges IR’s dominant structures and practices as both a field of knowledge and institutional practice (Burke et al. 2016). It identifies the intellectual and organizational 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 1. state-centrism, which precludes it from building the necessary planetary picture of reality; J. C. Pereira (*) Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI-NOVA), Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_2

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2. positivist and rationalist paradigms, whose assumptions of a stable and predictable world hinder the field and policymakers’ capacity to recognize the non-linearity and uncertainty of the Earth system’s processes, as well as lack of true interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work, which prevents it from capturing the highly complex essence of the planetary ecological crisis; 3. nature-society dichotomy, a core dogma of the prevailing scholarship and politics that disregards the unbreakable link between the natural and social worlds, and the urgent need for transforming the current development paradigm; 4. and anthropocentrism, which ignores the entanglement of human and non-human life, and the fact that harm caused to nature and other living beings does not happen in isolation, thus also negatively affecting, and risking, humanity’s well-being, security, and survival. Each of the four main sections in which this chapter is divided suggests a condition for overcoming IR’s limitations and building a politics for the Earth. 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.

Moving Beyond the State, Embracing the Earth Despite efforts to move away from its mainstream framing, IR remains a state-centric field of knowledge that studies power politics in an anarchic and competitive international system divided by territorial borders, the main driver of which is the predominant narrow national interest and sovereign features of the main state powers within the system (Hutchings 2001; Nair 2011; Walker 1993). This is IR and our political institutions’ fundamental image of reality. As a result, IR’s established paradigms and research programmes continue to focus on—and tend to privilege—the study of inter-­ state relations and the forms of international organization allowed by states. In this Westphalian inter-state system, diplomatic practices in general, and international environmental agreements resulting from diplomatic bargaining in particular, favour and are designed to ensure national sovereignty and self-­ interest. However, in an epoch in which human impact on the Earth system is so significant that it is risking ecological collapse, building a planetary picture of reality—and acting according to that image—is a sine qua non

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condition for effectively responding to the severity of the challenges of the Anthropocene. The international system’s territorial structure does not match the ecological map of the Earth. Ecological problems are transboundary or global in nature (e.g., water pollution can cross a national frontier and climate change affects all countries in the world, crossing all borders). In other words, ecosystems do not coincide with the political boundaries drawn between states. There is an ecological link, binding different human communities and humanity as a whole, that demands a shift in focus from the international system to the ecosystem and the planet. This means that traditional understandings of state, citizen, and sovereignty are profoundly defied by the ecological context (Dyer 2017). These ideas are reinforced by the recognition of the anthropogenic subversion of the Earth system’s fundamental processes implicit in the Anthropocene concept, as it evidences that humanity’s existence transcends the international or even the global—humanity’s existence is also, and increasingly, planetary. Simply put, human actions and the globalization of economic, social, and political affairs are not only impacting the social world—that is, having repercussions that affect most societies and the lives of most people (e.g., the societal and individual consequences of a global financial crisis)— but also transforming the natural, physical framework that regulates the functioning of the Earth System’s major processes. Essentially, the human enterprise is now a fully coupled, interacting component of the Earth System itself. (…) A human-inclusive Earth System implies that global-­ scale social and economic processes are now becoming significant features in the functioning of the System, like atmospheric and oceanic circulation (Steffen et al. 2011, 740).

Accordingly, the focus can no longer be on inter-state relations or globalization processes and their global social impacts, but on “the collective human interaction with the biosphere” (Burke et al. 2016, 501). The necessary planetary picture of reality for effectively navigating the Anthropocene is one that recognizes humanity’s (and its global-scale economic and social processes) embeddedness in the Earth System. Nevertheless, obsessed with inter-state power politics, IR is failing to see the Anthropocene and its dangers. It is overlooking a new, massive type of power— humanity’s power to transform the Earth and dominant role in driving planetary ecological change as well as the dire consequences arising from it, which cannot be addressed merely by the use of state power, but whose mitigation or prevention demands a radical change in human values and behaviour, as shall be seen later in this chapter. In addition, IR’s state-centrism limits the

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discipline’s capacity to notice other actors influencing reality and to integrate them into its analyses. In the Anthropocene, humanity is transforming the planet, and the planet is interfering in human affairs, breaking down the barriers that (artificially) separate the human and natural realms (or society and nature). Human and natural forces are intertwined. In the world of the Anthropocene, events are then the result of the multiple, complex interactions between humans, non-humans, and biophysical elements (Harrington 2016). Therefore, agency is not restricted to states or even humans (Salter 2015). This fact is neglected both within the discipline and in international politics. Finally, responding to the ecological challenges of the Anthropocene requires moving to a broader notion of self-interest interconnected with the interest of humanity and the planet as a whole. Nevertheless, in a state-centric system built to preserve sovereignty and strict national interest, multilateral environmental regimes such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) suffer from several limitations to their effectiveness. For example, the UNFCCC’s decision-making process is based on consensus and reflects the lowest common denominator, allowing progress to be blocked by reluctant parties (Keohane and Oppenheimer 2016). Moreover, the regime still keeps the voices of key actors such as scientists, civil society environmental groups, and indigenous communities on the margins; fails to harmonize the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainable development; and does not represent ecosystems and non-human forms of life, which are, and will continue to be, deeply affected by climate change (Burke et al. 2016). It is thus not surprising that after three decades of multilateral climate negotiations, the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere has increased significantly, global temperatures have risen beyond projections, and climate change has worsened substantially. Building a planetary image of the world is a necessary step not only for capturing the essence of the Anthropocene, but also for developing a new system of environmental law and governance at all levels, capable of adequately responding to the gravity of the ecological crisis.

 ecognizing Instability, Uncertainty, R and Complexity As a discipline, IR emerged under the relatively stable environmental conditions of the Holocene. The environment is thus predominantly perceived as simply the background in which states pursue their interests, and human

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events and conflicts take place (Dalby 2014). In addition, in an attempt to make work in the field more robust and reliable, scholars have adopted models from the natural sciences and Newton’s assumption of a “closed system” penetrated IR. A closed system has no interaction with its external environment, which means that it is not affected by outside agents or elements. Consequently, it is possible to more easily isolate variables and observe causal consistencies (Wight 2015). It is a linear and predictable system. Accordingly, IR’s influential positivist and rationalist paradigms assume the existence of a static world outside that can be fully assimilated and anticipated. Analyses and explanations are generally rooted in the conviction that changes are gradual and phenomena follow linear trajectories (Kavalski 2015). However, the Anthropocene—unstable, uncertain, and dangerous—defies such premises. Moreover, IR’s agenda often reflects a reductionist understanding of the field’s appropriate ontologies, epistemologies, methods, and practices, despite attempts at expanding and renewing the discipline by opening IR to new modes of thinking and acting, and to other fields of knowledge (Pereira 2017). The complexity of the Anthropocene, nevertheless, makes the prevailing restrictive assumptions within the discipline obsolete. First, severe, unprecedented human-induced changes to the physical framework that regulates the stability and resilience of the Earth system are risking irreversible ecological damage and the safe environmental conditions upon which modern societies depend. The ecological limits within which humanity can safely operate are being pushed to the point where positive feedback effects (i.e., processes that reinforce an initial action) may be initiated and abrupt environmental changes triggered, threatening a cascade of effects that would potentially lead the Earth to a completely different, unsafe state (Rocha et  al. 2018; Steffen et  al. 2015, 2018) (see Box 2.1). Under the geological conditions of the Anthropocene, the prospect of an event capable of disrupting the entire international system cannot be disregarded. Nevertheless, scholars and decision-makers usually think in terms of high-probability but low impact and low-probability but high impact events, ignoring the fact that massive anthropogenic interference with the Earth system is significantly increasing the probability of a high impact event (Mabey et al. 2011). In fact, given the long-term interval between causes and results in the complex Earth system, there are certainly transformation processes already in progress that cannot be stopped and whose consequences may be severe. Unexpected change is intrinsic to the Earth’s new geological epoch. Second, the socio-ecological system is an open one where phenomena are the result of multiple causal structures, mechanisms, processes, and fields, and unpredictability is the norm (Reyers et  al. 2018). As had been seen, the

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Anthropocene is characterized by long-term effects, complex interactions, and uncertainties, making the future a highly unstable object of study. Within this context, imagining and preparing for multiple alternative scenarios, developing skills for dealing with different possible situations, and providing iterative responses are crucial. However, IR’s naïve assumption that phenomena are linear and predictable prevents it from assuming the existence of different possible futures, a necessary condition for truly informing human action in the Anthropocene (Pereira 2017). Developed under the same assumptions, our political-legal system—designed to address short-term, structured, direct cause and effect issues—is profoundly limited in its capacity to constructively deal with the challenges arising from the Earth’s new geological conditions. Simple solutions that produce immediate effects are no longer viable (Pereira and Viola 2018). Third, the Anthropocene, as a complex geological epoch in which human actions play a central role in subverting the Earth system’s major processes, evidences that the destinies of nature and humanity are inextricable—as seen above—and breaks with the divided discourses between the natural, social, and human sciences. In a world where socio-ecological interconnections are increasingly complex and intense, fragmented and isolated analyses fail to capture the essence of the crisis facing the planet and prevent scholars and decision-makers from keeping pace with the unprecedented challenges of our time. True interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work is a fundamental condition for effectively addressing the magnitude of contemporary transformations. Embracing the knowledge, theories, and methods from other disciplines and fields is, therefore, a step that IR needs to take if it is to overcome reductionist analyses and provide the necessary holistic picture of reality, without which any response to the crisis will be unsuccessful (Pereira and Freitas 2017). Only close collaboration among natural and social scientists and humanists will be able to deliver the adequate solutions for the collective problems that are risking life on Earth. Ensuring security and survival on a global scale demands an approach that combines the knowledge that Earth system science is producing about the planet and the ecological crisis with an ethical, ontological, and practical discourse capable of aligning our politics and policies, institutions, diplomacy, values, beliefs, and lifestyles with the planetary real (Burke et al. 2016), as shall be seen in the next subsections. Recognizing the instability, uncertainty, and complexity of the Anthropocene is thus essential if IR is to maintain its relevance.

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Box 2.1  Climate Tipping Points The Earth’s climate system is formed by large-scale components characterized by a threshold behaviour known as tipping elements. In other words, climate tipping elements are supra-regional scale constituents of the Earth’s climate system that may pass a tipping point (Lenton et al. 2008). Examples of tipping elements include the Greenland ice sheet, boreal forests, and the Amazon rainforest. A tipping point is the threshold at which a small perturbation in a system triggers abrupt changes driven by feedback effects that inevitably alter, often irreversibly, the state of the system (Milkoreit et al. 2018). Comparing them with the human body, tipping elements could be defined as vital organs that, in the absence of certain requirements (e.g., sufficient oxygen supply), radically alter or cease their normal function (PIK 2017), and begin to seriously affect other organs, which, in turn, further affects those which suffered a change in the first place, thus creating a “cascading collapse” leading to the destabilization or failure of the entire organism. In the case of large forest biomes that store massive amounts of carbon, such a process would imply increasing levels of forest degradation (tree mortality and biomass loss) as a result of climate change and/or deforestation activities leading to the release of carbon into the atmosphere and to the aggravation of global warming, which would, in turn, further affect the forest ecosystem, causing it to collapse and emit huge amounts of carbon that, by worsening climate change, would affect the functioning of other tipping elements of the system, generating additional positive feedback loops (Pereira and Viola 2019). In short, once tipped, these self-­ reinforcing processes can continue without additional forcing. Moving past tipping points could thus precipitate a global catastrophe. Considering the complex and uncertain nature of the system, it is nearly impossible to identify clearly where the tipping points stand. However, the latest science suggests that humanity may have already crossed the boundary below which the danger of destabilization of the planet’s climate is likely to remain low (Steffen et al. 2015)—which means that temperatures will most likely increase more sharply than predicted over the next decades. A rise of 2 °C in the global mean temperature could potentially trigger tipping points that would move the Earth towards a global climate catastrophe (Steffen et al. 2018). The planet has already warmed by 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels and the pledges that countries have made under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement thus far are highly insufficient to achieve the treaty’s aim of limiting global warming to “well below 2  °C”. Tipping points are, nevertheless, highly overlooked in political climate change debates (Pereira and Viola 2018).

 reaking with the Nature-Society Dichotomy B to Forge a New Development Paradigm As seen in the previous sections, the Anthropocene evidences that humanity and nature are intertwined. It thus breaks with a central belief of modernity— the nature-society dichotomy, or the idea that nature and society are separate

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domains of reality (Inoue 2018). It was discussed how this belief has prevented IR from recognizing agency beyond the state and the human, and from engaging in the necessary dialogue with other fields of knowledge. This section concentrates on a broader—and perhaps the most important—implication of this core dogma at the heart of prevailing scholarship and politics. In IR, the key concept of security was formulated assuming that threats are limited to outside agents—the “enemy” is the other and the other is “out there”—and the existence of an “external environment” (Mitchell 2014; McDonald 2018). Security thinking in IR is dominated by the idea of states securing or protecting their territories and populations from threats external to their own societies. However, by reshaping the planet, humans are “producing” the environment in which they live and the conditions of their existence; human actions are risking an ecological catastrophe, which means that the “enemy” is “here” in our production and consumption patterns, lifestyles, beliefs, and values (Cudworth and Hobden 2015; Dalby 2017). In other words, nature is not external to human politics, economy, and culture; the threat lies in the current human development paradigm, which recognizes only rhetorically the importance of ecological conservation. Accordingly, a fundamental change in the manner in which we think and act in relation to nature—that is, the reorienting of human activities—is an imperative condition for ensuring security and survival on a planetary scale. The ecological crisis is the result of human, political choices; mitigating its effects and averting its most catastrophic consequences is essentially a matter of making and implementing new political decisions guided by ethical, moral, and ontological principles aligned with the planetary real. Nevertheless, actions continue to focus on how to allow our unsustainable practices to grow (mainly through technological fixes), rather than on transforming our habits—perpetuating the logic that has given rise to the Anthropocene in the first place—in a dangerous attempt to sustain the unsustainable (see Box 2.2). The Anthropocene forces us to recognize the ecological limits to human freedom and the fact that our growth-dependent global market economy is not built to achieve ecological sustainability. It forces us to question capitalism’s pursuit of profit at any cost and logic of unlimited growth and accumulation—to which nature conservation is an impediment—and the associated short-term political interests. Although having provided unprecedented material development, the global market economy has done so with uneven benefits, oppression, and severe ecological damage. Challenging existing political, economic, and social structures—and ultimately human values—in light of social justice and ecological imperatives is thus critical. However, there seems to be little effort to think

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about alternatives among those who study global environmental politics (GEP); few GEP scholars adopt a critical political economy approach in their work (see Dauvergne and Clapp 2016). In addition, GEP scholars seem to be alienating themselves from policy, activist communities, and even other scholars by focusing on highly abstract, small debates that are often hardly understandable for those not directly involved in them, or outside academia, and fail to respond to real-world threats. In other words, concentrating almost exclusively on conceptual and theoretical accuracy, GEP scholars tend to disregard concrete experience on the ground and problem-solving research, which limits their capacity to have a practical impact on policy and activism. Finding a balance between the theoretical and practical dimensions of research is fundamental (Dauvergne and Clapp 2016; Erskine and Booth 2016; Sylvester 2016). GEP scholars’ disengagement with real people in the real world is very problematic, especially considering that the key agents of change are communities, (transnational) green social movements, non-governmental organizations, and individuals supporting change, and whose action is pivotal to mobilizing societal and political support for ecological action and fundamental changes in the prevailing human development paradigm. If it is to contribute meaningfully to mitigating the crisis, IR will have to abandon its belief in an external environment; overcome its excessively abstract character and connect with people; and recognize that we live in a world “in which the state is the handmaiden of a capitalism which sees nature as a mere material in wait of profit” (Burke et  al. 2016, 504), and human needs and interests are invariably placed above ecological balance and the survival of non-human forms of life. This latter idea will be developed in the next section.

Rejecting Anthropocentrism In IR, humans are the ultimate subjects of security; ecosystems and non-­ human forms of life are valued merely because of the services they provide to society and the fundamental role they play in satisfying human needs and interests and ensuring human well-being (Mitchell 2014). In addition, ecologies and non-human communities have no representation or rights in the existing global system of institutions. Simply put, scholarship and politics are deeply anthropocentric. As seen throughout this chapter, humanity and nature are entangled—life on Earth is the result of complex relationships and interdependencies between species. Nature is vulnerable to human violence and harm, but human beings

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Box 2.2  Water Shortages and the Focus on Supply In light of the existence of critical interactions between climate change, energy, food, and water, and between the functioning of ecosystems and the water cycle, as well as of the facts that only 2.5% of the planet’s water is fresh and less than 1% is easily accessible, and that projections indicate a growing global population reaching almost 10 billion people by 2050, water scarcity is one of the most challenging dimensions of the planetary ecological crisis (Pereira and Freitas 2017). According to the latest World Water Development Report: Water use has been increasing worldwide by about 1% per year since the 1980s, driven by a combination of population growth, socio-economic development and changing consumption patterns. Global water demand is expected to continue increasing at a similar rate until 2050, accounting for an increase of 20% to 30% above the current level of water use (…). Over 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress, and about 4 billion people experience severe water scarcity during at least one month of the year. Stress levels will continue to increase as demand for water grows and the effects of climate change intensify (WWAP 2019, 1). Trends of accelerating water consumption in a rapidly changing, unstable planet, with increasing chances of crossing tipping points, are highly problematic, especially considering that the source of all freshwater, that is, precipitation, is now unstable and unpredictable. Declines in groundwater and lake levels, and the extinction of wetlands, evidence the unsustainable nature of the usual uses of water systems. Humanity is significantly changing the global water cycle without appropriate knowledge of the system and its response to change (Vörösmarty et al. 2013). Humans have been altering the hydrological responses of various watersheds since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Industrial innovations have fuelled the belief that nature could be controlled and made orderly. The manifestations of the Anthropocene contradict such belief. Mitigating them and avoiding the worst scenarios demand radical and systemic changes to our economies and societies, and relationships between nature and humans. Nevertheless, policymakers in the water sector continue to address water shortage issues mostly through investments in water infrastructure and engineering and technical expertise to ensure the provision of water and related services. In short, solutions focus on the supply-side components of the water sector. Although a key part of ensuring global water security in the Anthropocene, technological fixes per se are highly insufficient to address the problem, as they reinforce unsustainable practices by allowing higher levels of water use and consumption. Without serious consideration of the demand-side components of the sector—our water use and consumption patterns and habits (e.g., the type of food we eat, whose production requires more or less water and land, and emits more or less greenhouse gas that will further affect the water cycle)—any policy response to the water crisis will be extremely limited in its capacity to adequately address the problem.

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are also vulnerable to the destruction of ecologies and non-human communities enabling humanity’s existence and well-being. To put it briefly, there are “shared ties of vulnerability” (Braidotti 2013) between humans and the plant and animal world. This means that harm inflicted to ecosystems and other living beings is an act against humanity’s security and the conditions that enable (human and non-human) life on the planet to thrive. Anthropocentric understandings of security, harm, and violence fail to recognize the enmeshed nature of the world. Within this framework, the Earth and its non-human beings are simply “resources to be used with no moral, intrinsic worth” (Fishel 2017, 53); even the superfluous needs of humans are prioritized in relation to the survival of non-human forms of life (Mitchell 2014). Current trends of plant and animal population decline and extinctions—which are threatening the functioning of ecosystems and services essential for sustaining humanity—are therefore unsurprising (see Box 2.3). Extinction is generally addressed as “a problem of scientific management and biopolitical control aimed at securing existing human lifestyles” (Burke et al. 2016, 517). A new ethical approach is needed. It is time to expand our ethical boundaries and consider the needs and rights of other living beings—which also depend on the continued function of ecosystems (McDonald 2018)—and to turn towards an “interspecies conception of politics” (Youatt 2014). We live in a more-than-human world. The Anthropocene urges us to recognize the intrinsic value of non-human forms of life as well as the need for a fair share of the Earth between humans and non-humans as fundamental conditions for preserving the multiple life forms that support healthy ecosystems. It urges us to break with, and move beyond, the anthropocentric world order that normalizes, enables, and encourages indifference towards and violence against non-human forms of life (Leep 2017). Valuing non-humans not only because they are valuable to us, but also, and fundamentally, because they exist, and their existence should be respected and preserved, ought to be an integral part of the quest for ecological security (Pereira 2017; Pereira and Freitas 2017). In this regard, IR could learn, for example, from indigenous ways of knowing and relating to nature, as many indigenous peoples reject possessing ownership or control over other living beings and are reluctant to use concepts such as “ecosystem services” and “natural resources”, which conflict with their non-­ anthropocentric and holistic view of the world (Inoue 2018). Awareness of entanglement, relationality, and mutual vulnerability implicit in the Anthropocene concept may help us extend compassion and care practices beyond the human (Harrington 2017). This is particularly important, considering that human beings tend to develop feelings of empathy mainly when a subject is described in greater detail and if that subject is given a face,

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and experience strong feelings about visible, recent events (Wiener 2016). The fact that nature is a vast and blurred subject, and that the impacts of ecological degradation are still, in most cases, not visible on a scale that motivates assertive public and political action, reinforces anthropocentric attitudes and practices. Nevertheless, by recognizing the significance and implications of the Anthropocene, it may be possible to overcome the cognitive biases that prevent humanity from caring about and acting to conserve the Earth and all species living on it (Pereira 2019). In sum, the dominant anthropocentric image of the world and international relations perpetuates the wrong beliefs, attitudes, and commitments that have led us here. A post-anthropocentric turn in both scholarship and politics is thus absolutely necessary. Box 2.3  The Sixth Mass Extinction Human activities are directly killing a growing number of plants and animals. Biodiversity loss has reached critical levels, risking the collapse of entire ecosystems; current extinction rates are unprecedented in human history (Laybourn-­ Langton et al. 2019). There is a “biological annihilation” underway; the planet is undergoing the sixth mass extinction event in its history (Ceballos et al. 2017). According to the latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-­ Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), nearly 1 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction. Biodiversity loss is the result of, in descending order, changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species (IPBES 2019). Although humanity represents only 0.01% of all life on Earth, it has caused the loss of roughly 83% of wild mammals, 80% of marine mammals, 50% of all plant species, and 15% of fish; 60% of all mammals on the planet are livestock and only 4% are wild animals (Bar-On et  al. 2018). These numbers clearly demonstrate humanity’s disproportionate impact on the planet. Three-quarters of the land-based environment and approximately two-thirds of the marine environment have been significantly altered by anthropogenic action; over a third of the planet’s land surface and roughly 75% of freshwater resources are allocated to crop or livestock consumption; one-third of marine fish stocks are being harvested at unsustainable levels; since 1980, plastic population has increased tenfold (IPBES 2019). The adverse effects of climate change on biodiversity are already visible—for example, severe heat waves are triggering events of mass bleaching on coral reefs. Limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 °C is a necessary condition for saving the majority of global species. However, pledges made by countries under the Paris Climate Agreement thus far would result in global warming of 3 °C by 2100. This scenario would potentially cause almost half of all insects, more than 40% of all plants and over one-quarter of all vertebrates to lose 50% of their habitat by the end of the century (Warren et  al. 2018). Political neglect is so severe that countries are failing to safeguard biodiversity even in protected areas and wildlife sanctuaries—nearly one-third of global protected areas have been seriously degraded by human activities, namely industrial agriculture, logging, mining, urbanization, and tourism (Jones et al. 2018).

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Conclusion In sum, the significance and implications of the Earth’s new geological conditions bring with them massive challenges, but also elicit new exciting possibilities for rewriting our disciplines, political institutions, societies, and values. New modes of thinking and acting are urgently needed. To keep pace with the ecological, political, economic, and social challenges presented by the Anthropocene, IR will have to abandon many of its mainstream core assumptions and reinvent itself. By identifying and discussing the main beliefs that prevent the field from contributing meaningfully to the issues of security and survival on a planetary scale, this chapter offered a possible introductory avenue for such reinvention and suggested a number of principles for building a politics that recognizes and matches the reality of the planet, and safeguards all species—human and non-human—living on it. Key Points 1. The focus on the state and inter-state power politics limits IR’s capacity to recognize humanity’s planetary existence; agency beyond the state and the human; and the need for a broader notion of self-interest interconnected with the interest of humanity and the planet as a whole. 2. The instability, uncertainty, and complexity of the Anthropocene require that IR scholars and decision-makers assume the growing possibility of an ecological catastrophe; prepare for different alternative futures; and engage in close collaboration with natural scientists and humanists. 3. The dangerous conditions of the Anthropocene are the result of our own unsustainable practices and ecologically destructive political decisions. Consequently, reorienting human activities as well as making and implementing new policies aligned with the reality of the Earth are fundamental conditions for ensuring security and survival on a planetary scale. 4. Humans and non-humans are entangled and mutually vulnerable. Recognizing this fact may help us expand our ethical boundaries beyond the human and accept the intrinsic value of non-human forms of life, thus breaking with the anthropocentric world order.

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Key Questions 1 . Why is IR’s state-centrism problematic in the context of the Anthropocene? 2. In what ways does the Anthropocene defy IR’s positivist and rationalist paradigms? 3. Why should climate tipping points be included in academic and political debates on climate change? 4. Are the nature-society dichotomy and anthropocentrism the root causes of the planetary ecological crisis? Why?

Further Reading Biermann, F. 2014. Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Connolly, W. 2017. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. Durham: Duke University Press. Curry, P. 2017. Ecological Ethics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Dalby, S. 2020. Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Dryzek, J. S. and Pickering, J. 2019. The Politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckersley, R. 1992. Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward and Ecocentric Approach. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kolbert, E. 2014. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Pereira, J.  C. and  Saramago, A. (eds) 2020. Non-Human Nature in World Politics: Theory and Practice. Cham: Springer.

References Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R. and Milo, R. 2018. The Biomass Distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115(25): 6506–6511. Braidotti, R. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Burke, A., Fishel, S., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S. and Levine, D. J. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–523. Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P.  R. and  Dirzo, R. 2017. Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Signaled by Vertebrate Population Losses and Declines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114(30): E6089–E6096.

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Reyers, B., Folke, C., Moore, M.-L., Biggs, R. and Galaz, V. 2018. Socio-Ecological Systems Insights for Navigating the Dynamics of the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 43: 267–289. Rocha, J. C., Peterson, G., Bodin, O. and Levin, S. 2018. Cascading Regime Shifts Within and Across Scales. Science 362(6421): 1379–1383. Salter, M.  B. (ed.). 2015. Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Steffen, W., Persson, A., Deutsch, L., Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Richardson, K., Crumley, C., Crutzen, P., Folke, C., Gordon, L., Molina, M., Ramanathan, V., Rockström, J., Scheffer, M., Schellnhuber, H.  J. and Svedin, U. 2011. The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship. Ambio 40(7): 739–761. Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennet, E. M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S. R., de Vries, W., de Wit, C. A., Folke, C., Gerten, D., Heinke, J., Mace, G. M., Persson, L. M., Ramanathan, V., Reyers, B. and Sörlin, S. 2015. Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Climate. Science 347(6223): 1259855. Steffen, W., Rockström, J., Richardson, K., Lenton, T. M., Folke, C., Liverman, D., Summerhayes, C. P., Barnosky, A. D., Cornell, S. E., Crucifix, M., Donges, J. F., Fetzer, I., Lade, S. J., Scheffer, M., Winkelmann, R. and Schellnhuber, H. J. 2018. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115(33): 8252–8259. Sylvester, C. 2016. Must IR Remain Abstract in the Future? In K. Booth and Erskine, T. (eds) International Relations Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press, 258–262. Vörösmarty, C., Pahl-Wostl, C. and Bhaduri, A. 2013. Water in the Anthropocene: Perspectives for Global Sustainability. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 5(6): 535–538. Walker, R.  B. J. 1993. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Warren, R., Price, J., Graham, E., Forstenhaeusler, N. and Van Der Wal, J. 2018. The Projected Effect on Insects, Vertebrates, and Plants of Limiting Global Warming to 1.5 °C Rather than 2 °C. Science 360(6390): 791–795. Wiener, J. B. 2016. The Tragedy of the Uncommons: On the Politics of Apocalypse. Global Policy 7(S1): 67–80. Wight, C. 2015. Theorizing International Relations: Emergence, Organized Complexity, and Integrative Pluralism. In E. Kavalski (ed.) World Politics at the Edge of Chaos: Reflections on Complexity and Global Life. New York: University of New York Press, Kindle Edition. WWAP (UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme). 2019. The United Nations World Water Development Report 2019: Leaving No One Behind. Paris: UNESCO. Youatt, R. 2014. Interspecies Relations, International Relations: Rethinking Anthropocentric Politics. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(1): 207–223.

3 Encounters between Security and Earth System Sciences: Planetary Boundaries and Hothouse Earth Judith Nora Hardt

Introduction The acknowledgement of the Anthropocene as a new geological era challenges our basic understanding of the meaning of security in socio-ecological terms. This chapter engages in the search for a security definition that breaks with International Relation’s (IR’s) traditional and limited focus on nation states, maintenance of a human-nature separation, and linear thinking. As a consequence, I analyse 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 analysing central concepts, outlined by ESS, such as “Planetary Boundaries” and “Hothouse Earth”, I will show how the key values and assumptions regarding security, existential threat, and emergency response can enable new approaches in the field of 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. I conclude the chapter with the proposition of some common research directions that could

J. N. Hardt (*) Centre Marc Bloch, Franco-German Centre for Social Science Research, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_3

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enable ESS, IR, and Security Studies scholars to jointly engage in an effort to address the so-called hard sciences as well as hard or Realpolitik of IR in the Anthropocene. Security is a key concern for the Realpolitik at the heart of traditional approaches in International Relations (IR), being tightly imbricated within power politics, violence, peace, and conflict. Guided by the ultimate goal of securing survival against existential threats, security policy is often articulated as above the cut and thrust of domestic political contestations. This means that security policy often operates independently from formal constraints, sometimes necessitating urgent responses to secure what are seen as fundamental or “hard” state interests. In traditional IR approaches such as Realist Theory, the basic core value is the sovereign and territorially bound nation state, which needs to be defended against military threats from other states (see also Box 3.2). Along with Realist Theory, most traditional IR approaches are criticized for being based on so-called Holocene thinking (Cudworth and Hobden 2011; Burke et al. 2016). The “Holocene” refers to the last 11,700 years of the Earth’s history—the time since the end of the last major glacial epoch, or “ice age”. Thus, “Holocene thinking” assumes that the Earth’s environment is a stable background for human activity and ignores the broader contexts and complex interrelation of humans with the Earth system. In contrast, stands the new, more relationally entangled context and perspective of the world, of the geological era, called the Anthropocene. The associated “Anthropocene thinking” (Cudworth and Hobden 2011) challenges the traditional meaning, politics, actors, and measures of security in socio-ecological terms, because the Anthropocene holds that humans have acquired the power of a global geophysical force of nature (Crutzen 2002). This new geological era, with its emphasis upon an inherently entangled and complex human-nature relationship, is said to constitute a new set of existential threats to human survival. In the analysis of the new approaches to security, facilitated by the new context and vision of the world of the Anthropocene, this chapter turns towards the research community of the Earth System Sciences (ESS); a loose aggregation of natural scientists, widely recognized as presenting the scientific underpinning of the Anthropocene (Schellnhuber et  al. 2004) itself. The highly referenced research results of ESS aim to describe and highlight the endangered functioning of the Earth system caused directly or indirectly by intertwinement with human activity. The ESS community presents a fundamentally important source of information and a new basis for the development of a conception of international governance and security which supposedly breaks with the traditions and limited focus or IR upon nation

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states, human-nature separation, and linear thinking. ESS and IR, especially fields such as Security Studies, have had little exchange of concepts and ideas. While IR and security scholars increasingly refer to the Anthropocene (see e.g. Harrington and Shearing 2017), ESS research has much more rarely reached out to the existing body of knowledge and research results of IR and Security Studies. This chapter analyses how Earth System Science relates to security logics and topics and whether ESS enables the development of a new meaning and conceptualization of security that embraces the socio-ecological entanglement of humans with nature and the new quality of existential threat. In order to undertake this analysis, it differentiates between security logics that use a clearly defined fixed concept of security and the alternative “security prism” approach. The chapter is structured in three sections. The first section describes the evolution, basic assumptions, and central concepts of Earth System Science. The second section analyses Earth System Science security logics through the examination of the concepts and the interrelations that emerge in recent research reports. The third section highlights that the until now separated research communities, that both engage “hard” (political and social) sciences, cannot continue to avoid engaging in common research and outlines some future challenges and pathways that arise at the nexus between ESS and IR approaches to security. There follows a short conclusion.

 rring on the Side of Danger: Trajectories E of the Earth System (Science) Earth System Science is dedicated to developing a unified understanding of how “Earth operates as a single, complex, adaptive system, driven by the diverse interactions between energy, matter and organisms” (Steffen et  al. 2020, 54). The acknowledgement of the need to address these questions in an international and interdisciplinary manner has grown over recent decades and is often inspired by a return to the earlier approach of the German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1767–1835). The scientific observation—especially since the 1960s—of irreversible, deteriorating, and dangerous consequences for the environment from human activity have led to the development of new approaches, culminating, in 2001, in the establishment of the Earth System Science Partnership. Box 3.1 shows the broad membership of the ESS community, important concepts, publications, and the several forms of institutionalization, among others the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

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Box 3.1  Evolution of Earth System Sciences. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the Basis of Steffen et al. (2020, 55) Phases towards the Earth System Sciences 1780–1990s

Initiation

2000–2020

Establishment

Organizations

Publications/Concepts

World Climate Research Programme, 1980–present day International GeosphereProgramme, 1986–2015 IPCC, 1988–present day International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, 1996–2004 DIVERSITAS (international programme on biodiversity science), 1991–2014 Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP), 2001–2012 Future Earth, 2012– present day

Humboldtian science (1767–1835) The Biosphere (Vernadsky 1926) Silent Spring (Carson 1962) Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) “Gaia hypothesis” (Lovelock 1972) Bretherton diagram (National Research Council 1986) Brundtland Commission Report (1987) 2nd Copernican Revolution (Schellnhuber 1999) Vostok ice core record (Petit et al. 1999)

Amsterdam declaration on Earth System Science (2001) “Planetary Boundaries” (Rockström et al. 2009) “Hothouse Earth” (Steffen et al. 2018)

Arising from the different ESS research communities, numerous reports and research findings, and the interdisciplinary work across the natural sciences, three basic assumptions emerged which have given shape and coherence to the approach taken across the field of Earth System Science. The first is the presumption of a “dynamic, co-evolutionary relationship between nature and human civilization at the planetary scale” (Steffen et al. 2020, 57). The second central presumption is that the changes observed in the Earth system processes are unprecedented and that Earth operates in a non-analogous state. A third key assumption is that human pressure will result in irreversible shifts in Earth system functioning leading to potential catastrophic consequences for human well-being. Therefore, responses that work towards an “ethical

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f­ramework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth system management are urgently needed” (Amsterdam declaration 2001). These basic assumptions are reflected in the following three central concepts of EES: The first is the Anthropocene, which has also become one of the most influential concepts for the Humanities (Steffen et al. 2020, 59) and has already been briefly described in the introduction of this chapter. The second central concept is that of the tipping point. The key assumption is that the basic functioning of the Earth system does not rely on linear and seemingly stable processes. Instead, these processes are maintained in a certain balance as long as they operate within a range or threshold. Once this (often unknown) threshold—the so-called tipping point—is passed, a sudden and irreversible shift of system properties occurs, which is furthermore reinforced by feedback mechanisms. In other words, these tipping points are described as points of no return as they lead to drastically changed new circumstances, players, characteristics, and processes (Lenton et al. 2019). The third central concept is the Planetary Boundaries. It describes the Earth system on the basis of nine systemic control variables—biodiversity, climate change, and bio-geochemical cycles, among others—that each are described as being threatened and pushed to the thresholds by human activity (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015). On the basis of respecting these thresholds via a determined scientific data set, the Planetary Boundaries hold a safe operating space for humanity at its core (Rockström et al. 2009, 2). The safe operating space, therefore, contains a framework for global stewardship in order to secure human well-being without severe and catastrophic impacts (Steffen et al. 2020). The Planetary Boundaries simultaneously describe a number of key thresholds, several of which are already exceeded, and outline the threatening possible outcomes, with the broad recommendation to respond to this threat by steering the Earth system back into a “Holocene-like state” based on scientific understanding (Steffen et al. 2015). The latest research results informed by the central ESS concepts contextualize planet Earth as being located on a dangerous trajectory towards passing tipping points. The Hothouse Earth (Steffen et  al. 2018) describes how the further temperature increase caused by human emissions constantly pushes Earth towards crossing planetary thresholds. If the trajectory of the Earth is not corrected in time towards a Stabilized Earth by significantly reducing

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emissions, later attempts to redirect or influence the trajectory will fail. Once Earth is trapped in an inescapable trajectory of Hothouse Earth, intrinsic feedback in complex regional processes will lead to a global cascade of tipping points that will affect the entire planet (Lenton et al. 2019, 595). These processes will cause “serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economics” (Steffen et al. 2018, 1), and lead to a new, less habitable, “ʻhothouseʼ climate state” (Lenton et al. 2019, 594). Lenton et al. (2019, 595) further describe in their article titled “Climate tipping points—too risky to bet against” that “we might already have lost control of whether tipping happens. A saving grace is that the rate at which damage accumulates from tipping—and hence the risk posed—could still be under our control to some extent. The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action—not just words— must reflect this.” This drastic call for urgent and effective action in the face of climate emergency and highly likely unforeseeable catastrophic consequences figures in many ESS publications almost as an additional characteristic feature (see e.g. Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2018).

 SS Encounters with Security Categories E and Analysis Earth System Science covers entirely different fields, agents, tools, and methods of analysis to International Relations and Security Studies. In the following, I will approach ESS research results via the analytical lens of the “security prism” and other security logics and categories to seek to draw out a conceptualization of security that holds the entangled human-nature relation, the Earth System, and the Anthropocene at its core. In the discipline of International Relations, security is a contested concept and Security Studies concerns a broad variety of concepts, approaches, and methods. Traditional security studies, on the one hand, maintain the existence of one fixed security concept focused on the state, territory, military, violence, and power. Thus, state security lies at the core of a realist worldview, often referred to as a “hard security concept”. Two other important fixed concepts should figure in every Security textbook. Collective security is based on the liberal worldview and depends on a more positive interpretation of the nature of humans, that is their being motivated and capable of establishing cooperation, peace, and stability. Human security is focused on the individual and vulnerable societies and groups and consists of seven interrelated dimensions (economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community,

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political) of security (UNDP 1994). As opposed to the other two, human security carries the idealist aspiration to secure basic human needs (Barnett and Adger 2007) and is based on the pillars of freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom from ecological hazards. It is often referred to as “soft security”. All of the fixed security concepts claim universal validity by explaining the behaviour of certain actors and the several structures and systems, and at the same time providing programmatic guidance for politics. On the other hand, scholars in Critical Security Studies have proposed to understand security as an analytical category rather than as a fixed concept. Such scholars hold that perspectives on security are not universally fixed but depend, among other things, on the actors, geography, and political context and can change over time (Buzan et al. 1998; Hardt 2018, 15). They forward that the conception of the “securitization process”—through which certain power holders elevate and thereby transform an issue from the level of normal politics to an issue of security—is important. Successful securitization is defined by Buzan et al. (1998, 26) as enabling the construction of “existential threats, emergency action, and effects on inter-unit relations by breaking free of rules”. In other words, this approach opens up the possibility to actually detect and analyse different interpretations and visions of security. Thus, the security prism (see Box 3.2) enables us to access the different security logics and concepts that constitute and shape the understandings of different actors in different contexts (Buzan et  al. 1998). In Box 3.2, the security prism is listed next to the dominant three fixed security concepts in the following table. The three dominant fixed security concepts have been criticized in the context of the Anthropocene for not acknowledging the Earth-boundness and the scientific research descriptions of possible risks/threats/deterioration of the Earth system and for being restricted to Holocene Security Studies (see e.g. Harrington and Shearing 2017; Hardt 2018). In the following, I will describe some of the several interconnected and overlapping topics that figure across the multiple publications of the ESS community, which resonate with security logics. Box 3.3 shows that several reports from the ESS community include central security categories, such as conflict, violence, and international cooperation. These reports describe that, for example, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification are having direct or indirect impacts on security questions and vice versa. For instance, conflict is pictured either as a social consequence of detrimental environmental processes or as having a negative influence on the environment. In these Earth System Science reports, along with socio-environmental phenomena, such as resource scarcity, which have been previously considered within IR and Security Studies (see e.g. Homer-Dixon 1994), there is the

State

Security for whom?

International system of states International peace and stability

Collective security

Human security

Research question

Primarily people and the Is there a new individual conceptualization Safety, human rights, freedom, of security that Security of what values? Territorial integrity, and opportunity for the national holds the individual and collective sovereignty, stability entangled humanDomestic governments, and Security from whom? Other states Rogue or failing states nature relation, the other actors and and criminal or terrorist Earth System, and policymakers failing to non-state actors the Anthropocene safeguard basic needs at its core? Direct and indirect threats Threat to international Security from what Direct or indirect from the state, as well as system of states and to threats? threats from other state, non-state, and global peace states actors, physical violence, underdevelopment and poverty, environmental hazards Security by whom? Primarily by the State, non-state actors, civil State, non-­state actors, military and defence civil society, NGOs (local, society, NGOs (local, national, forces of the state and international), the UN, national, and international/multilateral international), organizations, and concerted multilateralism and the action UN, international organizations, and concerted action

National security

Security prism

Fixed security concepts

Box 3.2  The Security Prism. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the Basis of Abdus Sabur (2009, 1006) and Hardt (2018, 89–108)

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Box 3.3  ESS Reports: References to (Classical) Security Concepts, Categories, and Discourse. Source: Elaborated by the Author

Sources IPCC

(1997, 12)

(2014, 20)

(2018, 31)

(2019, 18)

Rockström et al. (2009, 21)

Steffen et al. (2018, 5)

Lenton et al. (2019, 595)

References to (classical) security concepts, categories, and discourse “Increasing environmental deterioration (e.g., changes in water availability, losses of agricultural lands and flooding of coastal, riverine and flatland areas) arising from climate variability, climate change and land-use practices would aggravate socio-economic and health problems, encourage migration of rural and coastal populations, and deepen national and international conflicts.” “Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts in the form of civil war and inter-group violence by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks (medium confidence).” “International cooperation is a critical enabler for developing countries and vulnerable regions to strengthen their action for the implementation of 1.5°C-consistent climate responses, including through enhancing access to finance and technology and enhancing domestic capacities, taking into account national and local circumstances and needs (high confidence).” “Changes in climate can amplify environmentally induced migration both within countries and across borders (medium confidence), reflecting multiple drivers of mobility and available adaptation measures (high confidence). Extreme weather and climate or slow-onset events may lead to increased displacement, disrupted food chains, threatened livelihoods (high confidence), and contribute to exacerbated stresses for conflict (medium confidence).” “Humanity thus needs to become an active steward of all planetary boundaries […] in order to avoid risk of disastrous long-term social and environmental disruption.” “Risks to health, economies, political stability, societal decline, collapses, migrations/resettlements, reorganisations, and cultural changes—and the ‘habitability of the planet for humans’ are related to temperature.” “To err on the side of danger is not a responsible option. If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization.”

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elucidation of new categories and qualities of existential security threats that further open up questions of International Security. These are, for example, “tipping cascades”, which hold “abrupt, nonlinear responses (conversion of Amazon to Savanna)” (Steffen et al. 2018, 4), limited remaining CO2 emissions budgets and an “existential threat to civilization” (Lenton et al. 2019, 595). Some of the ESS publications set security policy in relation to these new existential threats. Hence, ESS sees peace and cooperation (classical core security topics) and international governance as central to establishing “Earth Stewardship”, thereby responding to the planetary emergency (see e.g. Steffen et al. 2018, 31). Furthermore, the central “threat-response logic” of security can be recognized in several ESS publications. For example, the concepts of “Planetary Boundaries” and the “Hothouse Earth” describe the dimensions of the status quo, threat, and solution (Hardt 2019). At the same time, urgent action— Earth Stewardship and the reduction of emissions—is described as a response to these fundamental existential threats (see also Lenton et  al. 2019, 595). This is how, it can be argued, Earth System Science securitizes and elevates Earth  Stewardship to a central aspect of security policy, as it needs to be immediately put into effect. Even though references to securitization and the militarization of the topic are absent, the logic of the ESS discourse complies with a securitization logic. In the next analytical step, the application of the security prism to the key Earth System Science reports highlights that ESS represents a consistent conceptualization of security (Hardt 2018, 2019). In other terms, Earth System Science is underpinned by a novel conceptualization of security that carries an entirely different meaning than the other fixed security concepts (see Box 3.4). Within this newly defined security concept, the Earth system lies at the very core of security. The “safe operating space” exists in scientifically measurable parameters and can be understood as a new type of fixed security concept with an entirely different meaning of security that emphasizes the human-nature intertwinement and the need for fundamental change. The concept of threat remains and is constituted by the human-induced trajectory towards a Hothouse Earth and the loss of human “influence or control” (Steffen et al. 2018, 4). The emergency response consists in steering the “Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabiliz[ing] it in a habitable interglacial-like state” (Steffen et al. 2018, 1). Instead of using weapons or development aid, here the security measures entail scientifically guided decision-making. Most of the policy recommendations of ESS contain deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions; protection, enhancement, or the creation of biosphere carbon sinks; efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, possibly solar radiation management; and adaptation to unavoidable impacts of the warming already

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Box 3.4  Earth System Security. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the Basis of Hardt (2018, 89–108, 2019), Lenton et al. (2019), Steffen et al. (2015, 2020), and Rockström et al. (2009) Fixed security concept Security prism

Earth System Science Security

Security for whom? Security of what values? Security from whom? Security from what threats? Security by whom?

The Earth System/the planetary biosphere Stability and sustainability of vital system processes Direct and indirect consequences of human activity Changes to the status quo and the biophysical and geophysical environments Earth System Science, Climate Science, and other sciences, states, international organizations, and collective action

occurring and modifying the Earth’s energy balance by, for example, building “much more effective stewardship of the marine and terrestrial biospheres in general” (Steffen et al. 2018, 4–5). I will not go into more detail here (see Hardt 2018, 2019) but point out the next logical step, now that it has become apparent that the research communities and fields of ESS and Security Studies, seemingly so different, depend on interrelationships so fundamental that these cannot be further ignored.

Anthropocene “Hard” Sciences and Politics As Earth System Science and IR and Security Studies come close to naturally speaking to each other or covering common ground, I will argue that they would highly benefit from and necessitate further joint research. Here I suggest some research themes on which communities from ESS, IR, and Security Studies could focus in order to overcome several shortcomings and engage in the joint effort to address the so-called “hard” sciences and politics of/in the Anthropocene.

Towards the Existential As the legitimately recognized scientific knowledge basis for the description of the Earth system, ESS underpins all other disciplines and sciences and therefore enjoys the status of a “hard science”. On the other hand, international security resides at the core of our conception of the world and has been

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ordering, determining, and dominating politics from the individual to the international level in the most profound ways (Hardt 2018, 1). IR scholars analyse the existential value to secure the responses, the actors, and processes and values implicated in International Relations while ESS analyses the conditions and measures to secure human well-being against catastrophic and existential threats in a human-nature entangled Earth system. The description of the Earth system security logic (see Box 3.4), therefore, challenges the (Holocene) IR and Security Studies to re-consider the definitions, qualities, and measures of “existential threat” and the (Holocene) existential categories of violence, crisis, collapse, and power and on how to interconnect them with tipping elements and the Planetary Boundaries. In the search for how to bring together the “hard” political sciences of ESS and the Realpolitik of IR and Security Studies, which both make the world go around, I suggest to engage with the central underpinnings that both share, the “threat-response-logic” (Hardt 2019). Another central focus for both communities could lie in their common concerns: the fear of crisis, violence, human extinction, and finality that constantly haunts humanity. Centring the research on the condition of humankind and on the key values and fears in human-nature entangled worlds and opening up explicitly the philosophical questions, debates, and challenges of futures, securities, apocalyptic narratives, and of the existential would not only be a necessary step but would also present a great chance to better understand ourselves in and as part of the Anthropocene (Hardt 2019).

Towards the World of Human-Nature Intertwinement IR and Security Studies are dedicated to undertaking “empirical and systematic analysis of international society, structures, power distribution and actors, which, in their totality, shape the contemporary world” (Hardt 2018, 5). In line with the central theme of this textbook collection, I argue that the “hard politics” of IR—that is security, war, peace, and power—cannot ignore Earth System Science anymore and have to overcome the Holocene mindsets of linear thinking, human-nature separation, human centrism, and of control. In addition, the fact that ESS is already working with the basic and classical research concept of the need for collective approaches to governance and security presents at the same time a call to action, an entry point, and a new analytical challenge to IR and Security scholars. Similarly, the engagement with the human-nature interrelated world of the Anthropocene also requires the ESS community to further integrate the

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Humanities into their analyses. While this necessity has been recognized as one of the main future challenges of ESS (Steffen et al. 2020, 61–62), it is to be hoped that this integration will not be restricted to mere modelling scenarios. For example, the description of the “safe operating space” of Planetary Boundaries would strongly benefit from the inclusion of a more differentiated and complete picture of the human-nature entangled Earth. Instead of describing a generalized “universal we”, who seem to evenly fit into the scientifically defined “operating space”, ESS should carefully differentiate between generations, geography, political context, power relations and structures, violent acts, injustices, values, beliefs, cosmology, and so on. Therefore, Earth System Science would do well to include IR and Security Studies in order to sharpen the analysis of political implications and highly contextual assumptions associated with the classical categories of peace, war, conflict, violence, crisis, and strongly embedded and deeply intertwined power relations and injustice. As a consequence, a central task for consideration by both scientific communities, ESS and IR, lies in the fact that their main scientific tools and mindsets still differentiate between humans and nature. The important challenge of thinking collaboratively to establish new joint research pathways and modes of operandi entails the critical review of the role of science in actively (directly and indirectly) shaping the world (Hardt 2018, 8). A special effort to think “out[side] the box” (Bai et al. 2016, 352), such as developing new forms of knowledge that include civil society and other actors in the process (Jahn et al. 2015; Lövbrand et al. 2015) lies ahead. This process also includes the latest development of scholar activism (Hagedorn et al. 2019; Ripple et al. 2019)—to date heavily dominated by ESS scholars—that shows how the relation between science and general politics and society is currently changing.

Change Versus Status Quo A central concern that underpins many ESS research results is the urgent need to change the trajectory of planet Earth towards a Stabilized Earth and into a Holocene-like situation (see Steffen et al. 2018). While most of the ESS publications end with a strong generalized claim for immediate and effective political decisions and actions, specific political recommendations are strongly avoided. In the words of Steffen et al. (2015, 1259855–1259858), ESS does not aim to be policy prescriptive, in the sense that, for example, the Planetary Boundaries “cannot readily be used to make choices between pathways for piecemeal maneuvering within the safe operating space or more radical shifts

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of global governance” and “it is not designed to be ‘down-scaled’ or ‘disaggregated’ to smaller levels, such as nations or local communities”. By presenting an external scientific framework for a “safe operating space”, however, the likelihood of the general tendency of ESS (re-)storing the status quo of the current system, structures, and process of international relations and the implicated power relations, acts of violence, and injustices is very high (Hardt 2019, 94). In other words, the aim of initiating and encouraging a much needed and deep transformation of ESS is unlikely to be successful, as long as traditional (Holocene) IR is still highly influencing the world and at the same time ignored by ESS research. Furthermore, the discussions about the deeply interrelated dimensions of politics and science (see e.g. Beck and Forsyth 2018) should be further addressed and deepened by both communities in an interconnected manner.

Conclusion The current descriptions of the conditions of our Earth (see e.g. Steffen et al. 2018; IPCC 2019; Lenton et al. 2019) portrayed by the Earth System Science community and the tipping points constituting new and unexpected threats, such as the worldwide outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) at the beginning of 2020, show that humanity stands at a historical brink of fundamental change of the human-nature entangled Anthropocene world. This chapter has suggested that the “hard politics” of IR—the concerns of security, war, peace, and power—cannot ignore ESS anymore and have to overcome the Holocene mindsets of linear thinking, human-nature separation, human centrism, and command-and-control. The encounter between IR and Earth System Sciences should be developed, as ESS research findings demonstrate strong relationships to security logics and topics. This remains relatively underexplored by students and scholars of International Relations and of ESS. These include, among others, the existential threat-and-emergency-response logic, the description of an existential threat to survival, the need for effective measures for response and the references to central classical research categories of peace and conflict. By applying the security prism, a consistent Earth system conceptualization of security can be illustrated that simultaneously provides an entry point and calls upon IR and security scholars to further the analysis. This chapter also described some future challenges and possible pathways for a joint approach of ESS and IR. A central task for these scientific communities lies in developing scientific tools and mindsets that address the humannature entanglement, tackle the basic concerns of change versus status quo

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maintenance, and engage specifically with a focus on the definition of “the existential”. Further engagement in the tasks to understand the Anthropocene world lies in asking the question of “What lies at the core?” and rethinking the differentiation and definition of “hard” versus “soft” politics and sciences through Anthropocene thinking. Key Points 1. The entangled human-nature relation and the new socio-ecological context of the Anthropocene challenge the traditional approaches of  (Holocene) Security Studies and IR. 2. Earth System Science describes and highlights the endangered functioning of the Earth system caused directly and indirectly by human activity. Thereby ESS closely relates to the basic logic, concepts, and categories of IR and Security Studies. 3. The two very different research communities and fields of Earth System Sciences and International Relations depend upon fundamental interrelationships and almost naturally speak to each other and cover common ground. 4. This chapter raised future research challenges and directions for collaborative research between ESS and IR and Security Studies towards the creation of a new hard political science of the Earth. Key Questions 1 . What are the differences between “Holocene” and “Anthropocene” thinking? 2. What are the central topics, concepts, and assumptions of Earth System Sciences? 3. What is the difference between fixed security concepts and the security prism? 4. How do Earth System Sciences relate to IR and Security Studies? 5. Which future research challenges arise from the nexus of Earth System Sciences and IR and Security Studies?

Further Reading Edkins, J. (ed.) 2019. Handbook of Critical International Relations. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Hamilton, C., Bonneuil B. and Gemenne, F. (eds) 2015. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis. New York: Routledge.

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Hardt, J. N. 2018. Environmental Security in the Anthropocene: A new Framework for Analysis. Assessing Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Lövbrand, E. and Mobjörk, M. (eds) forthcoming in 2021. Anthropocene Securities: Recollections and Reflections 50 Years After the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trombetta, J. (ed.) forthcoming in 2021. Handbook of Climate Change and International Security. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

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4 The Nuclear Origins of the Anthropocene Rens van Munster

Introduction This chapter outlines the intimate connections between the militarization of the planet during the Cold War and the advent of the Anthropocene. Originally coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the Anthropocene denotes a new epoch characterized by the geological impact of the human species upon planet Earth. Although geologists still need to formally decide whether the Anthropocene, in fact, does qualify as a distinct geological era, a majority of the members of the Anthropocene Working Group under the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body that formally decides on the Anthropocene, views radioactive fallout from widespread nuclear testing during the 1950s as a prime stratigraphic marker for dating  the beginning of the Anthropocene (Waters et  al. 2016a, b) (see Box 4.1). The study of nuclear weapons has long been a central concern within the International Relations (IR) discipline and security studies (Jervis 1989; Craig 2003; Pelopidas 2016). Yet, a few notable exceptions aside (Hamilton 2017; van Munster and Sylvest 2016), IR theorists have been slow to subject the geological association between the nuclear age and the Anthropocene to profound theoretical and empirical scrutiny. One of the reasons for this neglect may be

R. van Munster (*) Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), København, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_4

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that most Anthropocene-interested IR theorists have been keen to stress that our entry into the Anthropocene represents a sharp break with the past (Burke et al. 2016). 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 (see Chap. 7). The suggestion that the birth of the thermonuclear age also inaugurated the Anthropocene as a new geologic era renders much of IR theorizing on nuclear weapons highly problematic. The analysis of nuclear weapons within IR remains a prerogative of the field of strategic studies and its strong commitment to the analysis of war in a traditional framework of state bargaining, threat politics and deterrence—a framing that leaves little room for themes that transcend narrow conceptions of sovereignty and national security. Yet the geological associations between nuclear weapons and the Anthropocene raise difficult questions that expose such framing as too limited. These include  concerns about the global and local  ecological footprint of nuclear weapons, as well as the slower and less spectacular forms of nuclear violence to which colonial populations and territories have been subjected. Ignoring these forms of violence risks perpetuating nuclear colonialism in both theory and practice. Box 4.1  The Great Nuclear Acceleration Opinions about the origins of the Anthropocene differ widely, not least because any decision on the origins of this new age immediately bears on the profoundly political question of who or what is responsible for our entry into the Anthropocene. Still, Anthropocene scholarship increasingly focuses on the decade of the 1950s as the period that made the Anthropocene visible. Often referred to as ‘The Great Acceleration’, the 1950s were a decade characterized by rapid technological development, fast economic growth and conspicuous consumption. Many of the core indicators of the Anthropocene, including greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, rising global temperatures and species extinction and biodiversity loss, also grew exponentially during this period (Steffen et al. 2007, 2015). (continued)

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Box 4.1  (continued) Earth System scientists originally did not include nuclear weapons as one of the significant markers of the Anthropocene (e.g. Steffen et al. 2011). Yet nuclear weapons development, too, accelerated at a dizzying pace during the 1950s. At the beginning of the decade, some 300 atomic weapons existed. Only 13 years later, in 1963, their total number had increased to 32,000. In addition, the invention of the hydrogen bomb in 1952 meant that nuclear weapons had become much more powerful than the first atomic bombs. The largest bomb detonated by the United States—a 1954 test shot on Bikini; code-named Castle Bravo—was about a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, the development of space and missile technology meant that states could now deliver these deadly loads anywhere on the planet within a matter of mere minutes. This triple nuclear acceleration—in numbers, yield and speed of delivery—was complemented and made possible by a fourth acceleration: in nuclear testing. From 1945 to 1998, nuclear weapons states carried out a total of 543 atmospheric tests with a combined yield of 428 megatons, equivalent to over 29,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. Most of these tests were completed by the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and early 1960s, when both states committed to stopping further above-ground nuclear testing with the signing of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. By then, nuclear testing had already left a long-­ lasting stratigraphic signature on the planet in the form of americium-241, carbon-­ 14 and plutonium-139, an isotope with a half-life of 24,000  years. The spread of these radioactive isotopes now qualifies the period of intense nuclear testing as ‘a clear, easily detectable bookmark for the start of a new chapter in our planet’s history’ (Waters et al. 2016b, 47).

The Military, War and the Environment IR theorists have mainly considered the relevance of the Anthropocene in the empirical context of carbon capitalism, climate change and the agenda of environmental security that emerged in the early 1990s (Burke et al. 2016; Fagan 2017). Although the history of capitalism is highly relevant for understanding our entry into the Anthropocene, the geological identification of Cold War nuclear testing with the Anthropocene directs our attention to geopolitics and the militarization of the planet as other crucial vectors. In the field of IR, however, the analysis of war and that of the environment remain two separate, largely unrelated fields of study. For example, in their influential account of security studies, Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen maintain that ‘the broader constitution of environmental security as treated through climatic changes or through the degradation of land, biodiversity, the atmosphere, water, forests, coastal areas and rivers … arose mainly from overlapping scientific and political agendas that had little to do with the superpower military rivalry’ (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 128–29).

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This separation between the study of war and that of the environment is somewhat artificial and overlooks that the emergence of the Anthropocene as a new geological era was intimately connected to the Western way of making war. The history of modern warfare is also a history of natural destruction (Grove 2019) and the Anthropocene is ‘perhaps above all a Thanatocene’, as Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz write  with reference to Thanatos, the Roman god of death and warfare (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016, 124). Although their focus is on Western warfare since the nineteenth century, other observers go back even further and claim that the European conquest of the Americas had global climatic implications. European colonizers killed 20 million Native Americans and allowed forests to return to such an extent that the planet underwent a global cooling in the early seventeenth century (Lewis and Maslin 2015; Davis and Todd 2017). Although the exact contribution of European guns and germs to this global cooling remains a matter of some controversy, the more general point—that the history of warfare is deeply imbricated with large-scale environmental transformation—is beyond doubt. Nor is the environmental impact of the military limited to the battlefield. As an activity, modern warfare is now so thoroughly integrated into our industrial societies that it makes little sense to view it in isolation from fossil-­ fueled capitalism. The energy consumption by the US Department of Defense, the world’s largest institutional consumer of energy, stands for 80–90% of the total US government energy consumption. For the United States to maintain its geopolitical capacity for global warfare, its military requires 23 million gallons of fuel a day, which amounts to the burning of 927,000 gallons of fuel each hour (Bélanger and Arroyo 2016; Belcher et al. 2020). In addition, military infrastructures have been identified as major sources of contamination and pollution. Within the United States alone, the use of toxic chemicals has contaminated or is suspected of contaminating water on bases and nearby communities at over 400 active and closed military installations nationwide. At 149 current and former US military bases, the contamination is so severe that they have been designated Superfund sites by the US Environmental Protection Agency, meaning they are among the most hazardous areas in the country requiring clean-up. PFOs and PFOAs—chemical substances that were concentrated in foam to put out fires at military installations, which are popularly known as ‘forever chemicals’ because nature cannot break them down—have contaminated groundwater and drinking water on at least 126 military bases or their surrounding communities (Sullivan 2018). According to a 2017 GAO report, the Department of Defense has already spent $11.5 billion on evaluations and environmental clean-up of closed bases, and it estimates $3.4 billion more will be needed (GAO 2017). This is of course just a

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snapshot of the total military pollution worldwide, a figure which must also include contaminating practices of US military installations not located in the United States and the toxicity produced by military activities of other states, including China, Russia, the United Kingdom and France. Still, the overall picture is clear: modern war is not just a socio-political but also a deeply environmental or ecological phenomenon. The development of nuclear weapons arguably embodies this development most strongly. Nuclear testing has created a global geography of irradiated landscapes that include the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, French Polynesia, China, Australia, Russia and the United States, as well as other places. Moreover, the ability to conduct nuclear testing depends on a range of other highly contaminating industrial practices such as uranium mining, uranium enrichment, plutonium processing and missile testing, which have all turned large parts of the globe into environmental waste zones (Hecht 2012; Van Wyck 2010; Brown 2015). In addition, nuclear testing has been linked to anomalies in weather patterns, including an unusually cold year in 1954 (a year characterized by intense nuclear testing) and an extremely icy winter in 1962 (which saw another spike in nuclear testing). The extent to which nuclear testing in fact did modify the weather remains a matter of debate (Hamblin 2013, 125), but American scientists and military leaders did not consider ideas about weather modification far-fetched. During the Cold War, they actively sought to turn nature into an active ally in their struggle with the Soviet Union. Such attempts included wild proposals to manipulate the weather, including the manufacturing of earthquakes, tornadoes and tsunamis, as well as less earth-shattering suggestions of biological, chemical and radiological warfare (Hamblin 2013). ‘The twentieth century’, writes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (2004), ‘will be remembered as the age whose essential thought consisted in targeting no longer the body, but the enemy’s environment’. Modern warfare does not just target enemy life, but also the elements that make human life possible, including the air and the biosphere. The American use of defoliants, including napalm and herbicides like Agent Orange, to destroy the Vietnamese forests that provided cover for the Viet Cong probably remains the best-known example of such environmental warfare. Interestingly, much of our knowledge about the climate today has firm roots in these Cold War attempts to strategize and weaponize the natural environment. Knowledge about the functioning of Earth systems appeared vital to the pursuit of military objectives, such as deep-sea navigation and anti-submarine warfare, and for understanding the environmental effects of nuclear weaponry. Military interest in weather forecasting as a way of

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predicting fallout distribution funneled research money into meteorology, which produced much of the data about atmospheric flows that now makes it possible to speak about and model the climate as a global phenomenon (Edwards 2012a). ‘The specific attributes of being able to see the entire planet as a single unit or system’, argues Joseph Masco (2016, 44), ‘is a Cold War creation’. In contrast to global imaginaries of the planet which have existed for a much longer time, the Cold War enabled new visions of the globe as an integrated environmental space or single unit or system (Masco 2010; Edwards 2012b; Hamblin 2013; see also Chap. 7). The scientists whose work contributed to such a holistic view were not driven by environmentalist concerns. Influential oceanographers and ecologists, such as Eugene Odum, welcomed the US nuclear testing program. They regarded the atomic bomb ‘a great oceanographic tool’ and conceived of test sites at Bikini and Enewetak as little more than ‘living laboratories’, where they could learn about ecological relations by tracing the distribution and movement of radioactive isotopes through the environment. For them, the bomb was not just a weapon but also a scientific instrument to make the environment legible. As a result, in preparing for ‘total war’, the United States also discovered the ‘total environment’ as an object of knowledge, governance and political reflection (Robertson 2012). In the nuclear age, the possibility of geoengineering emerged as both a scientific and military concern.

The Nuclear Condition of Extinction The association of nuclear testing with the Anthropocene helps illuminate the multiple links between war and the environment or the ecological aspects of geopolitics. This connection also offers an invitation to broaden and deepen the intellectual ancestry of IR theorizing about human extinction, a question that has become inescapably linked to the Anthropocene (Kolbert 2014). IR theorists worry that the discipline’s theoretical vocabulary, for all its focus on security and survival, offers no framework for addressing extinction, ‘the non-­ being of collective life forms’ (Mitchell 2017, 4). A reappraisal of the intellectual debates on extinction in the context of nuclear weapons could deepen IR’s understanding of extinction while broadening its intellectual ancestry. During the Cold War, self-extinction emerged as both a theoretical problem and an empirical reality, but those at the forefront of thinking through this question often did so from the margins or outside of conventional IR theory and the confines of strategic studies and national security policy.

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Intellectuals such as Günther Anders, C.  Wright Mills, Lewis Mumford, Bertrand Russell and John H. Herz offered a resolutely global strand of nuclear thought that despite fundamental differences was united in the view that the thermonuclear revolution put the question of man-made extinction at the center of the political imagination (see van Munster and Sylvest 2016). For example, global fallout led intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to ask everyone to forget their differences and to imagine themselves in biological terms as members of a now endangered human species. As Anders philosophized, the possibility of self-extinction meant that the human species had crossed a threshold. If the experiences of Auschwitz and total war had taught us that everyone could be killed without reason, the nuclear age meant that this situation now characterized all life on the planet: On August 6, 1945, the Day of Hiroshima, a New Age began: the age in which at any given moment we have the power to transform any given place on our planet, and even our planet itself, into a Hiroshima … However long this age may last, even if it should last forever, it is ‘The Final Age’: for there is no possibility that its ‘differentia specifica’, the possibility of our self-extinction, can ever end—but by the end itself. (Anders 1962, 493)

Out of the mushroom cloud, then, arose a new awareness that had the survival of the human species as its main reference point. This new line of thinking was planetary in scope and innovatively linked nuclear war to questions of resource depletion, population growth and other issues that concerned the Earth’s capacity to support and sustain human civilization. At the most basic level, the survivalist view was a direct response to the ways in which human beings in the post-war years became estranged from, and changed, the natural world. Its proponents worried that machine and scientific technology had bestowed on human beings a power that, fed by insufficient respect for the natural and organic, risked spiraling out of control. Publications like Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (1948) and William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948) paved the way for a global catastrophic brand of environmentalism that pointed to the defiant (and self-defeating) attitude of humans in seeking to conquer rather than cooperate with nature. The interdependency of natural systems demanded human humility. Even if the term Anthropocene was not used, the future of human-Earth relations became an increasingly central concern as the nuclear age advanced and the darker prospects of technological inventions grew stronger (see e.g. Thomas 1956). For example, John Herz, who in IR is mainly known for his formulation of the ‘security dilemma’, became increasingly convinced that nuclear

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weapons called for interdisciplinary survival research, a project that was eventually developed by a group of scholars with similar concerns, including, notably, the inventor of the Gaia-hypothesis, James Lovelock (Herz 2003; Seidel and Laszlo 2006). Yet such ideas found their probably best-known expression in the ‘nuclear winter’ thesis. Modeling the effects of nuclear war on the climate, Carl Sagan and his colleagues reached the alarming conclusion that the cold, darkness and fallout of a nuclear war involving as ‘little’ as 100 megatons—a realistic scenario given the combined nuclear arsenals of the superpowers at the time—could have far-reaching consequences for human survival. At such a threshold, they warned, ‘the possibility of the extinction of Homo Sapiens cannot be excluded’ (Ehrlich et al. 1983, 1299). In his bestselling book The Fate of the Earth (1982), Jonathan Schell similarly stressed that the climatic effects of nuclear war underlined the futility of civil defense and other initiatives that should guarantee the continuation of life. ‘The vulnerability of the environment’, he argued sarcastically, ‘is the last word in the argument against the usefulness of shelters: there is no hole big enough to hide all of nature’ (Schell 1982, 61). Nuclear weapons and climate change were intimately linked: The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact should be seen as the very center of the ecological crisis—as the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills. (Schell 1982, 111)

Sagan hoped the nuclear winter thesis would prove that Cold War nuclear strategies were dangerous and self-defeating, but the ensuing debates conducted in journals such as Nature and Foreign Affairs mainly cast doubt on the scientific validity of the argument that winter indeed was coming. Critics generally agreed that global human misery, mass death and starvation would occur, but concluded that such effects would stop short of human extinction (Thompson and Schneider 1986)—in short, a nuclear fall rather than a full-­ blown winter. For others, however, extinction was a complex philosophical issue that could not be so easily resolved by quantitatively projecting the number of deaths. For Schell, in particular, extinction was qualitatively different from mass death, even if the latter should include ‘the deaths of all the people on earth’ (Schell 1982, 115). Unlike death, extinction cannot, argued Schell, be understood from the perspective of our present life but should be conceptualized as something that cuts off the future. If death is the opposite of life, extinction is the opposite of birth. The defining character of extinction is not that it ends life but that it ends the possibility of birth and new life. In short, ‘extinction is the murder of the future’ (Schell 1982, 168). By asking people

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to contemplate or imagine the extinction of the human species, Schell and others sought to cultivate a global ecological awareness that included the fate of future generations. Theorizations of extinction developed in the nuclear age are not without flaws and contradictions. In some work, the neo-Malthusian concern with extinction is dangerously reduced to a problem of overpopulation, a simplification that is rarely far removed from a questionable eugenic politics, as was the case with Osborne and Vogt, based on misguided racial beliefs. Moreover, compared to the post-human turn that characterizes much Anthropocene scholarship in IR today (Fishel 2017; Mitchell 2017), earlier scholarship may appear limited in its focus on human survival rather than more-than-human forms of sociality (see also Hobden and Cudworth in this volume). Still, there are numerous reasons for contemporary IR scholarship on the Anthropocene to revisit the Cold War debates on extinction and nuclear weapons, including early efforts to develop a global ecological vision, as well as an intergenerational ethics of planetary stewardship. Their pessimistic view on technology also raises difficult questions for those who are currently suggesting that humanity geoengineers itself out of its Anthropocene predicament. Such proposals, they would argue, fail to understand that it is exactly this type of techno-managerial thinking that sits at the center of our ecological problems today.

 he Atomic Anthropocene T and Nuclear Colonialism The effects of rising sea levels, biodiversity loss and temperature increases, as well as other threats associated with our entry into the Anthropocene, often magnify already existing historical injustices, particularly those related to colonialism (Davis and Todd 2017). Nuclear weapons are no exception. Their development has been deeply entangled with the violent histories of imperialism and colonialism. IR theorists were quick to recognize that the arrival of nuclear weapons would profoundly transform the international system and its main institutions, including the balance of power, great power war and diplomacy (see e.g. Brodie 1946; Herz 1959; Aron 1966; Jervis 1989), but have until recently paid little attention to the colonial dimensions of nuclear weapons development (see e.g. Biswas 2014). By contrast, Afro-American intellectuals and leaders, who were themselves engaged in a struggle for freedom in the United States, stressed that the development of nuclear capabilities critically relied on the continuation of an unfree colonial system of rule that included the appropriation of overseas territories as designated test sites (Intondi 2015).

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The insights offered by these Afro-American intellectuals were not taken up by their white contemporaries and remain marginal in the IR discipline even today. Yet this attention to nuclear colonialism renders established Western narratives about nuclear weapons problematic and provides much-needed nuance to the oft-heard claim that nuclear weapons have never been used since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While it is true that a nuclear war between states has never taken place, scores of bombs were in fact detonated on colonial lands. France tested its first 17 devices in the Algerian desert in 1960–1961 and, after Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, conducted more than 40 tests in French Polynesia, a French overseas territory in the Pacific Ocean. The United Kingdom conducted atmospheric tests on the aboriginal Australian territories of Maralinga, Emu Field and Monte Bello Island, as well as Christmas Island and Malden Island in the central Pacific Ocean. The United States, in turn, conducted its most powerful tests in the Marshall Islands, the total yield of which equaled the detonation of 1.6 Hiroshima-sized bombs on every day of the 12-year testing program (see Box 4.2). Box 4.2  The United States and Nuclear Colonialism The development of nuclear weapons in the United States critically depended on the exercise of colonial power. At home, the United States built nuclear military infrastructures on the lands of Native Americans, a group that has been disproportionally affected by the harmful effects of the US nuclear weapons complex (Kuletz 1998). US nuclear colonialism also had an international dimension. In 1947, the United Nations established the so-called Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), which is designated as a ‘strategic area’ to be governed by the United States. In effect, the agreement gave the United States control over three major island groups, the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshalls, to be used for military purposes. Five days after the agreement was concluded, the United States Atomic Energy Commission established the Pacific Proving Grounds on Enewetak and Bikini, the two most northern atolls of the Marshalls, for the purpose of atmospheric nuclear testing. The population living on these atolls was forced into almost permanent exile (Mason 1954; Kiste 1974; Niedenthal 2013). The detonations destroyed and contaminated large parts of the Bikini and Enewetak atolls and covered the population of the downwind atolls of Rongelap, Ailinglae and Utirik with a thick layer of radioactive dust. Nuclear colonialism in the Marshall Islands reflected racial hierarchies of worth. In 1956, two years after the powerful Castle Bravo detonation on Bikini, Merrill Eisenbud, an official of the US Atomic Energy Commission, bluntly reveled in the scientific possibilities of studying the effects of the bomb’s radiation on the exposed islanders: ‘Now, data of this type has never been available. While it is true that these people do not live the way westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice’ (AEC 1956, 232). When the Marshall Islands gained independence in 1986, the United States paid $150 million to a compensatory trust fund, an amount considerably less than the $500 million awarded to the downwind populations of testing in Nevada and far below the $2.2 billion awarded to the victims by the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal (Barker and Johnston 2008).

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In short, when it comes to nuclear weapons, tests are not just tests. They affect people’s health, cause ecological destruction and irradiate the environment. Indigenous communities affected by nuclear testing have voiced their concerns about the adverse effects of nuclear testing on their physical and psychological health (see e.g. Tagupa 1974; Keju-Johnson 1987; Tetiarahi 2005; Jetñil-Kijiner 2017; see also Keown 2018). Still, the myth that nuclear weapons have never been used since Nagasaki remains a powerful trope in Western theory. For example, Jacques Derrida, the founding father of deconstructionism, argues that the ‘fabulously textual’ phenomenon of nuclear weapons first and foremost depends ‘upon structures of information and communication, structures of language, including non-vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding’ (Derrida 1984, 23). Derrida shares this view with most strategic theorists, who generally regard nuclear weapons through the abstract and detached framework of political communication and bargaining (Brodie 1946; Trachtenberg 1991). Within this framework, nuclear testing is not recognized as ‘real’ use and, if considered at all, reduced to a form of political signaling that communicates both capability and resolve. Such views are in profound contrast to indigenous experiences and conceal the real violence enacted upon indigenous communities and their lands. These communities had no stake in the production and acquisition of nuclear weapons, yet are the ones affected most by their development. Experiences of nuclear colonialism also complicate the dominant image of the Anthropocene as a planetary catastrophe. Although the danger of a nuclear war resulting in lasting climate change and the death of millions of people across the planet remains a real risk, the ongoing continuous suffering by communities exposed to nuclear testing draws attention to the more intricate, less spectacular and less visible ways in which nuclear weapons perform violence. The original injustices related to spectacular nuclear tests have since mutated into what Rob Nixon has referred to as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon 2011, 2). Leaking radioactive waste, irradiated landscapes and contamination continue to shape the lives of communities that have been forcefully removed from their lands or suffer from radiation-related illnesses. Residual radioactivity invites us to include gradual deaths, radiation sickness, biological mutations and displacement among the central effects of what it means to live, die and survive in the Anthropocene.

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Conclusion This chapter has argued that the Anthropocene has deep roots in the Cold War nuclear arms race and the militarization of the planet. It has highlighted the intimate links between the military, war and the environment while bringing into sharper view the centrality of nuclear weapons and so-called remote nuclear test sites for understanding the challenges of living on an increasingly turbulent Earth. Cold War debates about extinction in the aftermath of nuclear war gave birth to a new planetary awareness and global ecological visions formulated around the survival of the human species. A reappraisal of these debates and visions, as well as their shortcomings, can offer important inspiration to current scholarship that seeks to attune the IR discipline to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Such reappraisals also offer an opportunity to reflect on the colonial foundations of the global nuclear order. The history of nuclear weapons crucially intersects with the history of colonialism and imperialism. The Cold War may be over, but its harmful radioactive afterlife continues to affect populations across the globe. Welcome to the atomic Anthropocene. Key Points 1. The Cold War nuclear arms race was central to the production of the Anthropocene as both a geological epoch and as an object of knowledge, intervention and reflection. 2. The nuclear origins of the Anthropocene highlight that the strong separation of the study of war from that of the environment is unwarranted. Given the profound impact of the military upon the environment, war must be also studied as an environmental phenomenon. 3. The effects of the Anthropocene are unevenly distributed around the globe. Nuclear testing constitutes the Anthropocene as a global condition, but the heaviest burden was borne by vulnerable communities and colonial subjects that had no stake in the pursuit of nuclear weapons, yet whose bodies and homes have been exposed to both the immediate and long-term effects of nuclear experimentation. 4. The IR debate on the Anthropocene has focused predominantly on catastrophic threats on a planetary level. The history of nuclear colonialism reminds us that the (atomic) Anthropocene is also characterized by less spectacular and more insidious forms of violence.

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Key Questions 1. What is the relevance of the Cold War nuclear arms race for our understanding of the Anthropocene? 2. It is wrong to separate the study of war from the study of the environment. Do you agree? 3. Extinction is a central theoretical and practical concern in the Anthropocene. To what extent do Cold War debates on radioactive fallout and nuclear winter foreshadow these debates? 4. Why is it important to recognize nuclear colonialism in the context of the Anthropocene? 5. What do we mean when we speak of the ‘slow violence’ of nuclear weapons?

Further Reading Barker, H. M. and Johnston, B. R. 2008. Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Hamblin, J.  D. 2013. Arming Mother Nature. The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jetñil-Kijiner, K. 2017. Iep Jāltok. Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Munster, R. van and Sylvest, C 2016. Nuclear Realism. Global Political Thought during the Thermonuclear Revolution. Abingdon: Routledge. Nixon, R. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Schell, J. 1982. The Fate of the Earth. New York: Knopf.

References Aron, R. 1966. Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, trans. R. Howard and A. Baker Fox. Garden City NY: Double Day. Anders, G. 1962. Theses for the Atomic Age. Massachusetts Review 3(3): 493–505. Barker, H. M. and Johnston, B. R. 2008. Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report. Walnut Creek (CA): Left Coast Press. Belcher, O., Bigger, P. Neimark, B. and Kennelly, C. 2020. Hidden Carbon Costs of the “Everywhere War”: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Boot-­ print of the US Military.  Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(1): 65–80.

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Biswas, S. 2014. Colonial Desire. Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bélanger, P. and Arroyo, A. 2016. Ecologies of Power. Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press. Bonneuil, C. and Fressoz, J-P. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. D. Fernbach. London: Verso. Brodie, B. (ed.) 1946. The Absolute Weapon. Atomic Power and World Order. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Brown, K. 2015. Plutopia. Nuclear families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burke, A., Fishel, S., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S. and Levine, D. J. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR.  Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–523. Buzan, B. and Hansen, L. 2009. The Evolution of International Security Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Craig, C. 2003. Glimmer of a New Leviathan. Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, H. and Todd, Z. 2017. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.  ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geography  16(4): 761–780. Derrida, J. 1984. No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives). Diacritics 14(2): 20–31. Deudney, D. 2007. Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Edwards, P.  N. 2012a.  A Vast Machine. Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press. Edwards, P. N. 2012b. ‘Entangled Histories: Climate Science and Nuclear Weapons Research.’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 68(4): 28–40. Ehrlich, P., Harte, J., Harwell, M. A. et al. 1983. Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War. Science 222 (4630), 23 December: 1293–1300. Eisenbud, M. 1956. Minutes of A.E.C. Meeting. Advisory Committee on Biology & Medicine. U.S.A.E.C. Health and Safety Laboratory, January 13–14, 1956. Fagan, M. 2017. Security in the Anthropocene: Environment, Ecology, Escape. European Journal of International Relations 23(2): 292–314. GAO (United States Government Accountability Office) 2017. Military base Realignments and Closures. DOD Has Improved Environmental Cleanup Reporting but Should Obtain and Share More Information. GAO-17-151, January 2017. Retrieved from https://www.gao.gov/assets/690/682204.pdf [accessed 17 February 2021].

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5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene Cheryl McEwan

Introduction The idea of the Anthropocene—the naming of a current situation in which human activity rivals “some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system” (Steffen et  al. 2011, 843)—captures a moment of dual crisis: the unfolding global ecological catastrophe and the ever-impending collapse of capital. The growing realization in the global North that capitalism and the conditions of the Anthropocene no longer create the conditions for life (Tsing 2015) 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 (McEwan 2019). Yet the idea of the Anthropocene rests on the notion that an essential human nature has created the current crisis. This ignores the role of systems, such as colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy, that a small minority of humans created and “other humans powerfully resisted” (Klein 2016, 12; also Chakrabarty 2014), and erases the racialized history of extractive colonialism that has given rise to this form of globalism (Yusoff 2019; McKittrick 2013). As Ghosh (2017) argues, the very idea of a ‘stable Holocene’ preceding

C. McEwan (*) Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_5

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an unruly Anthropocene is a bourgeois ideal that was never a reality for those exploited by colonialism/capitalism/patriarchy. Thus, a concept that is defining the future of the planet actively erases the historical and contemporary experiences of most of its inhabitants. 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. It also accounts for the difficulties that the Anthropocene, and the requirement to theorize human and non-human futures at the planetary scale, present for postcolonial scholars. These difficulties are, of course, not unique to postcolonial theory. While evidence that humans live on the brink of environmental catastrophe is all around, the sheer complexity and scale of the contemporary crisis mean that abilities to envision survival in and life afterwards are profoundly impaired. Writing in a radically different moment of crisis in 1918, Ernst Bloch articulates this occluded vision: “we are located in our own blind spot, in the darkness of the lived moment, whose darkness is ultimately our own darkness” (1918, 200). For Bloch, navigating out of the ‘darkness’ required utopian thought experiments, which he went on to develop in his later works, that sought to reconcile nature and humankind through socialism. The scale and complexity of the current ecological crisis present enormous challenges for creating knowledge about possible future forms of life and dwelling. Yet creating this knowledge is a task of extreme urgency. Contemporary scholars are attempting to find creative ways out of the blind spot by theorizing an ethos of life in the anticipated ruins of capitalism and by engaging a planetary scale for thinking about presents and futures that is more attuned to the materiality of life, including ecological and non-human demands (Haraway 2016; Tsing 2015; Tsing et  al. 2017). However, the Eurocentrism of the Anthropocene remains a significant occlusion in current thinking and consequently, following the pattern of earlier forms of creative thinking on the brink of catastrophe, threatens to limit creativity by falling prey to visions of domination, ever more meticulous human-ecology interventions and even authoritarianism. Donna Haraway’s recent writings, for example, are a case in point. Haraway (2016, 2018) posits predicted global population rises over the twenty-first century from 7.8 to 10.9 billion as the main threat to human and non-human beings. She advocates an ecotopia of collective, non-coercive, non-racist kinship as an alternative to ‘making more babies’ to stem this growth and reduce global population to two or three

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billion over a couple of hundred years. However, in outlining a radical manifesto for care and valuing life, Haraway does not explain how the planet might lose eight billion humans over this time span. Ecofascism is, of course, more forthcoming, and history tells us which people will be dispensed with first and which will be forcibly denied offspring; ignoring the racial politics of proposing a depopulated world is thus profoundly problematic and dangerous. In response to such dangers, this chapter suggests that the search for critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in the Anthropocene also requires decolonizing theory and praxis. As Dalby (2016, 33) argues, “how the Anthropocene is interpreted, and who gets to invoke which framing of the new human age, matters greatly both for the planet and for particular parts of humanity”.

The Eurocentrism of the Anthropocene The Anthropocene is part of the naming practices of the West. As Sidaway et al. (2014, 5) argue, the Anthropocene is thoroughly Eurocentric in that it “is measured and dated in science whose origins are in, and which expresses the power of, a Western weltanschauung (world-view)”. Scientists are currently debating the origins of the Anthropocene, but any origin point—1492 and the conquest of the Americas; 1610 and the Colombian Exchange (the transfer of human populations, plants, animals, cultures, technology and ideas between the Americas and Europe that was triggered by colonialism and extraction); the 1800s and the origins of the fossil and plantation economies that were founded on slavery and drove European industrialization; the 1940s and nuclear testing (see Chap. 4), first on Japanese cities and subsequently on Aboriginal lands in Australia, Pacific atolls and native American land in the Mojave desert—is marked by racial inequalities. The erasure of these histories in the naming of the present and future as the Anthropocene could be considered an act of epistemic violence (Yusoff 2019). Talk of the Anthropocene also erases the existence of human systems that have organized life differently, systems that insist that humans must think seven generations in the future; must be not only good citizens but also good ancestors; must take no more than they need and give back to the land in order to protect and augment styles of regeneration. These systems existed and still exist, but they are erased every time we say that the climate crisis is a crisis of ‘human nature’ and that we are living in the ‘age of man’. (Klein 2016, 12)

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Such erasure forecloses possibilities that these different human systems may also inform alternative futures. The Anthropocene should not prompt us to abandon the fundamental concerns of social science and the terrain of postcolonialism: the theorization of culture and power. Instead, an “increasing recognition of the potency of social relations of power to transform the very conditions of human existence should justify a more profound engagement with social and cultural theory” (Malm and Hornborg 2014, 63). Importantly, however, the Anthropocene also justifies a deeper engagement with the creativity, philosophies and praxis in those marginal spaces that have been created historically by hegemonic relationships of power and knowledge. Inequalities and dispossession have underpinned the advent of the Anthropocene. The environmental destruction that is currently taking place has been caused by approximately 25% of the planet’s population; many millions are not a party to the fossil economy, for example (see Gore 2015). Yet its effects are felt most keenly by those least responsible, for example, indigenous peoples in the Arctic whose territories are literally melting away or small island states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans whose very existence is threatened by rising sea levels. The latter is beginning to be recognized as a human rights issue: in a ground-breaking ruling in January 2020 in a case involving a Kiribati asylum seeker deported by the New Zealand government, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ruled that governments must take into account the human rights violations caused by the climate crisis when considering deportation of asylum seekers. However, the great majority of the potential victims of climate change are in Asia and the threats faced here are stark. According to Ghosh (2017), 125 million people in India and Bangladesh, and around 10% of the population of Vietnam, could be displaced by rising sea levels; 24% of India’s arable land is at risk of desertification; 47% of the world’s population depend on the waters that flow out of the Himalayan ice sheets, and if the glaciers continue to shrink at current rates, the most populous parts of Asia will face catastrophic water shortages within the next 10–20 years. Responses to climate change are dominated by a search for technocratic solutions rather than addressing inequalities and dispossession, which are rooted deeply in colonial history and endure powerfully in the present. For example, a 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included geoengineering in its calculations and simulations to claim that injecting millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere could help limit global temperature rises (IPCC 2018), thereby legitimizing these technologies as inevitable. And one of the uglier features of environmentalism is the insistence by the haves that in order to ‘save the planet’ the have-nots

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should be denied the patterns of life, such as electricity, refrigeration and transportation, which they themselves take for granted. As Ghosh (2017) argues, the injustices of colonialism are perpetuated by claims that the poor should make sacrifices so that the rich can continue to enjoy the fruits of their wealth. New forms of Orientalism1 accompany the reverberations of climate change. In the Middle East and North Africa, for example, violence is caused by both the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and the people displaced by this violence are dehumanized in Western political and popular discourses. This is especially so if they survive crossing the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea to arrive on European shores or at Europe’s borders in desperate need of refuge. Weizman and Sheikh (2015) trace this violence across an aridity line that stretches from the Horn of Africa, runs through Somalia and Ethiopia, and west through Eritrea, Sudan, Northern Nigeria and Mali, and then east across the coast of North Africa to Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and into Pakistan. The line connects places marked by drought, water scarcity, scorching temperatures and military conflict, and in which climate change is a profoundly colonial project. These places are also hotspots for Western drone strikes, which goes largely uncommented upon because the people living here are discursively dehumanized. As Klein (2016) argues, bombs following oil and drones following drought fill boats with refugees who are dehumanized. The needs of others for security is cast as a threat to ‘our’ own security and in response, walls are being built—literally in Israel, the USA and at the edges of Europe, and symbolically within Britain with its retreat from the EU, from principles of free movement of people and towards ever tougher and inhumane immigration policies. Black and brown lives are valued so little that thousands can be lost at sea—for example, according to a UN report (Fargues 2017), at least 34,000 people died or went missing attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa and the Middle East between 2000 and 2017—or incarcerated in prisons on islands—for example, Nauru, off the coast of Australia—which themselves are at risk of slipping beneath the rising seas. As Stoler (2016, 337) argues, “Displaced peoples have become the ‘toxic’ refuse of our contemporary world”. Terms like “environmental refugees”—which has no basis in international law,2 is  As derived from Edward Said (1978), Orientalism is a Western way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of non-European peoples and cultures as exotic, inferior, primitive, uncivilized and at times dangerous. 2  ‘Refugee’ has a strict legal definition pertaining to a person outside of their country who cannot return because of fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a social group. 1

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not recognized by those who need to move to survive or by those who move only short distances, and in countries like the UK and Australia invokes racism, discrimination and state-sanctioned detention—deflect “from the historical and political conditions that have produced these effects” (ibid.). The time is ripe for a sustained postcolonial critique of the Anthropocene, but this may also require a rethinking of postcolonial theory.

Postcolonial Theory and the Anthropocene Postcolonial theory is concerned with racial power and myriad ways in which groups of people have been and continue to be designated outside the category of the human. In contrast, the Anthropocene calls the category of the human into question—it is no longer understood as internal to itself (and in many non-Western cultures it never was) but is a reflection of the totality of the Earth system. As Baldwin (2017) argues, the Anthropocene is significant because it gives finality to the blurring of the distinction between Nature and the Human, which is an artefact of European imperial power. At the same time, by calling the category of the Human into question, it necessitates reconsideration of how racial power—the multiple ways in which groups of people are designated outside the category of the Human—is traced in the Anthropocene. Despite this, attempts to theorize the Anthropocene have mostly ignored race. This is problematic because one of the prevalent themes in debates about the Anthropocene is human survival and contained within survivability is the biopolitical question of which bodies will be designated as best suited for survival. These are fundamentally racial questions, which raise questions about, whether postcolonial theory is capable of deciphering the politics of otherness contained within them, and, additionally, whether postcolonial theory is able to contribute toward a progressive politics capable of responding to the Anthropocene crisis alongside its resurgent contemporary fascisms. (Baldwin 2017, 294)

Critical geographers and environmental historians have long documented environmental racism and injustices and their relationship with (neo)colonialism—for example, the grossly unequal distribution of pollution, waste disposal and biowaste among impoverished peoples everywhere, or the egregious practices of multinational corporations, conglomerates and governments that destroy ecologies, resources and livelihoods. However, little of this

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work has made its way into postcolonial scholarship (Stoler 2016). And despite growing scholarly concern with the inequalities and dispossession underpinning the current ecological crisis, postcolonial theory has struggled to engage critically with the Anthropocene debate. There are three primary reasons for this. Firstly, postcolonial theory has found it difficult to engage with political ecology because of the human-centred focus of postcolonial analysis, its embeddedness in humanism as a philosophy espousing reason, ethics and social and economic justice, and its concern with issues such as identity, cultural hybridity, political heterogeneity and epistemology. In contrast, theorizing the Anthropocene requires an account of how human beings are entangled in ontological aspects of wider relational and ecological processes. Secondly, this difficulty relates to the concern of postcolonial theory to reveal the Other in text by exposing the structures of representation that draw meaning through references to a colonial past, which presents difficulties in theorizing contemporary ecological crisis and potential futures. In response, Stoler (2016) calls for a focus on how the ‘ruins of empire’ endure in the present (e.g. in Palestine and Australia and with respect to Native American lands) and how people live with and in these ruins. The work of indigenous scholars (e.g. Whyte 2017) is already beginning to fill this gap, arising from memories, knowledges, histories and experiences of oppression that differ from many non-indigenous scientists, environmentalists and politicians who are prominent in the framing of the issue of climate change today. Similarly, Baldwin (2017) argues that engaging with the Anthropocene requires that postcolonial methodologies shift their temporal gaze towards the future to better come to terms with the subaltern in formation or the figure of the yet-to-come (e.g. the racialized figure of the climate change migrant). Thirdly, the disconnection between theorizing the Anthropocene and postcolonialism relates to the requirement to theorize both at different scales: the Anthropocene necessitates theorizing at the planetary scale, while postcolonial theory is focused on the human scale. The requirement to theorize the Anthropocene at the planetary scale thus also brings the humanism at the heart of much postcolonial theory into question (see Box 5.1) and also points to the need for greater engagement with political ecology as a means by which to resolve the epistemological dilemmas. Malm and Hornborg point to the differential impact of Hurricane Katrina in black and white neighbourhoods of New Orleans (see also Crow 2012 for an autobiographical account of this), or of Hurricane Sandy in Haiti and Manhattan, or sea-level rise in Bangladesh and the Netherlands. They suggest that “for the foreseeable future—indeed, as long as there are human societies

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Box 5.1  Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Conception of the Human as a Geophysical Force Dipesh Chakrabarty has written some of the most thoughtful reflections on the problems with species-thinking in debates about anthropogenic climate change and the challenges this poses for humanist philosophies. He argues that the Anthropocene is the moment when the human becomes fully manifest in Earth history and, paradoxically, the moment in which we lose our ability to comprehend this effect (2012, 14). Its primary historical significance lies in the way its proponents give finality to the blurring of Nature and the Human, even while we know this binary to be an artefact of European imperial power. Chakrabarty argues for, the need to view the human simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force and as a political agent, as a bearer of rights and as author of actions; subject to both the stochastic forces of nature (being itself one such force collectively) and open to the contingency of individual human experience. (Chakrabarty 2012, 15) This marks a significant shift in postcolonial thinking about the human and has the potential to connect in significant ways to the decolonial movements that are challenging the Eurocentrism of the Anglo-American academy. It also has some links with Paul Gilroy’s (2015) call for a reinvigorated left humanism that draws inspiration from the anti-colonial writings of Césaire, James, Fanon, Senghor and Du Bois. Gilroy argues that what he calls a ‘posthumanist humanism’ ought to engage with Black scholarship and its critique of racialism located in anti-racist struggles. However, both Gilroy’s and Chakrabarty’s attachment to humanism means that they cannot escape endorsing it as a necessary project, with all the attendant risks of shoring up Eurocentric notions of a universal humanity comprised of beneficent rescuers in wealthier countries and darker-­ skinned victims in poorer countries needing to be saved. According to Chakrabarty, humanity is universal and climate change represents a planetary threat for all humanity: “Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighbourhoods of California)” (2009, 221). More recently, Chakrabarty (2014, 14) has acknowledged that the crisis of climate change will be routed through “anthropological differences”, but as Malm and Hornborg (2014, 63) argue, this fails to account for the realities of differentiated vulnerability on all scales of human society.

on Earth—there will be lifeboats for the rich and privileged”. Meanwhile, less privileged and poorer people whose lives have been constrained by colonialism and racism suffer the harshest consequences of the same ecological disasters and are left to try to maintain livelihoods in already marginal areas. Humanity may be universal, but it is important that postcolonial theory is able to respond to the fact that climate change brings differentiated threats that are being realized through historically inscribed inequalities (see Box 5.2).

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Box 5.2  Gayatri Spivak’s Notion of ‘Planetarity’ Gayatri Spivak has responded incisively to the challenges of re-scaling postcolonial theory from the human to the planetary and, particularly, to critiques of universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and planetary change. She argues that planetary ideas risk re-inscribing the universalism of globalism by problematically assuming an “undivided ‘natural’ space rather than a differentiated political space” (Spivak 2003, 72). She calls on us to “imagine ourselves as planetary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities” so that “alterity remains underived from us” (Spivak 2012, 339). Spivak’s notion of planetarity is a strategy for learning planetary difference. It is a challenge to decolonize knowledge about the world by knowing it from outside of the categories of Western thought (Krishnaswamy and Hawley 2008). It calls for a move away from reading non-Western epistemologies, ontologies and subjectivities from the vantage point of Western knowledge and through an orientalizing canon. It demands that difference is known in ways that do not prescribe otherness in one’s own terms and thus “offers a topos for learning the worldings that liberal multiculturalism and the cosmopolitan imagination may not be equipped to recognize” (Jazeel 2011, 88). It creates the possibilities for a “multiplicity of critical, decolonizing perspectives against and beyond Eurocentered modernity, from the various epistemic locations of the colonized people of the world” (Grosfoguel 2012, 97). This is important because progressive ideas need to emerge from critical thinkers in dialogue across cultural difference. The invitation opened by Spivak’s notion of planetarity works against the hope-less scenarios for future international relations painted by some scholars about the Anthropocene. Pessimists paint a bleak picture in which Anthropocene politics are reduced to management of the post-apocalyptic present: the governance of polluted oceans, flooded cities and burning and desertified landscapes in which survival is all humanity can hope for. In contrast, planetarity and what is seen as the collapse of the modernist universe create unique possibilities to decolonize international relations, to reflect again on who counts as human, to become attuned to the needs of non-humans, and to engage with and learn from non-Western indigenous cosmologies. In turn, this has the potential to reinvigorate debates about renegotiating and re-politicizing security, participation and well-being, and to establish new forms of political cooperation. However, this is unlikely to happen while Anthropocene debates remain decidedly Eurocentric in focus and outlook.

Indigenous scholars and race theorists have raised serious concerns about the Euro-Western academy’s current approach to human-environmental relationships (see Chap. 24), which they argue erases race, colonialism and slavery and poses difficult challenges for theorizing the Anthropocene. Posthumanism and the ontological turn have been challenged as Eurocentric because they erase non-European ontologies and refer instead to a foundational ontological split between nature and culture as if it is universal (Sundberg 2014). As Todd (2015, 245–246) argues, scholars critical of this Eurocentrism re-centre the locus of thought, offering a reconfiguration of understandings of

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human-­environmental relations towards praxis that acknowledges the critical importance of land, bodies, movement, race, colonialism and sexuality. For example, Sundberg (2014, 39) urges scholars to enact the ‘pluriverse’ (a world in which many worlds fit) as a decolonial tool, in her case drawing on Zapatista principles of “walking the world into being” (see also Kothari et al. 2019). For Sundberg, walking and movement bring a decolonizing methodology to fruition because, “As we humans move, work, play, and narrate with a multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct worlds/ontologies”. Planetary thinking, therefore, can help decolonize the Anthropocene by acknowledging and embracing difference, in contrast to global thinking, which assumes universal planetary sameness.

Decolonizing the Anthropocene and Provincializing Eurocentric Futurism Responding to the profound challenges posed by the Anthropocene requires scholars everywhere to decolonize their imaginaries. Plural democratic imaginaries in which human and non-human actors are shaping new ideas about responsible and progressive planetary futures are far removed from a foundational narrative of economic-growth-equals-modernity-equals-progress. These ideas create new ethical perspectives on nature, life and the planet that privilege “subaltern knowledges of the natural” and articulate “in unique ways the questions of diversity, difference and inter-culturality—with nature… occupying a role as actor and agent” (Escobar 2007, 198). The concern of postcolonial scholars to provincialize Europe (in its widest sense as ‘the West’) remains pertinent considering the urgency to imagine and enact responsible and progressive planetary futures, and the maintenance of colonial relationships in global geopolitics and economics. Ironically, however, this concern may have become less urgent precisely because the energies driving alternatives are no longer necessarily located in Euro-America. Western countries appear to be provincializing themselves while African, Asian and other developing countries are advancing economically, socially and politically. As Mbembe (2013) argues, the fixation in Europe and the USA with the question of immigration is jeopardizing the creation of more dynamic relations with Africa and Asia. Both Europe and the USA are building fortresses around themselves and the only other response to a receding American empire is more militarism. As Europe and the USA are withdrawing, other countries such as China, India, Turkey and (until recently)  Brazil are increasingly

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playing a role in the unfolding geopolitical and economic reconfiguration. They are also the places in which solutions are being sought to the irreconcilability of economic growth and environmental sustainability. As Europe closes its borders, countries in the global South may begin to open their borders and play a more influential role in global affairs. In this context of declining Western influence, the racist stereotypes that have been the concern of postcolonial critics perhaps also become less relevant: as Mbembe wryly observes “we should leave Europeans to deal with their own stupidities because we have more urgent tasks and projects to attend to… Europe will have to deal with its own mental illnesses, racism being the first of these” (ibid.). Despite the pessimism concerning environmental crisis, global South scholars like Mbembe are optimistic about the greater role that African, Asian and Latin American countries will play in global affairs and in theorizing futures in the Anthropocene. Planetary futures are being played out in global South countries and the economic, social, migratory and security impacts of vulnerability in these places will have profound consequences for the rest of the world. However, while a few scholars are engaging with non-Western, indigenous knowledges to theorize the Anthropocene and ways of surviving (Todd 2015), mainstream debates largely neglect the ideas emerging in these places. There is thus a need to reflect on what it means to decolonize and inhabit the Anthropocene through an engagement with non-Western creativity, thought and praxis concerning ecological crisis, the precarity of human and non-human life, and relationships between land, people and nature. There is a need to investigate ways of responding to the deep ethical, social and political challenge of learning from those least responsible for and yet most affected by the Anthropocene, whose knowledges have historically been marginalized and erased by hegemonic relationships of power, and who have long resisted those systems creating the current crisis. There is also a need to explore how alternative humanist critiques of the Anthropocene might be enacted while harnessing the potential for the idea of Anthropocene to challenge political imagination. Placing the Anthropocene perhaps opens a way forward: for example, the notion of an African Anthropocene offers a productive paradox that holds planetary temporality and specific human lives in a single frame (Hecht 2018) (see Box 5.3). Watson (2014, 93) argues that engaging with these new ways of thinking emerging beyond the West—what he calls “subalternist cosmopolitics”—is important for the creation of “cohabitable worlds and corollary forms of local governance with actors that don’t share the cognitive, bodily, and metaphysical forms of human being” (see also Sarr 2019). He argues that the idea that the current political system “constructed to represent human interests and

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constituencies” might be able to “know and care for the ontologically disparate worlds and experiences of other-than-human beings may amount to the present era’s predominant ideological delusion” (ibid.). In other words, our political systems cannot act ecologically because, as artefacts of previous eras in which Western notions of modernity and progress were considered universal, they were not designed to do so. The more precarious present age thus requires more heterogeneous and experimental forms of governance in which one group of humans should not exercise sovereignty over other groups of humans and humans as a whole “should not exercise sovereignty over the entirety to the Earth as we know (and don’t know) it” (ibid.). Again, this points to pluriversal thinking and to the idea of a co-inhabited cosmos as critical to producing more just and liveable worlds. Rather than dwelling on doom-laden scenarios of the inevitability of catastrophe or apocalypse, pluriversal thinking generates the kind of optimism that both Western scholars, like Haraway and Tsing, and First Nations, Aboriginal and indigenous scholars are cultivating by exploring “alternative politics of more-than-human entanglements” (Tsing 2015, 135). The hope is that this might create the possibilities for new commons in the ruins of capitalism from which humans and non-humans can survive. Postcolonial approaches are important in this radical rethinking of life in the Anthropocene because, in their focus on racial politics rooted in colonial and neo-colonial socio-economic relations, they offer alternatives to the technocratic approaches to dealing with current challenges of addressing climate change, sustainability, food security and so forth. These challenges cannot be addressed without also acknowledging continuing dispossession, uneven economic development and social inequality that emerged in the colonial past. As Klein (2016, 11) argues, Edward Said may not have had time for tree-huggers, but tree-huggers must urgently make time for Said—and for a great many other anti-imperialist, postcolonial thinkers—because without that knowledge, there is no way to understand how we ended up in this dangerous place, or to grasp the transformations required to get us out.

Arguments such as these are all the more pertinent considering recent debates about the whiteness of climate justice movements such as FridaysForFuture and Extinction Rebellion.

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Box 5.3  African Philosophies and the Anthropocene People across the African continent have been living with and adapting to a high degree of climate variability and associated risks for centuries, but recent decades have seen accelerated rates of change and increased incidences of climatic disasters. Accelerated climate change, population growth and natural resource depletion pose significant threats to natural assets (land productivity, livestock, water and energy resources), capabilities (health, nutrition, education) and human development, which are exacerbated by ecological fragility and two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africans needing to make a living from the environment. However, this also creates fertile ground for new ways of thinking. African philosophies such as Ubuntu provide one possibility from which to theorize life in the Anthropocene in innovative ways, which could have profound implications for thinking differently about humanism, posthumanism and the rights of other species. Ubuntu is a relational understanding of the process of becoming and being remade as a person through the ethical interaction with what or who is not her: a person is a person through other people, or ‘I am because of you’. In contrast to Cartesian logic of ‘I think therefore I am’, Ubuntu encapsulates an essence of humanity based on belonging, participating, sharing and affirming this humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his, her or its uniqueness and difference. Whereas humanism is anthropocentric, Ubuntu as a philosophy of humanness overcomes the anthropocentric-ecocentric divide to view human life as embedded in and related to ecological life (Le Grange 2015): humanity is affirmed through its relatedness to human and non-human others. It also opens new ways of engaging with the non-human a site of intervention, since as a category this also depends on the different notions and boundaries of ‘the human’ in the relational ontologies being investigated. Mbembe (2013) argues that the African continent has three attributes, rooted in African philosophies such as Ubuntu, which are creative and increasingly significant in a contemporary world of rapid change and profound uncertainty. The first is multiplicity—the profusion of cultures, knowledges, world-views and philosophies that colonialism set out to erase (e.g. through the imposition of individuality and monotheistic Christianity), but which endure and are a resource for remaking the continent. The second is circulation and mobility—the idea of the African historical cultural experience being one in which almost everything was on the move. In contrast to the Hegelian notion of Africa as a closed continent, Mbembe argues, “it was always a continent that was on the move” (ibid.) and he suggests that this concept of movement can be mobilized in creative ways to deal with contemporary challenges. The third is composition—African lives are compositional and relational, for example in the ways in which the economy is lived on an everyday basis or in the ways in which people relate to one another, with the subject understood as being made and remade through the ethical interaction with what or who is not him or her. Mbembe’s point is that Africa can make a creative contribution to the world of ideas and praxis that can be to the benefit of the world at precisely the moment of Western withdrawal (see also Sarr 2019). This, he argues, has implications for all manner of things in an age of ecological crisis: “theories of exchange, theories of democracy, theories of human rights, and the rights of other species” (ibid.). Moreover, he argues that “the very future of our planet is being played out in Africa” (Mbembe 2015) in the responses to the challenges posed by ecological crises, climate change, refugees and so forth.

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Conclusion The ethos that underpins much of postcolonialism, decolonialism and critical posthumanism will remain relevant in responding to the current ecological crisis and the challenges it poses. As Mbembe (2016) argues, this ethos is concerned with reopening the future of the planet to all who inhabit it and learning how to share it again—“amongst but also between its human and non-human inhabitants, between the multiple species that populate our planet”. Any possibility of surviving the current ecological crisis rests on a growing awareness of our precariousness as a species in the face of ecological threats and fostering a postcolonial, more-than-human ethos of sharing. The planetary turn is still unfolding, but it signals a conceptual shift that realizes one aim of postcolonialism in that Europe and the West will be thoroughly provincialized. As Mbembe (2016) argues, “older senses of time and space based on linear notions of development and progress are being replaced by newer senses of time and of futures founded on more open narrative models”. Universal Western thinking is no longer assumed by critics to provide solutions to the present crisis. However, as Schmidt (2019, 729) argues, universal policymaking and ideas of ‘neoliberalism without nature’—a neoliberalism that “retains the structure of sustainable development” but dispenses with the idea “that nature provides a stable backdrop for fulfilling human needs from one generation to the next”—are already shaping new notions of belonging in the Anthropocene. Critical scholarship has yet to gain purchase in these realms. To have any relevance in understanding these shifts and their possible outcomes, IR and the wider social sciences need to remain attuned to the fact that China and other Asian, African and Latin American countries will undoubtedly play significant and possibly quite divergent roles in shaping these futures. Decolonizing the Anthropocene requires a deeper engagement with the creativity, philosophies and praxis emerging in these parts of the world, and especially in those ‘shadow spaces’ created historically by hegemonic relationships of power and knowledge. As Schmidt (2017) argues, it is in these spaces from which peripheral communities and learning practices may contribute to enhancing resilience through the co-creation of new framings of human-Earth relationships and ideas about how to transition to them. IR and the wider social sciences have a responsibility to widen the range of theories and praxis concerning the future, and to develop a radical and transformative project for scholarship on planetary well-being in response to the unprecedented social and environmental challenges that characterize what has come to be known as the Anthropocene.

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Key Points 1. The concept of the Anthropocene has been criticized as Eurocentric and part of the naming practices of the West. Its roots in colonialism, and the racialized inequalities and dispossession that are a feature of the Anthropocene, are often overlooked. 2. The Anthropocene poses challenges for postcolonial theory in deciphering the politics of otherness and contributing towards a progressive politics capable of responding to the ecological crisis. 3. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attempt to view the human simultaneously as a geophysical force and as a political agent marks a significant shift in postcolonial thinking about the human, but fails to recognize differentiated vulnerability on all scales of human society. 4. Gayatri Spivak’s notion of planetarity is an alternative to universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and planetary change, and challenges us to decolonize knowledge about the world by knowing it from outside of the categories of Western thought. 5. Pluriversal thinking—based on the idea of a world in which many worlds fit—can help decolonize the Anthropocene by acknowledging and embracing difference, and responding to the deep ethical, social and political challenge of learning from those least responsible for yet most affected by the Anthropocene, whose knowledges have historically been marginalized and erased by hegemonic relationships of power. Key Questions 1 . In what ways is the Anthropocene a Eurocentric concept? 2. What challenges does the idea of the Anthropocene present to postcolonial theory and why? 3. In what ways have postcolonial scholars responded to these challenges? 4. Why is it important that IR learns from knowledges that have historically been marginalized? Acknowledgement  Some of the ideas discussed here draw upon work published in Chapter 8 of my book Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development (Routledge, 2019). I am grateful to Routledge for permission to reuse and rework this material in this chapter.

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Further Reading Baldwin, W.  A. 2017. Postcolonial Futures: Climate, Race, and the Yet-to-Come. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24: 292–305. Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. 2014. The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative. The Anthropocene Review 1(1): 62–69. Stoler, A. L. 2016. Duress. Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press. Tsing, A. et  al. (eds) 2017. The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. University of Minnesota Press. Weizman, E. and Sheikh, F. 2015. The Conflict Shoreline. Steidl Books. Yusoff, K. 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.

References Baldwin, W.  A. 2017. Postcolonial futures: Climate, race, and the yet-to-come. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24: 292–305. Bloch, E. 1918. The Spirit of Utopia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2009. The climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197–222. Chakrabarty, D. 2012. Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change. New Literary History 43(1): 1–18. Chakrabarty, D. 2014. Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.  Critical Inquiry 41(1): 1–23. Crow, S. 2012. Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (Second Edition). Oakland, CA: PM Press. Dalby, S. 2016. Framing the Anthropocene: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Anthropocene Review 3(1): 33–51. Escobar, A. 2007. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 179–210. Fargues, P. 2017. Four Decades of Cross-Mediterranean Undocumented Migration to Europe: A Review of the Evidence. Geneva: International Organization for Migration, United Nations. Ghosh, A. 2017. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, P. 2015. Offshore Humanism. RGS-IBG, edited lecture, The Antipode RGS-­ IBG Lecture. Retrieved from  https://antipodefoundation.org/2015/12/10/paul-­ gilroy-­offshore-­humanism/ [accessed 8 February 2021].

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Gore, T. 2015. Extreme Carbon Inequality. Oxfam International Report. Retrieved from  https://oi-­files-­d8-­prod.s3.eu-­west-­2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-­public/file_attachments/mb-­extreme-­carbon-­inequality-­021215-­en.pdf [accessed 17 February 2021]. Grosfoguel, R. 2012. Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Decolonial Pluri-­ versalism from Aimé Césaire to the Zapatistas. Transmodernity Spring: 88–103. Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. 2018. Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice. In Clarke, A.  and Haraway, D.  (eds)  Making Kin Not Populations. Reconceiving Generations. Prickly Paradigm Press. Hecht, G. 2018. Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene. Cultural Anthropology 33(1): 109–141. IPCC. 2018. Global Warming of 1.5%: Special Report. Switzerland: IPCC. Retrieved from  https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf [accessed 17 February 2021]. Jazeel, T. 2011. Spatializing difference beyond cosmopolitanism: Rethinking planetary futures. Theory, Culture & Society 28(5): 75–97. Klein, N. 2016. Let them drown: The violence of othering in a warming world. London Review of Books, 2 June, 11–14. Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A. et al. (eds) 2019. Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary. Tulika Books/CUP. Krishnaswamy, R. and Hawley, J. 2008. Planetarity and the Postcolonial. In R. Krishnaswamy and Hawley, J. (eds) The Postcolonial and the Global. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 105–108. Le Grange, L. 2015. Ubuntu/Botho as Ecophilosophy & Ecosophy. Journal of Human Ecology 49(3): 301–308. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. 2014. ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’. The Anthropocene Review 1(1), 62–69. Mbembe, A. 2013. ‘Africa and the Future’ an interview with Achille Mbembe by Thomas Blaser, 20 November. https://africasacountry.com/2013/11/africa-­and-­ the-­future-­an-­interview-­with-­achille-­mbembe/ [accessed 14 February 2021]. Mbembe, A. 2015. ‘Discussing African Futures’ an interview with Achille Mbembe by Damola Durosomo, 9 November.  http://www.okayafrica.com/achille-­ mbembe-­african-­futures-­interview/ [accessed 14 February 2021]. Mbembe, A. 2016. Africa in the New Century. https://africasacountry.com/2016/06/ africa-­in-­the-­new-­century/ (accessed 09/01/20). McEwan, C. 2019. Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development. London: Routledge. McKittrick, K. 2013. Plantation Futures.  Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism 17(3_42): 1–15. Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sarr, F. 2019. Afrotopia (translated by D.S. Burk). University of Minnesota Press.

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Schmidt, J. 2017. Social Learning in the Anthropocene: Novel Challenges, Shadow Networks, and Ethical practices. Journal of Environmental Management 193: 373–380. Schmidt, J. 2019. The Moral Geography of the Earth System. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 44: 721–734. Sidaway, J., Woon, C. Y. and Jacobs, J. M. 2014. Planetary Postcolonialism. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35: 4–21. Spivak, G. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Colombia University Press. Spivak, G. 2012. An Aesthetic Education in An Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steffen, W., Grinevald, J. et al. 2011. The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A 369: 842–867. Stoler, A. L. 2016. Duress. Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sundberg, J. 2014. Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies 21(1): 33–47. Todd, Z. 2015. Indigenizing the Anthropocene. In H. Davis and Turpin, E. (eds) Art in the Anthropocene. Open Humanities Press, 241–254. Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Durham: Duke University Press. Tsing, A. et al. (eds). 2017. The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. University of Minnesota Press. Watson, M. 2014. Derrida, Stengers, Latour and Subalternist Cosmopolitics. Theory, Culture & Society 31: 75–98. Weizman, E. and Sheikh, F. 2015. The Conflict Shoreline. Steidl Books. Whyte, K. 2017. Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes 55(1): 153–162. Yusoff, K. 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press.

6 Geoengineering: A New Arena of International Politics Olaf Corry and Nikolaj Kornbech

Introduction: ‘Fixing’ the Climate Crisis? The ever-rising concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere and the seeming reluctance or inability to effectively address drivers of emissions has led some to search for new technological interventions to deal with global warming. Known collectively as ‘geoengineering’ or ‘climate engineering’, such methods are usually defined as large-scale intentional inventions in Earth systems for climate purposes (Shepherd 2009). Some are designed to artificially cool the planet by reducing incoming sunlight, for example by injecting sulphur in the lower stratosphere, while others seek to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them, either via intervening in ecosystems or directly through human-built machinery. All are interventions conceived to act after excess emissions have accumulated into the atmosphere, rather than tools to prevent or adapt to such emissions. As such, optimists see in them a possible escape from the quagmire of global climate politics, even if all are still at the early stages of research and development. Sunlight-reducing

O. Corry (*) University of Leeds, Leeds, UK e-mail: [email protected] N. Kornbech Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_6

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methods are often considered high-leverage yet low cost and as such, it is argued, could make the problem of cost-sharing in global climate politics less acute. By promising future reduction of atmospheric CO2, carbon removal techniques have raised the tempting prospect of having (or prolonging) high-­ carbon economies while handling climate change. Others worry that they amount to merely the latest in a series of technological promises that have failed to materialise but have delayed serious decarbonisation: so-called technologies of prevarication (McLaren and Markusson 2020). However, while IR analysis has been sparse, the emerging international politics of geoengineering appears to share some of the problems of existing climate politics, while also generating new ones. Not only are there potential unwanted and unknown environmental side effects, some technologies may also generate new international climate dilemmas. Further, experts agree emissions reductions will still be needed even in the most optimistic scenarios and, though some geoengineering may be necessary, it may also risk exacerbating political obstacles to the acceleration of conventional greenhouse gas mitigation. Given this Anthropocene dilemma, we suggest the standard rationalist approach to climate change in International Relations (IR) is not sufficient. Its headline problem of self-interested states negotiating global agreements in the face of collective bargaining dilemmas is only one dimension of how international relations and geoengineering matter to each other. In this chapter, we introduce geoengineering as a new arena of international politics and explain why hopeful technical explorations of alternative climate strategies have not properly factored in the international. We ask 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, we will draw on two high-profile areas of geoengineering research, namely stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) (see Boxes 6.1 and 6.2), to illustrate some of the issues that geoengineering poses for 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? To conclude, we consider what ‘the international’ implies for theorising IR in the ‘Anthropocene’ more widely.

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What Are Geoengineering Technologies? All ideas for geoengineering involve large-scale interventions that intentionally alter the global climate to ameliorate global warming. This definition excludes unintended changes to the global climate as well as local weather modification, for example, cloud seeding. Geoengineering techniques (or ideas about them) are diverse but are often put into two overall categories based on distinct mechanisms. They involve different interactions with society and the international system; the international politics of each are, therefore, dissimilar in important ways. The first kind is known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or negative emissions technologies (NETs). These techniques aim to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them safely at a scale that either slows or reverses rising atmospheric concentrations. Some are ecosystem-based and rely on stimulating carbon sinks in ecosystems (e.g. forest enhancement or protecting and extending mangroves) while others rely on extensively manufactured infrastructures to do the heavy lifting (e.g. ‘artificial trees’ otherwise known as direct air capture (DAC)). One of the most commonly discussed forms of CDR involves combining energy production from crops (bioenergy) with carbon capture and storage (BECCS; see Box 6.1). While carbon capture and storage prototypes exist and bioenergy from crops has a longer, though problematic, pedigree, linking the two in the development of BECCS at a globally consequential scale is untried. Huge uncertainty exists over whether BECCS and, indeed, any combination of negative emissions approaches can be delivered at a scale that would make a meaningful difference to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (Anderson and Peters 2016). Despite this, negative emissions have already gained wide prominence in climate policy and appear in huge quantities in some of the most influential mitigation scenarios. In their report on limiting climate change at 1.5 °C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included large-scale BECCS deployment in three out of four high-level pathways (IPCC 2018, 14). Many states and large corporations have also set ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas targets which imply some or all of their emissions would be in effect sucked back out of the air; major fossil fuel companies and airlines have also announced their intention to use NETs to achieve these targets (ICRLP 2020). While some measure of NETs may now be unavoidable if safer levels of atmospheric CO2 are to be achieved, this has raised concerns that NETs may prove counterproductive by causing mitigation deterrence: when the prospect of being able to remove GHGs in the future changes incentives and planning scenarios, potentially delays or prevents near-term emissions cuts.

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Box 6.1  Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage BECCS is currently the main CDR technology currently included in IPCC’s 1.5 °C scenarios (IPCC 2018, 14), largely as an artefact of the way the underlying models have been developed and operated (Mander et al. 2017, 6038). Despite it, therefore, being a central plank in current plans to deal with climate change, it remains a speculative technology at scale. BECCS involves energy production from plant biomass while capturing some of the carbon dioxide emitted during combustion and then storing it indefinitely (geological reservoirs are the most typical proposed locations). However, to deliver global impacts, a massive expansion of plantation crops or forests would be necessary—one to two times the area of India according to some estimates (Smith et al. 2016, 46), if BECCS were to do all of the work asked of CDR in climate model projections of the future. This scale of land use would impact the land available for food production, and BECCS would be subject to resource constraints, including soil nutrients and water use (Smith et al. 2016). Social implications of large-scale land use change are also unavoidable. Experiences with related technologies such as forest carbon sequestration and biofuel production indicate that adverse social effects, such as land grabbing and population displacement, are likely absent concerted political intervention (Buck 2016, 164).

Proposals for solar radiation management (SRM) would attempt to cool the planet directly by reflecting more incoming solar radiation. The most prominent proposal involves injecting an aerosol (e.g. sulphur) into the lower stratosphere to increase the reflectivity of the Earth, producing a cooling effect (see Box 6.2), but there are other ideas such as increasing the albedo (reflective effect) of marine clouds or gene manipulation of crops to make them lighter in colour for the same purpose. The contemporary wave of research into SRM started in 2006 when prominent scientists argued that SRM ought to be explored as a possible ‘plan B’, in case the ‘plan A’ of mitigation and adaptation fails (Crutzen 2006; Shepherd 2009). In recent years, increasing concern over climate ‘tipping points’ (Steffen et al. 2018) have led some scientists and policy advisors to go further, advocating for SRM as a temporary supplement to emissions cuts and CDR (Honegger et  al. 2018, 18; MacMartin et  al. 2018). The IPCC’s next assessment report is also expected to devote considerably more attention to SRM measures (IPCC 2017a, b). Like all technological innovations, research into geoengineering is structured by ideas about how it will, or should be, bound together with society. In this sense, geoengineering can be understood as sociotechnical imaginaries, which connect prospective material technologies with “publicly performed visions of desirable futures” for a society (Jasanoff 2015, 4). The dominant sociotechnical imaginary of geoengineering is characterised by a planetary framing that tends to hide to full implications of the international: the

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Box 6.2  Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is an experimental solar radiation management (SRM) technology with potential high-leverage global effects. In some scenarios, planes or high-altitude balloons would spray an aerosol into the atmosphere 20  km above sea level, blocking out a small fraction of incoming sunlight and thereby cooling the planet. However, the effects of such interventions are highly uncertain and to some extent unpredictable. Since the effects of SAI cannot be empirically tested except by actual deployment, research has hitherto relied on simulations in Earth System models (Irvine et  al. 2016, 828). Modelling studies show significant variation in their results, and there is uncertainty and disagreement over which variables have most significance (McLaren 2018, 211). However, simulations suggest  that SAI cannot ‘restore’ earlier climates or mask the effects of high GHG concentrations perfectly; for instance, SAI would affect temperature and precipitation differently to the effects of a reduction in greenhouse gases. It also appears that SAI deployment would involve trade-offs that could leave some regions ‘worse off’ than others (Irvine et  al. 2016), although this depends on the size of ‘regions’ and parameters examined. Some studies have suggested that SAI may cause worrying regional disruptions, for example, that the Amazon might experience severe rainfall reduction (Jones et al. 2018). Another concern is that the effects of a sudden disruption of SAI, known as a ‘termination shock’, would cause unprecedented rapid climate change (McCusker et al. 2014) although some argue that policymakers could easily prevent this (Parker and Irvine 2018).

co-­existence of multiple societies (Rosenberg 2016). In what follows, we explore the implications of bringing the international into the understanding of geoengineering. We show how despite being billed as a useful supplement, geoengineering may be politically infeasible and end up complicating climate politics even further.

The Elusive International Geoengineering has so far been debated, studied and assessed without taking the international dimension fully into account (Corry 2017a). On the one hand, for climate modellers, the world is one interconnected place of physical stocks and flows, and the role of human society is understood as external inputs to this system (chiefly greenhouse gas emissions and modification of carbon sinks) (Demeritt 2001; Taylor 2015, 26–45). On the other hand, the environment in IR is typically not theorised as being part of the international system—at the most, it is seen as an external part of the world in the form of resources to be exploited or something  in need of governance (Corry 2017b, 2020).

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Most of the climate modelling that simulates the possible risks and benefits of stratospheric aerosol injection, for example, excludes “geopolitical strife over attempts to implement geoengineering” (Kravitz et al. 2014, 6). For analytical reasons, many climate model studies assume a “central planner framing” (e.g. Keith and MacMartin 2015, 201) or a ‘global utility function’—both of which leave out the many implications of the world being divided into multiple uneven societies: ‘the international’ (Rosenberg 2016). Metaphors of SRM also tend to project the idea that a singular global actor would be doing the global cooling (or carbon sequestration), for example, as a medical drug that a doctor could choose to administer. Here, not only is the geoengineer singular, but the Earth is by implication an individual body or ‘patient’ in need of therapy (see Nerlich and Jaspal 2012). Similarly, one science writer compared SRM with a putative singular actor “reaching for the planetary car keys”, relying on the idea of Earth as a car and the geoengineer as the driver (Kintisch 2010, 232). Yet the delivery of a global-scale SRM intervention in the climate system would necessarily take place within the international system and thus would be marked by the many consequences of a politically fragmented and uneven world of multiple societies. By one account, this is the essence of the international: that social life is never singular as long as there is societal multiplicity and that this has far-reaching consequences (Rosenberg 2016). This covers the obvious international diplomacy and institutions or regime-building (Young 1989) around climate change but also the causes and drivers of anthropogenic climate change, and even ostensibly ‘domestic’ factors such as political regimes of technological innovation. All realms of social life, including domestic reactions to climate change, are almost invariably conditioned by, or take into account, the existence of an international world of multiple uneven societies. Only in limited ways has the international featured in debates about geoengineering. Some modelling studies look into potential regional effects of SRM on climates, but this typically examines only differences in climate outcomes between regions rather than the full range of complications arising from the co-existence of multiple different societies. Societies inevitably have different histories, develop different political and economic systems, harbour different understandings of climate fairness, of themselves and their security, all resulting in different needs from and expectations of climate control (Wiertz 2016) and widely diverging perceived interests and strategies vis-a-vis other societies. The interaction of multiple societies will, therefore, deeply affect any processes related to research, development or governance of geoengineering. For instance, development of a technological capability in one state may prompt or guide similar or different initiatives in others, as seen in other cutting-edge technology spheres such as artificial intelligence (Armstrong et al. 2016).

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For its part, ‘climate change IR’ has been dominated by ‘environmental multilateralism’: a focus on state negotiations and the international institutional regime around mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions (Corry and Stevenson 2017, 6). The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its annual Conference of Parties (COP) meetings have arguably been the main events through which such IR scholars have digested the intersection of the international and the climate. Such focus on diplomacy, summitry and (failed) agreements assumes that states are the main (though not the sole) actors in global climate politics and that institutions and norms to coordinate action among self-interested actors are the key policy question (Keohane 2005; Young 1989; Keohane and Victor 2011). The sparse IR literature on geoengineering has often taken this overall approach (Horton and Reynolds 2016; Reynolds 2019). Climate conflict (Nordås and Gleditsch 2007; Hsiang and Burke 2014) and wider questions of ‘climate security’ (though the content of this varies, see McDonald 2013) have also attracted attention, emphasising the anarchic backdrop to climate politics or its tendency to be drawn into security politics. Finally, another smaller, but growing, cluster of research focuses on the role of political economy, the international system and nonhuman nature (Malm and Hornborg 2014; Moore 2015; Newell and Lane 2017), emphasising historical materialist themes in social, technological and ecological interactions (Corry 2020).

Geoengineering and the International This section considers geoengineering first as a challenge of environmental multilateralism, then in terms of climate anarchy and finally through the lens of materialist international approaches. Rationalist approaches to geoengineering place decisive emphasis on costs and benefits to rational actors and the possible multilateral responses to a basic collective action dilemma where free-riding is the main challenge. SRM has drawn most of the attention of IR scholars interested in geoengineering because the basic incentive structure is considered different compared to CDR and emissions cuts: For Barrett, “Because [solar geoengineering] consists of a single project, it can be undertaken unilaterally or minilaterally. Because of its low cost, the incentives for it to be tried are very strong” (2008, 50). Due to their high-leverage and global impacts, solar methods are thought to “pose grave and novel challenges to governance” (Parson 2017, 2). A typical research question concerning ‘governing’ stratospheric aerosol injection is, therefore, “what international capacity and authority would be needed to make

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informed, prudent, legitimate decisions regarding proposed large-scale interventions, whether for research or operational deployment?” (Parson 2017, 3). While different national laws exist regulating environmental interventions, there is currently no specific formal international mechanism with the explicit purpose of regulating SRM. Existing frameworks designed for other purposes provide only a patchy regime. The UNFCCC’s focus on greenhouse gas concentrations means that SRM methods, such as stratospheric aerosol injection, mainly fall outside its remit. The Environmental Modification treaty, ENMOD, prohibits hostile use of environmental modification, but this would not cover SRM for peaceful purposes, and not all states have signed up to the treaty. Interventions that might affect ozone could fall under the Montreal Protocol while sulphur interventions could be covered by agreements designed to curb acid rain. Similarly, the London Protocol on Dumping of Waste at Sea provides some constraints for interventions such as ocean iron fertilisation that involve releasing matter into the ocean. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is perhaps the most directly relevant treaty for SRM, since it is probable that large-scale SRM would affect biodiversity in some way. The CBD Conference of Parties is also the only major international legal forum to have issued statements on SRM, most recently in 2016. These non-binding statements have expressed precaution, calling for more research on potential biodiversity impacts and urging states not to deploy geoengineering (both NETs and SRM) in absence of thorough risk assessments (Reynolds 2018). Notably, however, the US is not a party to the CBD. Thus, certain aspects of SRM might be covered by existing international agreements, but the absence of substantial and explicit provisions mean that it is highly uncertain how the current international legal framework would respond to SRM deployment, whether uni- or multilateral. This has led many scholars and policymakers to argue that new governing mechanisms are needed, including in a landmark Royal Society report (Shepherd 2009, ix) which did, however, give the go-ahead for accelerated research and development. Scenarios for how a multilateral regime might emerge in the context of differing interests tend to rely on rationalist assumptions to construct scenarios where cooperation develops under conditions of anarchy (e.g. Guzman 2008). Some suggest a small group may start up a ‘mini-lateral’ set of rules that other states would then be incentivised to join in order to exert influence over the emerging regime (Lloyd and Oppenheimer 2014). Others use formal game theory and estimates of stratospheric aerosol injection’s potential regional impacts to explore potential coalitions in favour of it (Ricke et al. 2013). However, international agreements on much less controversial environmental questions have proven extremely difficult to achieve and sustain,

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and early indications from UN negotiations on geoengineering governance do not look promising (see Box 6.3). For others, a multilateral governance imaginary is too optimistic and overlooks the basic anarchic dynamics of the international. As the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, the world had huge incentives to cooperate, since no country would be safe without all being safe, and coordination of production of vital equipment could have optimised global supply and distribution. Yet the US suspended its funding of the only existing multilateral health institution, the World Health Organization (WHO), and competition in procurement of personal protective equipment was rife. Realist IR has traditionally explained such outcomes as a result of the anarchic structure of the international, whereas constructivists consider such outcomes contingent on certain forms of interaction and identity-formation producing particular ‘logics of anarchy’ (Wendt 1999). Both, however, would argue that the institutionalist approach mistakenly treats the international climate problem as one of coordination or cooperation on the basis of common interests and outlooks. It cannot be assumed that states would use high-leverage geoengineering capabilities to some universal aim of global betterment, nor their rational self-­interest in projected temperature or precipitation outcomes. Conceivably, “rather than under-provision, the main threats [of SAI] are of competitive, predatory, parochial, and other unethical forms of provision” (Gardiner 2013, 524), as states seek to further their own competitive interests. Developing the ability to intentionally alter the global climatic system would, even if pursued for reasons related to a ‘common good’, amount to a strategic power resource, potentially affecting other states’ material interests and perceptions. As Chalecki and Ferrari note “(a)ny geoengineering technology on a scale large enough to shift the global climate has the potential to inflict damage of the same magnitude” (2018, 86). Partly, such questions of conflict versus cooperation depend on the prevailing ‘mood music’ of the international system, that is, whether tensions are high in a culture of anarchy dominated by enmity or one characterised by friendliness and cooperation. If climate problems are increasingly seen through a lens of ‘security’ and ‘climate emergency’, the potential rises for climate technologies to become seen as part of anarchic security dilemmas. But technical features of geoengineering technologies may also play a role. Stratospheric aerosol injection could become a facilitating condition for the securitisation of climate change (Wæver 2000, 253) and make it easier to turn climate change into a ‘security’ issue: one in which extraordinary measures are justified by reference to an existential threat. This could be by reference to extreme weather, migrants (weaponised politically as a threat) or via food insecurity. By introducing the possibility of intentional climate change, a geoengineered

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climate becomes more identifiable as a threat, since it could be plausibly attributed to a particular actor (Corry 2017a). The hope that SRM would ‘buy time’ to let states agree on climate mitigation (e.g. Whaley and Leinen 2018) would then be sabotaged by such securitisation undermining the multilateral climate regime. Added to this, military actors are likely to be involved in deploying or protecting stratospheric aerosol infrastructure linking it closer to national security dynamics (Lockyer and Symons 2019, 487). In addition, the multilateral and realist accounts may not consider how societies have different “civic epistemologies” (Jasanoff 2010: 239) that structure how scientific evidence interacts with policymaking. This was a major obstacle during the first negotiations over geoengineering governance (see Box 6.3). Such issues make it difficult to agree on how a multilateral institution should govern research and deployment, even before different national interests are considered. Box 6.3  The UN Environment Assembly, Nairobi, 2019: The First International Negotiations over Geoengineering The 2019 UN Environment Assembly (UNEA), held in Nairobi, Kenya, saw state representatives coming together to discuss a UN resolution on geoengineering for the first time. Switzerland presented what many considered to be a modest initiative, proposing an expert study of risks and benefits, including ways of adequately governing each technology. However, the negotiations almost immediately ran into trouble. On the surface, the main disagreements were whether SRM and CDR should be included under a single study; whether it was too early to commission a study; and whether UNEA or the IPCC was the appropriate venue for assessment. The US and Saudi Arabia wanted SRM and CDR clearly distinguished, claimed a UNEA-based study would ‘distract’ the IPCC and, in the end, argued it was simply ‘too early’ for a study. Others agreed to distinguish the two approaches but resisted a watered-down text that omitted references to existing global governance. The EU and Bolivia insisted on a reference to the Precautionary Principle. In the end, the Swiss delegation withdrew the resolution. The outcome was subject to different interpretations. Some found it hard to believe the sincerity of the US and Saudi’s worries for the IPCC. They pointed to the long track record of climate obstruction and the vested interests of the world’s biggest oil producers in leaving particularly CDR ungoverned. Deeper knowledgeissues also surfaced: some states thought of climate as a technical problem. Their main question for geoengineering was ‘will it work?’ and scientific climate models were assumed to be the best knowledge base for decision-­making. By contrast, others used North-South inequalities and the concept of climate justice as their frame of reference, attributing geoengineering with a problematic potential to perpetuate unequal power relations. Still others, guided by the precautionary principle, were mainly concerned about what was not known about geoengineering, considering further investigation of uncertainties and side effects, technical as well as political, the most important matter. Regardless, the Nairobi negotiations were a warning signal that geoengineering is not immune to the international complications so familiar from existing climate politics.

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Other approaches such as International Political Economy of the Environment (IPEE), drawing on a materialist tradition, argue that two decades of overriding concern with environmental agreements between states have “allowed little room for engagement with, and theorisation of, causation, social relations and the politics and possibilities of transformation” (Newell and Lane 2017, 137). One central figure, David Harvey, laments that the dominant social formation, capital, while at the heart of the cause of environmental destruction, “is able to displace responsibility for environmental problems and circumvent calls for regulation” (quoted in Newell and Lane 2017, 143). The solution advocated is, therefore, more international analysis of the processes and structures that drive environmental change, including the economic systems and distributions of power underpinning the state system. Jason Moore has characterised the global world system and the Earth system as effectively inseparable: global nature is today permeated by global capitalism which requires continuous and expanding supplies of ‘cheap nature’ in the form of unpriced or underpaid work, resources, energy or food. Successive waves of exploitation or appropriation of free or cheap ecosystem services are gradually exhausted or monetised (gain a price tag, e.g. carbon pricing), causing economic crisis. This triggers attempts to secure new sources of cheap nature, for example, via colonisation or exploration in new pristine habitats, to stave off system crisis yet again (Moore 2015). In this framework, geoengineering of both types can be seen in relation not just to multilateral institutions or in terms of a security dilemma between states. The techniques must also be recognised as part-and-parcel of patterns of uneven international appropriation and exchange of resources, power and risks. Geoengineering makes for new forms of international interaction, playing into existing power differentials and sustaining or disrupting patterns in the ‘metabolism’ between human societies and nonhuman nature. For example, large-scale deployment of BECCS envisaged in some IPCC scenarios (IPCC 2018, 14–17) could cause immense pressure on land, water and other resources (Smith et  al. 2016). Such pressures would interact with international political economy; for example, afforestation or biofuel production in the Global South may allow the Global North’s fossil fuel-based societal model to be extended, reducing the pressure to decarbonise. This may alter international flows and patterns of development as well as strategic calculations in relation to resource-rich countries. Special interests in those countries may push for CDR policies in the Global North. Brazil has lobbied the European Union to increase biofuel requirements in its Renewable Energy Directive in order to make income from exports, despite serious domestic detrimental consequences for biodiversity, human rights and rural

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livelihoods (Franco et  al. 2010, 680–683). The demand for CDR is also driven by multinational corporations like Microsoft and oil companies, buying CDR and carbon sinks in order to claim carbon neutrality, for example, by planting trees in the cheapest spots (McLaren and Burns forthcoming). The next generation may be left a ‘carbon debt’ and to pay for emissions cuts and expensive CDR that were both deferred to the future (McLaren et  al. 2019). Moreover, future negative emissions could fail to materialise, and if they do materialise, for example, via BECCS, recaptured and stored carbon may be at higher risk than unburnt fossil fuels (e.g. forest fires may re-release carbon sequestered through afforestation). Methods like stratospheric aerosols also entail novel risks, for example, to precipitation patterns that may be unequally distributed across regions.

 onclusion: Geoengineering and IR C in the Anthropocene Geoengineering may be considered the quintessentially ‘Anthropocene’ approach, designed as it is to intentionally manipulate the Earth system. What general lessons can we learn from it about international relations in the Anthropocene? Unfortunately, the current field of IR has mostly not conceived of the natural world as integral to international politics; ‘nature’ has been placed firmly on the outside, as something to be governed or perhaps exploited as a power resource (Corry 2017b). For neorealists and institutionalists especially, the physical environment is absent or taken for granted as a factor external to international politics. To remedy this, some IR scholars inspired by posthumanism and new materialism (see Chaps. 2 and 13) have proposed a new way to break with the nature/society distinction entirely. They aim to replace conventional notions of IR as anarchic politics between states with a focus on “the collective human interaction with the biosphere” (Burke et al. 2016, 501). This refocuses IR away from only states and human societies to all human and nonhuman life and their intermingling. However, collapsing the analytical boundary between nature and society does not necessarily aid analysis of the interaction between the two (Malm 2018). And while invoking the planet as a whole fits well with Anthropocene discourse, it also constructs a singular ‘humanity’ which tends to hide the role of the international, including those inequalities between groups or societies that were key drivers of climate change in the first place (Corry 2020, 423–4). Another solution favoured by historical materialists is, therefore, to focus on the ‘social metabolism’ between nature and societies: since humans are part of

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nature and derive their means of sustenance and security from it, the organisation of human activity affects the physical environment, and vice versa (Foster 2000). For IR, recognising that societies are both connected and separated through this metabolism provides an important tool to understand the international in ‘Anthropocene’ conditions (Corry 2020). This implies that climate change and geoengineering, through their effects on the social metabolism of societies, also change the workings of the international system by altering the ways in which societies are separated from and connected to each other. Conversely, international dynamics are extremely important for the feasibility of particular planetary technologies and how these ultimately end up intervening in the climate problem. In the Anthropocene, in particular, the international cannot be thought of as separate from the natural world, just as nature itself is deeply and constantly transformed by the co-existence of multiple societies. Key Points 1. Geoengineering is different from unintended or local weather modification in its intentionality and as a response to global warming. Methods are traditionally divided into carbon dioxide removal (CDR) or solar radiation management (SRM). 2. All the key technologies are currently uncertain and would involve different risks, but none would be effective replacements for continued or accelerated reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. 3. Most studies of geoengineering technologies and metaphors used to communicate them ignore or downplay the potential complications arising from the international. 4. Environmental multilateralism focuses on formal agreements and cooperation between states. A limited number of existing regimes apply to geoengineering. Rationalist assumptions about state action and incentives have a patchy record. 5. Climate anarchy approaches emphasise the links between climate and conflict, and geoengineering could interact with some of those connections including through dual use of technology, the securitisation of geoengineering and the risk that intentional manipulation of the climate could lead to new tensions. 6. Materialist approaches to the international emphasise that geoengineering would affect the underlying political economy of world politics, which could affect global power politics and lead to a transfer of risks between North and South. This puts a wider notion of climate justice than just ‘who pays’ at the centre of international geoengineering politics.

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Key Questions 1. How do carbon dioxide reduction technologies and solar radiation management techniques differ in (a) technical terms, (b) in terms of international challenges? 2. Why are mainstream IR approaches badly attuned to the role of nonhuman nature in world politics? 3. How do ‘globalist’ assumptions in climate change research and environmentalist ideas obscure the significance of the international for assessing the feasibility and desirability of geoengineering? 4. Why might ‘environmental multilateralists’ be more optimistic about the possibility of governing geoengineering technologies than analysis from ‘climate anarchy’ or the ‘materialist international’ camps? 5. To what extent does whether we will ultimately have a ‘good Anthropocene’ or a ‘bad Anthropocene’ depend on the future of the international order?

Further Reading Baskin, J. 2019. Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the End of Nature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Buck, H.  J. 2019. After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. London: Verso. Corry, O. 2017. The international politics of geoengineering: The feasibility of Plan B for tackling climate change. Security Dialogue 48(4): 297–315. Hulme, M. 2014. Can Science Fix Climate Change? A Case Against Climate Engineering. John Wiley & Sons. Keith, D. 2013. A Case for Climate Engineering. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lockyer, A. and Symons, J. 2019. The national security implications of solar geoengineering: an Australian perspective. Australian Journal of International Affairs 73(5): 485–503. McLaren, D. and Markusson, N. 2020. The co-evolution of technological promises, modelling, policies and climate change targets. Nature Climate Change 10: 392–397. Morton, O. 2015. The planet remade: How geoengineering could change the world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Horton, J. B. and Reynolds, J. L. 2016. The international politics of climate engineering: A review and prospectus for international relations. International Studies Review 18(3): 438–461. Hsiang, S. M. and Burke, M. 2014. Climate, conflict, and social stability: what does the evidence say?. Climatic Change 123(1): 39–55. ICRLP. 2020. Carbon Removal Corporate Action Tracker. Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy, American University. https://research.american.edu/carbonremoval/2020/05/07/carbon-­removal-­corporate-­action-­tracker/ [Accessed 23 May 2020]. IPCC 2017a. Decision: Chapter Outline of The Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). IPCC 2017b. Decision: Chapter Outline of The Working Group III Contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). IPCC. 2018. Summary for Policymakers. In: Global Warming of 1.5°C.  An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty. Geneva: World Meteorological Organisation. Irvine, P. J., Kravitz, B., Lawrence, M. G. and Muri, H. 2016. An overview of the Earth system science of solar geoengineering. WIREs Climate Change 7(6): 815–833. Jasanoff, S. 2010. A New Climate for Society. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 233–253. Jasanoff, S. 2015. Future Imperfect: Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity. In S.  Jasanoff and Kim, S.-H. (eds) Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, A.  C., Hawcroft, M.  K., Haywood, J.  M., Jones, A., Guo, X. and Moore, J.  C. 2018. Regional Climate Impacts of Stabilizing Global Warming at 1.5  K Using Solar Geoengineering. Earth’s Future 6(2): 230–251. Keith, D. W. and MacMartin, D. G. 2015. A temporary, moderate and responsive scenario for solar geoengineering. Nature Climate Change 5(3): 201–206. Keohane, R. O. 2005. After hegemony: Cooperation and discord in the world political economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Keohane, R. O. and Victor, D. G. 2011. The regime complex for climate change. Perspectives on Politics 9(1): 7–23. Kintisch, E. 2010. Hack the planet: science’s best hope-or worst nightmare-for averting climate catastrophe. John Wiley & Sons. Kravitz, B., MacMartin, D. G., Robock, A., Rasch, P. J., Ricke, K. L., Cole, J. N. S., Curry, C. L., Irvine, P. J., Ji, D., Keith, D.W., Kristjánsson, J. E., Moore, J. C., Muri, H., Singh, B., Tilmes, S., Watanabe, S., Yang, S., and Yoon, J.-H. 2014. A multi-model assessment of regional climate disparities caused by solar geoengineering. Environmental Research Letters 9: 074013.

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Lloyd, I.  D. and Oppenheimer, M. 2014. On the Design of an International Governance Framework for Geoengineering. Global Environmental Politics 14(2): 45–63. Lockyer, A. and Symons, J. 2019. The national security implications of solar geoengineering: an Australian perspective. Australian Journal of International Affairs 73(5): 485-503. MacMartin, D. G., Ricke, K. L. and Keith, D. W. 2018. Solar geoengineering as part of an overall strategy for meeting the 1.5°C Paris target. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 376(2031): 20160454. Malm, A. 2018. The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. Malm, A. and Hornborg, A. 2014. The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative. The Anthropocene Review 1: 62–69. Mander, S., Anderson, K., Larkin, A., Gough, C. and Vaughan, N. 2017. The Role of Bio-energy with Carbon Capture and Storage in Meeting the Climate Mitigation Challenge: A Whole System Perspective. Energy Procedia 144: 6036-6043. McCusker, K. E., Armour, K. C., Bitz, C. M. and Battisti, D. S. 2014. Rapid and extensive warming following cessation of solar radiation management. Environmental Research Letters 9: 024005. McDonald, M. 2013. Discourses of climate security. Political Geography 33: 42–51. McLaren, D. and Burns, W. forthcoming. It would be irresponsible, unethical and unlawful to rely on negative emission techniques at large scale instead of mitigation. In  Mayer,  B. and Zahar, A. (eds) Debating Climate Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McLaren, D. and Markusson, N. 2020. The co-evolution of technological promises, modelling, policies and climate change targets. Nature Climate Change 10: 392–397. McLaren, D. P. 2018. Whose climate and whose ethics? Conceptions of justice in solar geoengineering modelling. Energy Research & Social Science 44: 209–221. McLaren, D. P., Tyfield, D. P., Willis, R., Szerszynski, B. and Markusson, N. O. 2019. Beyond “Net-Zero”: A Case for Separate Targets for Emissions Reduction and Negative Emissions. Frontiers in Climate 1: 4. Moore, J. W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso. Nerlich, B. and Jaspal, R. 2012. Metaphors We Die By? Geoengineering, Metaphors, and the Argument from Catastrophe. Metaphor and Symbol 27(2): 131–147. Newell, P. and Lane, R. 2017. IPE and the environment in the age of the Anthropocene. In Corry, O. and Stevenson, H. (eds) Traditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 136–153. Nordås, R. and Gleditsch, N. P. 2007. Climate change and conflict. Political geography 26(6): 627–638. Parker, A., and Irvine, P.J. 2018. The Risk of Termination Shock From Solar Geoengineering. Earth’s Future 6(3): 456–467.

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7 Genealogies of the Anthropocene and How to Study Them Delf Rothe and Ann-Kathrin Benner

Introduction For many commentators in International Relations (IR) and beyond, the Anthropocene marks a radical rupture. Human action pushes the Earth system out of its Holocene state—the 12,000 years’ period that guaranteed relatively stable climatic conditions and human thriving since the last ice age. As land and oceans heat and sea-levels rise at an ever-faster pace, new questions are posed of liberal-modernity (see Chap. 1 ). The Anthropocene concept thus makes a radical proposal for rethinking history. It teaches us that human history is not independent from, but crucially entangled with, the history of the planet (Chakrabarty 2009). Humans and non-humans, geological forces, oceans and the climate system, all are entwined in one complex storyline—a cosmic drama of epic proportions—in which humankind has become the tragic hero. Yet, the Anthropocene does not only make history; it is also made by history. In this chapter, we take a closer look at the conceptual roots of the Anthropocene. We hold that to understand contemporary forms of governance in the Anthropocene, it is important to understand how it is built upon

D. Rothe (*) • A.-K. Benner Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_7

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and rearticulates earlier political rationalities and discourses. This is not to deny the radical novelty of the Anthropocene. However, as argued by Simpson (2020, 54), “like all categories, it is received as a bundle, knit together from already established languages and frameworks of understanding”. Tracing the history of the Anthropocene concept, thus, helps in explaining how certain political imaginaries have found their way into new forms of Anthropocene governance. To do this, we use the approach of genealogy (Grove 2018). Just like conceptual history, genealogy is interested in how contemporary ideas and discourses evolved. However, it understands such a history of knowledge as a discontinuous, fractured and contradictory process. A genealogical approach holds that the production of discourses is inherently tied to forms of political power. Rather than asking ‘Who invented the Anthropocene?’ or ‘When did it originate?’, from a genealogical perspective, one should ask ‘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?’ and ‘what are the implications of this new rationality for contemporary forms of governance?’ In the following four sections, we first briefly summarize the debate on the origins and historical predecessors of the Anthropocene concept. The second section 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 a closer look at the Whole Earth movement in the late 1960s. The concluding section then summarizes the findings and discusses their relevance to International Relations.

Anthropocene Origin Stories Many scholars locate the birth of the Anthropocene idea in the year 2000. In this year, the Nobel Prize–winning geochemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer published a joint short-paper entitled ‘the Anthropocene’ in the Global Change Newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). The IGBP was established in 1987 as a major international research program to study planetary-scale changes of the Earth system, in short: global change. Crutzen and Stoermer were active participants in this debate on global change that gathered pace in the 1990s with increasing awareness of climate change and globalization. Given the magnitude of human-made global change, they proposed the “Anthropocene” as the latest geological epoch “to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, 17). Figure 7.1 shows the increasing

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Fig. 7.1  The rise of the Anthropocene concept in scientific debates since 2000. (Source: Authors based on Web of Science data)

acceptance and use of the Anthropocene concept in scientific debates since 2000. However, there are scholars who extend or challenge this ‘short story’ of the Anthropocene. On one hand, scholars in the history of science have studied conceptual predecessors of the Anthropocene and have traced the idea of the human epoch back through nineteenth-century geoscience and philosophy (see Rispoli 2014, 2020; Simpson 2020; Hamilton and Grinevald 2015). Approaches informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) have, on the other hand, studied how discourses of the Anthropocene have been co-­ produced with science and technology during the Cold War (Sylvest and van Munster 2016; Rindzevičiūtė 2016). This research demonstrates how contemporary debates on geoengineering (see Chap. 6) or Earth system governance (see Chap. 3 and Chap. 17) would not be possible without the findings of geoscientists during the Cold War (see Chap. 4). The concept of the Anthropocene, thus, has several epistemic roots that some locate in the recent past, others trace back to the Cold War and some even to the emerging geosciences in the late nineteenth century. These legacies matter for students of IR because they still exert an influence today. Simpson (2020), for example, demonstrates that the Anthropocene discourse is still haunted by the colonial logic of its early thinkers. Others have shown how policies of environmental conservation and management in the Anthropocene reproduce militarized notions of the environment and related logics of control that have their origin in the Cold War geosciences (DeLoughrey 2014). In the following section, we introduce genealogy as a distinct approach to study these political effects of historical discourses.

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Genealogy as a Spatial Analytic In this section we introduce the notion of genealogy developed by Michel Foucault (see Box 7.1) as a way of studying the conceptual history of the Anthropocene and its political implications. As a history of the present, genealogy “analyzes the lines of descent of contemporary perceived problems” (Bonditti et al. 2015) such as the human transformation of the planet. Rather than taking the Anthropocene as a coherent concept, genealogy troubles and destabilizes it, taking its multiplicity seriously. A genealogical take on the Anthropocene, furthermore, stresses that the “discovery” of the current planetary crisis is not simply the result of “the progressive development of scientific knowledge” (Grove 2018, 59), but rather the contingent result of knowledge struggles that are “always bound up with power relations” (ibid., 58). Genealogy urges us to look for moments of discontinuity and discursive change “which at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary” (Foucault 1991, 76). Thus, from a Foucauldian point of

Box 7.1  What Is a Discourse? The French philosopher Michel Foucault was interested in the intimate relations of knowledge, subjectivity and political power (Foucault 1972). He conceptualized this triage with the notion of discourse. Following Foucault, a discourse can be understood as the totality of statements, or articulations, that give meaning to a particular phenomenon. This refers, for example, to statements in scientific publications, newspaper articles, political speeches or policy documents or (increasingly) on social media. Discourses are intrinsically linked to questions of power. This is because such systems of statements define what is considered to be true and is taken-for-granted at any given point in time. In other words, discourses are about the production of authorized forms of knowledge (and the simultaneous silencing of other, subjugated forms of knowledge). Furthermore, discourses exert power by defining subjectivities—that is: self-identities according to which people conduct themselves (Foucault 1982). Discourse on gender relations is a good case in point. Gender discourse produces a particular knowledge about the different genders (e.g. women are by nature more emotional, empathetic and caring than men; men are by nature practical, straight and dominant), subjectivities (e.g. hetero-normative masculinities), as well as related behavioral norms (e.g. men should be successful and determined in their job). Foucault tries to grasp this power of discourse, to set the conditions of the ‘sayable’, with his notion of the “rules of formation” (Foucault 1972, 32). The latter are the underlying rules of any historical discourse that shape what can be said about an issue in the given discursive context (Diaz-Bone et al. 2008). The aim of discourse analysis as a social scientific method, then, is to reveal these discursive structures and to study how they influence social behavior or policy outcomes (e.g. Milliken 1999; Hansen 2005; Holzscheiter 2014).

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view, the question is not so much where and by whom exactly the Anthropocene was first discovered. Rather, the important questions are, first, how and why the idea of a human-caused geological epoch could emerge at a certain point of time and, second, what the Anthropocene does—that is: how it affects politics. Following Collier (2009), we propose to understand genealogy as a form of spatial analytic (see also Grove 2018). Two assumptions are of particular importance here. First, discourses have a very material dimension. They are not only made up of statements: instruments, technologies, actors, spaces and knowledge artifacts are required for their production and dissemination, too. Discourses on global environmental change, for example, do not only comprise theories of global warming or the ozone hole, but also satellites and other sensing instruments, climate data, computer models and related infrastructures such as data centers, and so on. This understanding of discourse and genealogy is inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and its underlying assumption that non-human artifacts and objects have a certain agency (see Chap. 13 for an introduction to ANT). Second, and relatedly, discourses have a spatial dimension: they are produced and circulated somewhere and by someone. Genealogy, understood as a spatial analytic, thus studies how certain forms, statements, concepts, hypotheses, technologies—in short, discursive elements—spread to new domains and are recombined with each other in novel ways, thereby allowing the production of new forms of knowledge. To study such processes of recombination—as well as their spatial and material dimension—we develop an analytical heuristic around three analytical categories. First, the analysis begins with a study of problematizations. In the words of Foucault, a problematization refers to “the set of discursive and non-discursive practices that makes something enter into the play of true and false, and constitutes it as an object of thought” (Foucault 1988, 257). Put more simply, discursive problematizations of certain issues define what shall be governed, for what sake and by which means. Through problematizations, established forms of knowledge and taken-for-granted assumptions begin to crumble and novel entities or ideas emerge. Consider the example of climate change: through scientific research, political conventions, media debates and many other practices, climate change is turned into a political issue that calls for political regulation. Problematization here means “the gradual, contested and incomplete process of jointly dividing the multiform issue of global warming into more well-delineated ‘problems’” (Blok 2014, 48). Climate change becomes a problem of economic growth, of international justice, of national security or of scientific research (as the dominance of climate change deniers in many countries illustrates). This is why we use the term problematizations in the plural: because there is always more than one

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problematization of any phenomenon. The result is, in the case of climate change, “a ‘meshwork’ of multiple climatic problems” (Blok 2014, 48–49). Second, to account for the spatial dimension of discourse, we propose another analytical category that we call zones of translation (cf. Barry 2013). This notion refers to discursive and material spaces, in which new problematizations emerge. Zones of translation, then, can be understood as the virtual or physical spaces, in which different knowledges, actors, technologies and practices meet, compete or converge. New knowledge is produced where already existing discourses come together in novel and often unexpected ways. When concepts, technologies or human actors enter novel knowledge fields, and thus enter new sets of relations with other elements in this field, they often acquire a new meaning—that is: they are being translated. In the words of Barry: “As literary translators know, translation does not simply replace the original with a word-for-word equivalent [...] translation gives new life to a text in other times and places” (Barry et al. 1996, 415). A zone of translation could, for example, be a particular laboratory or a scientific institute but could also be a court, a parliament or a virtual community—connected through the internet or other communication technologies—or any other space in which new relations between heretofore unrelated elements are being forged. Third and finally, we propose to study knowledge artifacts—historically specific materializations of knowledges such as scientific diagrams, objects or models. On the one hand, we hold that knowledge artifacts have a stabilizing function. Knowledge that becomes inscribed into books, maps, technology or artwork tends to be more easily accepted and harder  to contest than other forms of knowledge. Objects can become fetishized and serve as discursive nodes around which different actors converge. On the other hand, knowledge artifacts can also enable discursive change and the production of new knowledge. Books, maps, movies, charts, all render knowledge mobile and thus promote its circulation (Latour 1986). Novel scientific models or technological breakthroughs can disrupt existing scientific discourses. In short, by taking a closer look at the material objects of knowledge production, one can understand both the tenacity of existing discourse and its change through new forms of knowledge. Please note that this outline of how to use genealogy in practice is not meant as a fixed analytical framework. There are many ways of doing a genealogical study. Many methods of discourse analysis are text-based and involve the systematic study of textual materials (e.g. newspaper articles, policy documents, protocols and similar) to reveal certain discursive patterns and regularities (see Milliken 1999). As genealogical studies trace knowledge controversies over time, working with archives can be very important

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(Lobo-­Guerrero 2013). Other scholars also analyze visual material or multimedia content such as homepages or movies (Rose 2016, 186–219). Understood as a spatial analytic, as in this chapter, a genealogy can also involve participant observation and conducting ‘expert’ interviews to study processes of knowledge production and dissemination. While the selection of methods crucially depends on your research interest and question(s), we hold that there are a few methodological principles—or research strategies—that should guide your research independently of the concrete methods applied. Box 7.2 summarizes the analytical categories presented in this chapter and gives an overview of research strategies and possible methods for each category. In the next section, we demonstrate how to use the proposed analytic in practice. For this, we draw mainly on the thorough reading of secondary literature combined with the analysis of a few key primary sources (such as the Whole Earth Catalog) that were identified in the secondary literature.

Box 7.2  Analytical Categories and Related Research Strategies Analytical dimension Explanation

Problematizations

Zones of translation

Knowledge artifacts

Practices – linguistic and nonlinguistic – that turn particular phenomena into social or political problems and define how these should be governed, for which sake and by which means

Objects that carry certain discursive statements and forms of knowledge in materialized, congealed form.

Examples

Scientific practices, political statements, or activism that turns climate change into a set of political problems Denaturalization: ask why we think about certain phenomena the way we do; don’t take existing knowledge as taken-forgranted; look for (past) alternative interpretations, subjugated knowledges, or counter-discourses

Virtual or physical spaces, in which new relations between heretofore unrelated actors are forged, discursive elements are recombined, and issues are being problematized in novel ways Laboratories, scientific institutions, political institutions, virtual communities, courts

Research strategy

Possible methods

Discourse analyses of political speeches, policy reports, media articles, and similar documents

Follow the object/actor: trace back dominant scientific concepts and statements, knowledge artifacts, and discursive actors. Ask where they come from (spatially). Look for concentrations of relations. Archival research, secondary literature reviews, research interviews, network analysis

Scientific models, maps, technologies, charts, artwork Become entangled: immerse yourself in the field of discourse; this can mean to conduct participant research at sites of knowledge production, but it can also mean the intensive study of texts, visual artifacts, or multi-media content Participant observation, interviews, visual analyses

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 he ‘Whole Earth’ Movement and the Birth T of Eco-Modernism As argued in the previous section, genealogy does not mean tracing a particular lineage of thought back to its origins. Rather, it means taking a close look at ‘critical discourse moments’ (Carvalho 2008, 166) and asking how they allowed for the emergence of new forms of (political) thought. In this chapter, we focus on one such particular moment that was crucial for the development of genuine forms of Anthropocene knowledge. This moment is the development of the ‘Whole Earth’ movement in California in the late 1960s (see Turner 2006; Diedrichsen and Franke 2014; Kirk 2001). Please note that our main aim here is to illustrate our analytical approach and demonstrate how it can be put into practice. We do not want to imply that the Anthropocene concept or versions of it could be reduced to ‘Whole Earth’ thinking. What we seek to show is how, during the late 1960s, a creative recombination of heterogeneous discourses and technologies, including information theory, cybernetics, population biology, and Californian counterculture, led to an entirely new understanding of the Earth and the ‘environment’ as a whole system. The foundations for this transformation were laid in the 1940s and 1950s with the emergence of cybernetics as a new interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between humans and machines. Drawing on new systems theories, the emerging discipline of cybernetics sought to develop a general theory of steering, in which all kinds of structures—social, ecological or technical—could be described as adaptive systems that would adhere to the same behavioral principles. These principles, derived from information theory, held that systems interact with their environment through the communication of information (input and output) and are governed through (negative or positive) feedback. These few general assumptions provided a conceptual vocabulary to treat humans and machines in the same analytical register (Rid 2016, 64), thus challenging the Cartesian dualism of subject and object that characterized modern science until then. While cybernetics was one major source of inspiration for the Whole Earth movement, another crucial one was the view of Earth from the outside—that was enabled by Cold War space technologies. In 1967, NASA’s Earth observation satellite ATS-III captured the first image from space that showed planet Earth in its entirety (Fig. 7.2). Further iconic images of the whole Earth followed—including the prominent “blue marble” color image of the Earth taken by the crew of the Apollo 8 space mission in 1972. As Cosgrove (2003) and others have argued, the publication of these iconic Earth images had a

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Fig. 7.2  NASA’s iconic blue marble image. (Source: Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA)

remarkable impact on the US and international public (Jasanoff 2004, 44). The view from space produced a sense of both the Earth’s singularity and its fragility (DeLoughrey 2014, 266). The ‘blue marble’ images thus strongly resonated with emerging public concern with global environmental problems and scenarios of environmental collapse as, for example, developed in the prominent Club of Rome report Limits to Growth in 1972 (Meadows 1972). Whereas environmental problems had previously been conceived in  local terms—for example, as environmental pollution of rivers—cybernetic systems theory and the iconic images of the ‘blue marble’ fostered the idea of global environmental change. All this had a strong influence on social entrepreneurs of the Californian counterculture in the late 1960s (Cadwalladr 2013). For them, cybernetics and new information technologies offered a way to solve global environmental problems. In short, the rationale was that if the Earth was a system threatened by human activity and humans are a crucial part of it, then individual self-transformation and lifestyle changes could save the planet (Rid 2016,

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168). For this, the Whole Earth movement sought to appropriate the technologies and concepts developed by US mass industrial society and turn them into tools for personal and societal transformation. The Whole Earth Catalog (see Box 7.3), whose first issue appeared in fall 1968, was supposed to enable this transformation.

Box 7.3  The Whole Earth Catalog The Whole Earth Catalog was a periodically published catalog that listed books and a range of goods and items that appeared periodically between 1968 and 1971. In the editorial of the first edition in 1968, the editor Steward Brand wrote: “we are as Gods and might as well get good at it” (quoted in Cadwalladr 2013). To become as gods, it was required to have the right ‘tools’ and the Catalog aimed at providing these to its readers. The first part featured reviews of books on whole systems, cybernetics or ecology, for example by Norbert Wiener or Buckminster Fuller. The later parts listed articles on commercial goods such as outdoor equipment or new information technologies (e.g. computers) as well as DIY-instructions that would help readers to live a self-sufficient and eco-friendly lifestyle. The catalog was different from any other existing publication at that time—it was neither just a lifestyle guide, nor simply a mail order catalog, nor a scientific publication, although it had elements of all of these. To its readers, the catalog was a “comprehensive informational system, an encyclopedia, a map” (Turner 2006, 83). Through review and comment functions, the periodically published catalog enabled feedback between its readers and thereby forged them into a close network. The catalog, thus, worked like a cybernetic system in itself (Turner 2006, 82). Silicon Valley pioneers such as Steve Jobs have later described it as an analogous version of Google and the first Internet search engines.

Problematizations: The Emergence of Planetary Thinking The discourse around the Whole Earth movement and the described process of translation brought about a whole set of new political problems. Most prominently, the Whole Earth discourse problematized the Earth as a single but fragile object and the ‘environment’ as a whole system, governed through the principle of feedback. The ‘planetary’ was born as a spatial political concept. This new problematization is perfectly mirrored in Buckminster Fuller’s Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth (Fuller 1968) that was published almost simultaneously with the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Here, Fuller developed the idea that the Earth could be understood as a mechanical vehicle running on scarce resources and requiring maintenance and steering by its operator, that is, Humanity. The spaceship Earth metaphor gave birth to the

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idea of the global environment as an object of governance and of the human as a planetary manager (Deese 2009). Second, the Whole Earth movement linked this novel planetary perspective to the need for individual transformation. The members of the Californian countermovement had grown up in a hyper-rationalized world of Cold War technocracy. For them, the modernist institutions of the Cold War—such as mass society, labor rationalization or modern science—were at the heart of the alienation of the individual, both from society and from the environment. Technological tools, then, offered a way of liberating the individual from these shackles. As the individual was seen as part of a whole system, individual transformation was at the same time understood as the key to the transformation of the whole Earth system. One can observe the emergence of a new kind of subjectivity here: the entrepreneurial self or cowboy nomad—a subject that is continuously seeking to push boundaries and explore new frontiers (Turner 2006, 94). Third, the Whole Earth movement brought about the idea of ‘tools’ as an alternative to political action. The underlying rationality holds that the social or environmental world can be broken down into a number of single problems that become solvable, if one has access to the right tools. Weigel (2018) summarizes this rationale as follows: “If people got good enough tools to build the communities they wanted, politics would take care of itself ”.

The Whole Earth as a Zone of Translation These new problematizations were possible because of the translation and recombination of heterogeneous discourses, technologies and actors. The counterculture activists around Brand translated cybernetics and information theory from an instrument of bureaucratic technocracy into a tool of individual transformation. They recombined systems thinking with population biology and emerging environmentalist discourse. They appropriated Cold War systems of vision, such as satellite technology and used the imagery that it produced to promote societal transformation towards more eco-friendly lifestyles. All of this perfectly illustrates the notion of translation as defined above. As concepts and statements, such as system, feedback, adaptation or similar, were introduced to other knowledge domains or related to other concepts, their meaning also changed. Military research laboratories such as MIT’s Radiation Lab and conferences such as the Macy Conferences assembled heterogeneous disciplines in a concrete space. The Whole Earth Catalog had a similar

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function. It constituted a new discourse but at the same time functioned as a space of knowledge exchange, in which processes of translation as defined above could take place.

Catalogs, Domes and Other Knowledge Artifacts The described zone of translation around the Whole Earth Catalog went along with the production of new forms of knowledge—for example, knowledge of whole systems, of global environmental problems or of new information technologies. As already indicated, these forms of knowledge were often inscribed into material objects. As described above, the Whole Earth Catalog was not just a medium of information exchange. Rather, it was an assemblage of a whole set of material artifacts and technologies—from books to new information technologies—that were rearticulated by the Whole Earth movement as tools of transformation. The artifacts assembled in the Catalog were material manifestations of whole systems thinking. One particularly striking example is the geodesic dome—a spherical shelter popularized by Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s and prominently featured in the Whole Earth Catalog (see Fig.  7.3). Due to its light-weight material and spherical construction, the dome was both easy-to-build and highly energy-efficient. At the same time, the geodesic dome embodied a particular cosmology (or worldview)—that is: spherical thinking. Fuller had envisioned a shift from a “cosmology of flat empires” (Lysen 2014, 151), which divides the world into two-dimensional territorial entities toward a spherical understanding of the Earth. While the political map paradigmatically embodies the former worldview, the latter becomes material in spherical structures such as the geodesic dome. And while the political map represents difference and fragmentation, the dome represented wholeness and entanglement (ibid., 152). The Whole Earth movement enthusiastically embraced Fuller’s spherical thinking and the geodesic dome. It became a material symbol of a whole system (sphere) and spherical and wholistic structures “became prototypes of a new kind of living” (Turner 2006, 94).

Eco-Modernism and the Anthropocene Reading the Whole Earth Catalog today gives rise to what Franke (2014, 16) calls an Anthropocene deja-vu: “the discourses and problems which are explored with great urgency today in the concept of the Anthropocene are, in large part

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Fig. 7.3  Cover of the last Whole Earth Catalog, June 1975. (Published under CC2.0 license, original by Akos Kokai, available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Whole_Earth_Catalog_(1975)_(15604607615).jpg)

identical with the discourses and problems addressed by the Whole Earth Catalog”. This does not imply that the Anthropocene can be traced to the Whole Earth movement in a direct, linear way. Instead, the described problematizations produced by Whole Earth went through a series of transformations and translations that were crucial for the development of contemporary forms of governance in the Anthropocene. In the 1970s, for example, Whole Earth thinking would meet with the economic thought of Friedrich Hayek and other neoliberal thinkers (Lazzarato 2014, 166). Frontier-ideology, individualism, techno-optimism, tool-thinking: all these ingredients of what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) have called the “Californian Ideology” resonated well with the neoliberal ideas of deregulation and individual entrepreneurship. The resulting mixture of eco-consciousness, neoliberalism and techno-­ optimism is prominent in one current version of the Anthropocene, which is usually summarized under the label of eco-modernism (see Rothe 2020). In line with Anthropocene thinking, eco-modernists challenge the binary between nature and (human-made) technology. According to them, pristine nature does not and never existed, because every part of the environment is already shaped by humans. Thus, there are no fundamental reservations

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Fig. 7.4  Seeds of the good Anthropocenes webpage. (Source: Screenshot captured from: https://goodanthropocenes.net [31 March 2020])

against geoengineering, gene-editing or related technologies that directly intervene in the environment. For eco-modernists, the fact that humanity has become a geological actor represents a chance rather than a threat. Through technological tools, humanity would have the opportunity to create a planet that benefits humans and other living beings. A good example of eco-­ modernism in practice is the ‘Seeds of the Good Anthropocene’ project (see Fig. 7.4). This is an online database that collects best-practice examples of local projects, including urban sustainability labs or resilience endeavors drawing on smart technologies. By spreading word of these examples on the internet, the project hopes to grow organically into something bigger and thus to make a real impact at the global level. This mirrors the idea of the Whole Earth, namely that individual projects of transformation could be linked through information technology and that the resulting feedback would enable a transformation of the whole system. On the webpage, this idea is visually represented by the networked globe, in which every node represents a single seed (Fig. 7.4). The webpage illustrates how contemporary eco-modernists appropriate earlier forms of Whole Earth thinking, including the iconic planetary gaze and the figure of the geodesic dome.

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Conclusion In this chapter, we have presented an analytical approach to study the genealogy of the Anthropocene. We have investigated the conditions of possibility for Anthropocene discourse and thus asked how it became possible to think and speak of something like a Human epoch or an Earth system. Understanding how the idea of the Anthropocene evolved and how related forms of knowledge were produced is important for understanding current forms of governance in the Anthropocene. Drawing on Collier’s topological notion of genealogy, we have set out an analytical framework around three core categories. These are (1) problematizations, that is the discursive practices that turn certain phenomena of reality into political or social problems; (2) zones of translation, understood as physical or virtual spaces, in which heretofore unrelated ideas, concepts, technologies or actors are recombined in novel ways; (3) knowledge artifacts, material objects that embody certain forms of knowledge (and thereby help spreading or stabilizing them). We have demonstrated how this framework can be used in practice by taking a close look at one particular moment, in which certain forms of Anthropocene knowledge were produced through a process of recombination: the Whole Earth movement in the late 1960s. The analysis showed how the Whole Earth movement brought about certain problematizations and forms of knowledge that inform contemporary Anthropocene discourse. These are, for example, the notion of the planet as a whole system that is endangered by human activity and the idea that technological tools could bring about major transformation. Today such ideas cumulate in eco-­ modernist discourse with its techno-optimist understanding of the Anthropocene. It is important to note that our analysis only presents a smaller snapshot of a much more complex genealogy of the Anthropocene. The analytical approach presented in this chapter can help further unpacking this complex discursive history. Funder information: This research received funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Grant no. 335616337.

Key Points 1. The concept of the Anthropocene has a history. Understanding this history is important for understanding the existing political approaches to the Anthropocene.

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2. Genealogy studies the emergence of political discourses in a historical perspective and allows the study of the heterogeneous epistemic traces that inform the idea of the Anthropocene. 3. A genealogical take on the Anthropocene asks for the conditions of possibility of certain forms of knowledge at a given point in time. 4. The Whole Earth movement in the late 1960s produced a novel way of seeing planet Earth—that is: as a whole system—and understood technological tools as a means of transforming both the self and the entire planet. 5. Eco-modernism holds that global environmental problems can be solved through the smart use of technologies such as geoengineering, nuclear power, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Key Questions 1. What is a discourse and how does it impact politics? 2. Which forms of knowledge underpin the idea of the Anthropocene? 3. How did it become possible to conceive of the human as a geological force and the Earth as a single interlinked system? 4. What is the planetary gaze and why is it important in the discourse on the Anthropocene? 5. What is eco-modernism and what do its proponents understand the Anthropocene?

Further Reading On Genealogy Rabinow, P. 1991. The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (Penguin Social Sciences). London: Penguin. Collier, S. J. 2009. Typologies of Power: Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government beyond ‘Governmentality’. Theory, Culture & Society 26(6): 78–108.

On the History of the Anthropocene Rindzevičiūtė, E. 2016. The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War World. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Simpson, M. 2020. The Anthropocene as Colonial Discourse. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): S. 53–71.

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On the Whole Earth Movement Turner, F. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

References Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A. 1996. The Californian ideology. Science as Culture 6(1): 44–72. Barry, A. 2013. The Translation Zone: Between Actor-Network Theory and International Relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies  41(3): 413–429. Barry, A., Osborne, T. and Rose, N. (eds) 1996. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and the Rationalities of Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blok, A. 2014. Experimenting on Climate Governmentality with Actor-Network Theory. In H. Bulkeley and J. Stripple (eds) Governing the climate: New approaches to rationality, power and politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 42–58. Bonditti, P. et al. 2015. Genealogy. In Aradau, C. et al. (eds) Critical Security Methods: New frameworks for analysis. Oxon and New  York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 159–188. Cadwalladr, C. 2013. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world. The Guardian [online], 5 May. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-­brand-­whole-­earth-­catalog [accessed 4 January 2021]. Carvalho, A. 2008. Media(ted) discourse and society. Journalism Studies  9(2): 161–177. Chakrabarty, D. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical inquiry 35(2): 197–222. Collier, S. J. 2009. Typologies of Power: Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government beyond ‘Governmentality’. Theory, Culture & Society 26(6): 78–108.  Cosgrove, D. 2003. Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crutzen, P.  J. and Stoermer, E.  F. 2000. The “Anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter [online], 41: 17–18. Available from: http://www.igbp.net/download/1 8.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf [accessed 04 January 2021] Deese, R. S. 2009. The Artifact of Nature: ‘Spaceship Earth’ and the Dawn of Global Environmentalism. Endeavour 33(2): 70–75. DeLoughrey, E. 2014. Satellite Planetarity and the Ends of the Earth. Public Culture 26(273): 257–280.

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Diaz-Bone, R. et al. 2008. The Field of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis: Structures, Developments and Perspectives. Historical Social Research [online], 33(1). Available from: https://nbn-­resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-­ssoar-­191069 [accessed 4 January 2020]. Diedrichsen, D. and Franke, A. 2014. The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside. In Diedrichsen, D. and Franke, A. (eds) The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. 3rd ed. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 8–9. Foucault, M. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical inquiry 8: 777–795. Foucault, M. 1988. Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. 1991. Questions of Method. In G. Burchell, Gordon, C and Miller, P. (eds)  The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 73–86. Franke, A. 2014. Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside. In D. Diedrichsen and Franke, A.  (eds)  The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. 3rd ed. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 12–19. Fuller, R.  B. 1968. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. New  York: Simon & Schuster. Grove, K. 2018. Resilience. London, New York: Routledge. Hamilton, C. and Grinevald, J. 2015. Was the Anthropocene Anticipated? The Anthropocene Review 2(1): 59–72. Hansen, L. 2005. Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. London, New York: Routledge. Holzscheiter, A. 2014. Between Communicative Interaction and Structures of Signification: Discourse Theory and Analysis in International Relations. International Studies Perspectives 15(2): 142–162. Jasanoff, S. (ed.) 2004. Heaven and Earth: The Politics of Environmental Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirk, A. 2001. Appropriating Technology: The Whole Earth Catalog and Counterculture Environmental Politics. Environmental History 6(3): 374. Latour, B. 1986. Visualization and Cognition. Drawing things together. In Kuklick, H. (ed.) Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1–40. Lazzarato, M. 2014. On the Californian Utopia/Ideology. In Diedrichsen, D. and Franke, A. (eds) The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. 3rd ed. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 166–169. Lobo-Guerrero, L. 2013. Archives. In Salter, M.B. and Mutlu, C.E. (eds) Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 121–124.

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Lysen, F. 2014. Spherical Consciousness in the Work of VanDerBeek and Fuller. In  D.  Diedrichsen and A.  Franke (eds)  The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. 3rd ed. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 150–158. Meadows, D. H. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Universe Books. Milliken, J. 1999. The Study of Discourse in International Relations. European Journal of International Relations  5(2): 225–254. Rid, T. 2016. Rise of the Machines: The Lost history of Cybernetics. Brunswick, London: Scribe Publications. Rindzevičiūtė, E. 2016. The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War World. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Rispoli, G. 2014. Between “Biosphere” and “Gaia”: Earth as a living organism in Soviet geo-ecology. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 10(2): 78–91. Rispoli, G. 2020. Genealogies of Earth System Thinking. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment 1(1): 4–5. Rothe, D. 2020. Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48(2): 143-164. Rose, G. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. 4th ed. Los Angeles: Sage. Simpson, M. 2020. The Anthropocene as Colonial Discourse. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38(1): 53–71. Sylvest, C. and van Munster, R. (eds) 2016. The Politics of Globality Since 1945: Assembling the Planet. New York, London: Routledge. Turner, F. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Weigel, M. 2018. Silicon Valley’s Sixty-Year Love Affair with the Word “Tool”. The New Yorker, 12 April. Available from: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/ silicon-­valleys-­sixty-­year-­love-­affair-­with-­the-­word-­tool [accessed 4 January 2021].

Part II The Challenge of Security

Introduction The Anthropocene is not only a new geological era, which challenges modern assumptions about nature and humans, but also a security discourse. The second section of this book contains five chapters which each address the challenge of security in the Anthropocene and the importance of environmental security to International Relations (IR). Traditionally IR has assumed the existence of separate states in a stable world where human impacts on the natural world can simply be ignored. However, the point about the Anthropocene is precisely that human actions and impacts are dramatically altering how the world works and are doing so in potentially very dangerous ways for the future well-being of peoples and ecosystems across the planet. In terms of international relations, this is especially complicated because the industrial production systems that are key to the military rivalries between states are mostly based on fossil fuels, and modern armed forces burn huge amounts of petroleum products. Environmental insecurity is being increased precisely because states are trying to extend their power using technologies that are changing how the earth system works. Rivalries among states and attempts by them to extend their power and influence, the traditional themes of geopolitics, are frequently thwarting efforts to grapple with climate change and contributing to the rapid elimination of many plant and animal species too. The opening chapter, ‘Environmental Security and the Geopolitics of the Anthropocene’ by Simon Dalby, emphasizes that environmental security now has to be about how the changes we make shape the future of the Earth system

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and crucially whether the decisions the rich and powerful make, about what to produce, will cumulatively move the planet towards a fairly stable configuration or towards one of accelerating climate change, and the further disruptions of ecosystems around the world in a situation now sometimes being termed a ‘hothouse earth’. This is the new context of the Anthropocene, one that challenges how societies might provide security in many new ways. Which is why it is so important that the new dynamic circumstances of the Anthropocene become the starting point for studies and policy suggestions of international relations. The old twentieth-century assumptions, such as the necessity of hegemony by the most powerful states in a world of competing states and frequently fractious politics, are badly out of date for dealing with the new challenges of global politics. These are about transitioning to new forms of economy that are not powered by fossil fuels and that allow states, societies and economies to be flexible enough to respond non-violently to the storms, droughts and social disruptions that are inevitable in the much altered world in which we all now live. The second chapter, by Maria Julia Trombetta, ‘Security in the Anthropocene’, builds on the problems set up in Dalby’s chapter, developing the analysis of how security needs to be rethought. This chapter provides an overview of the attempts and the challenges to reconceptualize security in the Anthropocene. It asks how a growing awareness of the complexity of relations involving humans, non-humans and things opens up new questions of the very subjects and objects 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. At the same time, the analysis warns against considering the Anthropocene as a unified discourse or a given condition. Many of the threats the Anthropocene is supposed to pose are constructed, and its representation is mediated, often through security assumptions. The way we can think about security in the Anthropocene is based on the way we think and conceptualize the Anthropocene itself. Securitization, broadly understood as the discursive process that transforms a problem issue into a security issue, will be used as a heuristic to illustrate some of the challenges and to map alternatives. ‘Security Through Resilience: Contemporary Challenges in the Anthropocene’, the third chapter, by David Chandler, analyses how the Anthropocene condition problematizes understandings of resilience as a security solution. Discussions of resilience often seek to defer or evade underlying problems rather than to address them and are rarely framed to take into

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account the structural causes of resource depletion and social and economic marginalization, which makes communities and societies more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances. This artificiality is sometimes expressed as a problem of technical, bureaucratic, depoliticized or ‘top-down’ approaches, which seek to achieve short-term solutions or to paper over the cracks. As a consequence of this framing, policy interventions, based upon enabling and capacity-­ building for resilience, often tend to impose the costs of adaptation upon those who are already in a marginal position, perceived as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘at risk’. Approaches, seeking to develop resilience through the application of new technologies such as satellite-based mapping, highlight the limits of programmes of resilience in the face of Anthropocene understandings that ‘fire-­ fighting’, the effects or consequences of climate change and legacies of capitalist and colonial modes of being, merely reproduces the hierarchies and forms of understanding which drive these problems in the first place. Matt McDonald’s fourth chapter ‘Protecting the Vulnerable: Towards an Ecological Approach to Security’ makes the case that the Anthropocene compels us to view and approach security through the lens of not how we might protect human collectives or institutions but how we might protect ecosystems themselves. If the Anthropocene means anything to us and the way we approach security, it should mean the need to reflect upon—and ultimately transition away from—the idea of a separation between nature and humanity. In the process, it means orienting to a defence of ecosystems, in particular their functionality in the face of ongoing change. The chapter focuses on the issue of climate change and proceeds in four stages. The first addresses why we should engage with the Anthropocene—and in particular climate change— through the lens of security at all, outlining the costs and benefits of such engagement. The second section points to the idea of different discourses of climate security, noting what these discourses encourage and prioritize in terms of the nature of the climate threat and appropriate responses to it. The third section outlines the contours of an ecological security discourse, emphasizing its focus on the resilience of ecosystems and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable. The chapter concludes by briefly reflecting on the challenges associated with advancing or realizing this approach in practice. The closing chapter of this section, ‘Caring with the World: Security in the Anthropocene’ by Cameron Harrington, explores an alternative logic and ethic of security—care—that may faithfully represent the unique conditions of the Anthropocene age and help create better responses. The concept of care can help move security concepts into the Anthropocene. Care is able to emphasize the types of deep relational thinking that are so appropriate when discussing the Earth’s ongoing and unknown patterns of interactions and

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responses. Existing in a world where socio-ecological processes and feedbacks are so entangled, complex and unpredictable requires a type of moral and political thought that does not rely solely upon purely foundationalist views and attachments to strict causality in world affairs. 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 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. It then explores the unique benefits and potential pitfalls for engaging with the concept of care in securing our new world. Care allows us to see security as a radical entanglement between humans, non-human animals, plants, bacteria, materials and technology. Learning how to navigate this entanglement with care will be a primary task for International Relations in our Anthropocene world.

8 Environmental Security and the Geopolitics of the Anthropocene Simon Dalby

Introduction Struggles for power now play out in an increasingly urbanized world altered by climate change and facing an extinction crisis. 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. The environmental context for international relations is being changed by how states and corporations interact as old patterns of colonial exploitation have been scaled up in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Who decides how to shape future environments is now a key part of geopolitics even if policymakers and scholars have been slow to recognize that this is what is happening. This new context of struggles over the future is raising profound questions about how to secure food, water and other environmental necessities in these new circumstances of Anthropocene geopolitics. This word “Anthropocene” is a geological term. It’s a word for a new geological period in the Earth’s history, one that is human-made. The “Anthropos”—that’s us. Geological periods mark big changes in how the Earth works, especially what combinations of species are alive and which are the dominant ones. Are our collective actions really on the same scale as events

S. Dalby (*) Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_8

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in the planet’s past like those that eliminated dinosaurs? That’s exactly what recent scientific discussions have concluded (Zalasiewicz et al. 2019). While there are all sorts of arguments—about which changes in the Earth system are most important and, related to this, when the Anthropocene can be properly said to have started, and also which sediments will be most important in marking the contemporary period long in the future—numerous scientists have concluded that we are indeed living in a new period in Earth’s history. The implications of thinking about humanity on this scale are profound, and this is the new context in which we have to consider the traditional themes of international relations. Survival and security are not now just about individual states and the dangers they may face from other states; it is now about much more than these concerns. 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 when people started to realize that human actions were changing the world in ways that were threatening to many societies. We are living in an increasingly artificial world, and while some politicians may look back to history and assume that armies and nationalism are what matter, decisions about what industries and what technologies get made to shape the planet’s future are now key to providing security for people the world over. As the last section of the chapter emphasizes, we are living in a new world, and security and international politics have to be rethought for these new circumstances. The point of using geological science language, and in particular the term Anthropocene, is precisely that at least the rich and powerful parts of humanity are having dramatic effects on how the world works. The widespread use of carbon fuels and the transformation of landscapes by farming, mining and industrialization are changing how the Earth system operates. Species are being eliminated in many places. Numerous new things are being made—plastics, fly ash from power stations, radioactive isotopes, a new widespread form of rock we call concrete, and all that carbon dioxide that is rapidly changing the air. Security, a key theme in international politics, used to be about providing social stability and keeping political elites in power. It was also about preventing political violence and ensuring that where state conflicts erupted they didn’t turn into wars and in particular nuclear ones (Dannreuther 2013). While those concerns haven’t gone away, alas, now in the new circumstances captured by the use of the term Anthropocene, security for most people is about how the global economy functions, and whether it can be shaped in ways that make a decent life for most us possible in the long run (Stiglitz and Kaldor 2013). Traditionally, international relations simply assumed a fairly

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stable Earth was the backdrop for political rivalries and the struggles for power and peace. Not anymore (Dalby 2020). The Anthropocene makes it clear that this geopolitical assumption of a stable geography can no longer be taken for granted.

Environmental Security Many thinkers about the human condition have long wondered about the relationships of humanity and nature and how, what moderns call, “the environment” might shape the human drama. But it was only in the latter half of the twentieth century as the scope and scale of human industry, and the dangers of nuclear war, in particular, began to be widely appreciated, that questions about whether humans could destroy their world started to be asked. If we could destroy the planet, then the next question was what should be done to prevent this? Could policy secure a safe environment for people? This discussion is what “environmental security” is all about. The World Commission on Environment and Development’s (1987) famous report on Our Common Future first popularized the term. That report, often called the Brundtland report, because former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland was the high-profile chair of the commission, focused on the need for sustainable development so that development did not undercut the environmental conditions of “physical sustainability” that it needed to function. Those conditions were what the report called “environmental security”. The term’s use expanded in following years to encompass concerns of environmental scarcities causing political violence and numerous related matters linking environmental change and politics (Homer-Dixon 1999). Crucially the basic assumption of environmental security, that the physical environment, both those artificial bits of it that humans have built and parts that are mostly natural, will be a stable and hence predictable context for humans in future, is now in doubt. It is so due to human actions. Where previous generations in the Western world, and many elsewhere, looked to a future that was safer and more prosperous as a result of economic development, if you were born in this century, then climate change looks likely to make your old age very precarious as rising sea levels, melting ice caps, storms, droughts and other disruptions cause rapid and unpredictable change. Traditional justifications for states were because they supposedly provided security for their populations and planned for the future in order to continue to do so. But many state leaders are still acting as though the dangers of climate change and other environmental disruptions can be ignored. In 2019,

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Presidents Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil simply denied that climate is a problem or that ecologically valuable systems needed to be preserved (Selby 2019). They supported the expansion of fossil fuel use and the destruction of forests for mining and agriculture to grow their national economies. While previous leaders in these states may have signed up the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change, they are happy to ignore its stipulations to perpetuate twentieth-century notions of resource extraction and widespread combustion of both forests and fuels regardless of the cost to future generations. But it is precisely the success of some states and corporations in growing prosperous through using fossil-fuelled economic growth that now imperils everyone’s future in various, albeit often very different, ways. For Trump and similarly minded politicians, climate science and the whole effort of the global community to try to curtail fossil fuel use and stop the extinction of so many species is either irrelevant or some kind of political hoax. In President Trump’s speech to the United Nations in September 2019, he dismissed international institutions, promising instead that the future belongs to patriots, not globalists (Trump 2019). The world is, in his vision, a place of competing in relatively autonomous places. The geography of all this assumes separate states in a stable world where human impacts on the natural world can simply be ignored, but the point about the Anthropocene is precisely that the actions of the rich and powerful are dramatically altering how the world works, and doing so in potentially very dangerous ways for the future well-being of peoples in many places. Political activists these days talk about climate crises and often support protest movements such as Extinction Rebellion (see Chap. 11) as they raise the alarm about the dangers we face. They do so with good reason; the planet is changing, and wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, melting ice caps, rising sea levels and floods make it clear that extreme weather is happening more often and making things more difficult for people struggling to cope with these increased dangers. The modern ideas of us as separate from an external environment, or of culture as superior to nature, clearly need an update in the face of these new circumstances. So too do assumptions that states are separate and can go their own ways without regard to the consequences of their actions on other states or the long-term future. In terms of international relations, this is especially complicated because the industrial production systems that are key to the military rivalries between states are mostly based on fossil fuels, and modern armed forces burn huge amounts of petroleum products (Belcher et al. 2020). Environmental insecurity is being increased precisely because states are trying to extend their power using technologies that are changing how the Earth system works. Rivalries

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among states and attempts by them to extend their power and influence, the traditional themes of geopolitics, are frequently thwarting efforts to grapple with climate change and with the rapid elimination of many plant and animal species too (Grove 2019) (Box 8.1). Box 8.1  The US Military: Insecurity Twice Over The US military and think tanks connected to the defence establishment in Washington have been raising the alarm about climate change for a long time and, since 2007, a stream of reports and statements has focused on the issue. The concern is twofold and points to the changing circumstances of the Anthropocene (Klare 2019). First, the US military is frequently called on to provide assistance following disasters. It has a worldwide reach with bases in numerous places that can provide aircraft and helicopters to help rescue victims of storms and flooding. Its ability to send emergency medical assistance, water supplies, conduct evacuations and provide communications when storms damage infrastructure makes it a key institution in dealing with disasters. Planners worry that these disasters, and long-term disruptions of agriculture due to droughts and storms, will feed into insurrections and challenges to political authority in underdeveloped states where political elites have little effective control. If this leads to further international terrorism, then it has further security ramifications. Climate change as a “threat multiplier” is the phrasing often used when referring to fragile states and situations where the additional stresses provided by climate disruptions may lead to political violence (CNA 2007). Second, the ability of the US military to respond to these problems, as well as undertake other military actions, is also being threatened by climate change in the form of rising sea levels as well as more severe storms. The largest naval facilities on the planet are the US naval bases in the Norfolk Broads in Virginia just south of Washington. These are increasingly becoming inundated by rising sea levels; high tides are flooding these facilities disrupting the piers, docks and warehouses that supply the naval ships. Late in 2018, the Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, where a substantial part of the US Air Force F-22 fighter force is based, was badly damaged by a hurricane. Some of the planes that were not ready to be flown out of harm’s way were damaged on the ground too. Six months later, one of the major US Bomber bases, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, was rendered unusable when flood waters covered its runways in one of the most extensive flood events on record in the US interior.

The assumption that one powerful state, be it the British empire in the nineteenth century, or the American one in the twentieth, can use its firepower to impose its rules on the international order is crumbling as the scale of contemporary transformations of economy and ecology become evident (Dalby 2018). These new circumstances dramatically disrupt the assumptions about global politics, assumptions of who provides security to whom where, how economics should be understood, and who should act now if the longterm future of civilization is to be secured in a world that it is rapidly changing.

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Changing Geographies Humans have been changing key parts of the earth’s ecology for a very long time, mostly because we have learned to partly control combustion. We can use fire to cook, hunt, keep warm and make tools, thus extending our ability to live to many parts of the world. It is only in the last few centuries that this has begun to have accelerating dramatic effects on the climate and on the rate of extinction of other species (Lewis and Maslin 2018). While large-scale organized human societies go back many centuries, and Asian civilizations are much older than the more recent empires in Europe, the human world finally got interconnected into a single economic system when Europeans conquered the Americas 500 years ago. European imperialism was initially about silver and gold, guns and slaves, but also about ecological change (Crosby 1986). Europeans took horses and rabbits, and rats and diseases with them and returned with potatoes and corn and all sorts of other species. The diseases they took with them to the Americas killed off most of the population there, and because there was no one to tend the fields, reforested much of the continent. This is an ecological change that may even have contributed to a period of global cooling, or at least cooling in Europe (Lewis and Maslin 2018), a period now known as the little ice age. This point about colonizers connecting up a global economy is important to the story of the Anthropocene because this economy is also about moving species around and changing landscapes in ways that make what grows where now something that humans largely decide; natural evolution no longer shapes what species are living where. In the nineteenth century as European empires expanded, they spread new agricultural arrangements with them (Davis 2001). Plantations for cotton, tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea and numerous other things changed rural economies. Demands for taxes to support the new imperial administrators and the expansion of commercial arrangements into rural areas disrupted traditional markets and subsistence agriculture. Making money by exporting crops from the colonies to imperial centres was frequently a dubious business, but empires were in part about precisely these patterns of resource extraction to feed economies in Europe. Tying traditional agricultural systems into global markets, where prices in Europe fluctuated at the cost of disruption in the colonies, made for numerous insecurities in the colonies: “Suddenly the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival” (Davis 2001, 12). When disaster struck and harvests failed frequently, populations in the colonies starved. But frequently too,

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imperial administrators blamed the weather rather than the failures of imperial administration, for the fate of the people in their charge. The wealth that came back to Europe spurred social changes and accelerated the birth of modern capitalism. Plantation agriculture, most obviously crops like cotton and tobacco, began to change the environment of the Americas profoundly, and with the widespread import of slaves from Africa, to provide labour for these new artificial ecologies, changed the population too. When the British factory owners started using steam engines to improve their control over their workers there and banned the export of cotton from elsewhere in their growing empire, notably in India, the use of coal to power the rise of industry started in earnest (Malm 2016). Steam engines were quickly adopted to do much more than pump water from mines and run the factories churning out cotton cloth. When they were put on rails steam engines transformed land transportation, and railway networks were built rapidly in Europe, the Americas and soon after elsewhere too. On water, a whole new class of “steam ships” transformed ocean transport too, gradually replacing the sailing ships that had been the transportation system for European empires. In the twentieth century, petroleum overtook coal as the fuel for transportation and much else. Gasoline, or petrol, as it’s known in Europe, and diesel have rapidly expanded transportation systems. Not just those for people able to afford a private vehicle, but crucially for commercial transportation and, of course, the endless aeroplanes that crisscross the skies in most parts of the planet every day. In the period after World War Two, the fossil fuel-powered mode of life rapidly expanded, not least driven by the aspirations of numerous people to own a car; something that became a practical necessity in North America, in particular, where growing suburbs required this mode of transportation. The consequences of these rapidly expanding landscapes of consumption were the further expansion of resource extraction. Mines, farms and dams expanded in most parts of the globe, setting in motion the processes that Earth system scientists now call “the great acceleration” (McNeill and Engelke 2016). The extraordinary expansion of machines and technologies in this period has dramatically extended the colonial patterns of resource extraction all over the world, to supply fuel and raw materials to the huge industrial complexes that now provide us all with the consumer goods that make our contemporary modes of life possible. The rapid expansion of the global economy in the period of the great acceleration has led to what Peter Dauvergne (2008) calls the “shadow of consumption”. The long-distance relationships in the global economy where raw materials are extracted from numerous places are transforming rural ecologies

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in numerous places, often with disastrous consequences for the species living there. Palm oil plantations in Indonesia are frequently linked to illegal occupation of land and the massive fires that cause air-quality problems in neighbouring countries too. We rarely think that the skin lotions we use, containing palm oil, might indirectly be causing children in Singapore to be having breathing difficulties. But these indirect effects are part of the new world we have made. Clearly, our attempts at regulating environmental matters—such as the parks and pollution regulations in developed countries—are woefully inadequate for dealing with these kinds of problems. To use another of Peter Dauvergne’s (2016) phrases, this “environmentalism of the rich” has failed both to deal with the scale of environmental disruption or the legacy of the dispossession and destruction of indigenous peoples and their ecologies. These dramatic transformations, and the continued extension of commercial extractions into the remaining forests and more remote parts of the planet, are a key part of the current global political system. They are the part of globalization that is usually not seen by shoppers in suburban malls, dazzled by the latest shiny toy the advertising agencies are convincing us we have to have to live a fulfilling life. The relentless transformations of ecologies and economies involve the expulsion of numerous peoples from their lands but also the expulsion of many people and traditional modes of the economy from the new globalized production systems that link commodity chains and production complexes across the world (Sassen 2014). In the process too, numerous species are expelled from their ecological niches; the rapid expansion of the global economy is precisely the process that, by disrupting and destroying habitats in many places, is leading to the current global extinction event that so worries biologists and wildlife advocates. This rapid destruction of biodiversity is another very worrisome development in the Anthropocene as activists in Extinction Rebellion understand very clearly. This is rendering us all potentially very insecure in the future because humans depend on so many other species in many ways.

Living in the Technosphere Key to all this is the huge amount of fossil fuels modern life involves. This allows us to use engines for transport, digging endless holes in the ground, making electricity, keeping buildings comfortable, making vast amounts of plastic and other stuff that clutters up the ecosystems we depend on for food,

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water and, well, everything else we use to live. We are not just spreading out on the surface, but we are digging deep mines and building high too, processes that also divide the world vertically and literally build injustices and divisions onto the landscape (Graham 2016). Those holes we dig—mines, foundations for building, tunnels and all the rest—mean that we are moving much more material than natural processes of erosion and deposition; we are now the planet’s leading geomorphologists too! The rich and powerful are re-­ plumbing the planet too with dams, irrigation systems, canals, pipes, sewers and pumping stations and in the process moving water around in new ways; many rivers no longer reach the sea because we divert so much of their water for crops, cities and industries. Environmental security now has to be about how the changes we make shape the future of the earth system and, crucially whether the decisions the rich and powerful make, about what to produce will cumulatively move the planet towards a fairly stable configuration, or towards one of accelerating climate change and the further disruptions of ecosystems around the world in a situation now sometimes being termed a hothouse earth (Steffen et  al. 2018). Will the political and economic elites of our times decide to invest in solar energy, batteries and windmills to gradually wean us off our dependence on fossil fuels and begin tackling the climate crisis? Will they fall in line with President Trump’s rejection of climate change and his insistence that the future is one for patriots, and bash on regardless with fracking and digging coal? Or will they come to their senses and conclude that, despite their wealth, they can’t protect themselves and their families from the complex systems and interconnected crises that the technosphere presents to them and to everyone else? Can novel financial arrangements and the activists demanding divestment from fossil fuel industries begin to shift financial resources towards making sensible things and reviving ecosystems to cope with Anthropocene changes (Gaffney et al. 2018)? This is not how traditional international relations thinking has conceived the world or how states might provide security, but in the new circumstances of the Anthropocene this is the kind of new thinking that is needed (Box 8.2). Because the majority of us live in cities these days, and in houses and apartments that need electricity or fossil fuels to heat them, and the water we use in them—to cook food, wash our clothes and provide access to the internet, movies, electronic games and yes, power the computers that textbooks are written with—a key to most of our personal security is keeping those systems running. To do this, we have made numerous new things in huge quantities and use technology of many sorts to power our buildings, transport and most aspects of our lives. Altogether, these materials and technologies, often now

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Box 8.2  Divestment/Investment Citizen initiatives to deal with climate change have become part of the policy process outside the normal operation of governments. Many environmental and church groups have been arguing that investing in fossil fuel industries that are making climate change worse and frequently simply not trying to rework their business plans to do less damaging things, is both morally wrong and dangerous misuse of funds. Moving investments in pension plans, or University endowment funds out of fossil fuels and moving them into sectors of the economy that don’t profit from damaging the environment, makes ethical sense as a way of taking action that doesn’t wait on governments to act. While there have been many moral arguments about this, the financial case for moving to the new growing sectors of the economy, especially in renewable energy, electrical vehicles, battery systems and microgrids, is also convincing many investors to bet on the future as one that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels. The University of California announced in September 2019 that it was moving its endowment fund of some $70 billion out of fossil fuels, not because it was the ethical thing to do but because the fossil fuel sector wasn’t as profitable as many other parts of the economy. Their announcement specified this as a business decision, driven by the changing nature of the economy, where the old fossil fuel sector was increasingly seen as something from the past rather than a promising investment opportunity.

simply called the “technosphere”, depend on reliable supplies of energy. Politicians are, above all these days, supposed to arrange things so the lights stay on! Personal insecurities in disaster situations, in storms and floods, in particular, are frequently directly related to this “power” suddenly becoming unavailable. But if that power is supplied by using fossil fuels, as so much of it still is, then the indirect effects of climate change coming from the waste gases, that carbon dioxide problem again, are making people in low-lying states, and in numerous places where disrupted weather systems are causing droughts, disasters and storms, very insecure. Our prosperity comes at their cost (Dalby 2020). This is the new geopolitics of the Anthropocene. Reflecting on these matters at one of the first United Nations meetings on the security implications of climate change, the delegate from Tuvalu, a state facing inundation by rising sea levels in the foreseeable future, put things very directly and bluntly to the world community: “The world has moved from a global threat called the Cold War to what should now be considered the ‘warming war’. Our conflict is not being fought with guns and missiles but with weapons from everyday life—chimneystacks and exhaust pipes. We are confronted with a chemical war of immense proportions” (Pita 2007). In terms of security, the national security of Tuvalu is dependent on the rest of the world rapidly scaling back

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their use of fossil fuels; if that doesn’t happen, then Tuvalu will cease to exist. But Tuvalu doesn’t have any weapons apart from moral suasion and the articulateness of its spokespeople in international meetings. This is not a geopolitical confrontation that it can win against the larger powers if they insist on continuing to use the “weapons of everyday life”. The countries of the Global South face such “climate terror” daily, reading alarming statements about the state of the world’s environment but without the power to do much about it (Chaturvedi and Doyle 2015).

A New World: Energy and Geopolitics The importance of digital technologies and the use of computer-controlled systems for running numerous parts of the technosphere is also a potential source of insecurity, one that is already keeping security planners up at night. In the case of disasters, electrical grids and communications systems, including cell phones that depend on reliable electricity, are very vulnerable (Briggs and Matejova 2019). Aggression and just bad behaviour in cyberspace is already threatening national electricity grids and in a couple of cases, including in Ukraine and apparently in Venezuela too, direct cyber-attacks have been used to sabotage electricity systems and switch the lights out (Sanger 2019). Artificial disasters are now part of the international struggles where power cuts can be induced as a matter of what might be called non-violent coercion. In 2019, Houthi-controlled drones from Yemen caused considerable damage to Saudi Arabian oil facilities as part of their conflict, revealing just how vulnerable fossil fuel supply systems are. While this wasn’t about the “warming war”, the potential for desperate actions, on the part of those suffering its consequences, looms on the geopolitical horizon unless the technosphere is shaped in more sustainable directions and soon. Is it much of a stretch to suggest that sooner or later desperate activists or politicians—in states facing imminent destruction because of climate change and having failed to get the attention of state emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide—might resort to online sabotage in attempts to take fossil fuel facilities offline? In California, a few weeks later, the electricity utility turned the power off in an attempt to prevent the electric grid causing yet more wildfires: in effect choosing one form of insecurity over another and highlighting the new vulnerabilities of the technosphere. Security policy now is in part about choosing which potential disaster is most worrisome (Dalby 2020).

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Of course, the rich and powerful may decide to try to deal with these issues using violence and combine this with efforts to “geoengineer” the climate, using such techniques as injecting sulphur aerosols into the stratosphere to “shade” the planet and cool it as a way to counter the disruptions of climate change (Blackstock and Low 2019). Coupling these technological efforts with a refusal to reduce fossil fuel use suggests dangerous possibilities of an increasingly violent future. Not least, this is so because such engineering efforts would have to be maintained indefinitely; if carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere then geoengineering will have to be continuous. If it stops for whatever reason then the rapid rise in temperature would quickly be disastrous. But this kind of solar geoengineering isn’t going to solve the problem because it fails to deal with the crucial matter of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causing the oceans to become more acidic (Pierrehumbert 2019). Once again, the interconnectedness of the Earth system makes it clear that such temporary fixes, only focused on one aspect of the problem, will not generate environmental security for the future. Security for most people now has to mean political conditions that allow societies to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances. As coastlines erode, and in some cases, whole island nation states disappear under the waves, and as storms, wildfires, droughts, floods and related disruptions endanger agriculture as well as cities, it is no longer sensible to think in terms of a stable Earth on which the human drama can play out. The American military often likes to use phrases like “shaping the future”. That it turns out is exactly what fossil fuel using industrial societies have been doing on a much bigger scale than they realized until the last half-century. Having realized it, many advocates of fossil fuel-powered lifestyles are still ignoring the dangers and refusing to face up to the unintended consequences of fossil fuel use with all the dramatic alterations of natural systems that have been set in motion. All of which is going to make the very necessary transitions to new energy systems and modes of economy in coming decades all the more difficult (Selby 2019). But all is not lost, at least not yet! As the climate crisis worsens, states and corporations, as well as climate change activists, are thinking seriously about alternatives and about how to fuel and power a global civilization that needs to address many of the problems of underdevelopment that still plague many parts of the world. How to implement the sustainable development goals that the United Nations adopted in 2015, and do so without using ever more fossil fuels, is a key question for contemporary geopolitics. A key part of this is about building new things and powering these electrically. But adapting old technologies and using them in new ways will probably also be crucial to thinking much more imaginatively about how urban residents are going to thrive in the next economy (see Box 8.3).

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Box 8.3  La Paz, Bolivia: Adaptation in Action La Paz is a high-altitude capital city, one facing unique problems due to its rapidly growing population and a changing climate. It is facing growing demands for water just as the glaciers in the Andes Mountains around the city are finally disappearing due to climate change. They have been melting for decades and now that they no longer provide reliable water supplies downstream, La Paz faced a serious, although temporary, water supply problem early in 2017. Emergency arrangements to truck water into the city were instigated and the worst of the shortage dealt with, but this episode, like the one in Cape Town South Africa a little later, makes it clear that major cities have to rethink their water supply systems quite drastically in the face of uncertainties about rainfall and snowpacks. Because of those melting snows in the Andes, the Bolivian ski team no longer has a place to train. Ski resorts in the mountains are being abandoned due to lack of snow. However, the technology that usually keeps ski resorts going, the cable cars to take skiers to the high-altitude slopes, is being reimagined for a very different purpose. La Paz has been building cable car lines across the city, providing a high-capacity innovative mode of public transport. Big buses and subways are impossible in such terrain, but cable cars, running over the built-up areas, are providing an innovative mode of public transport. In comparison to traditional railways and subways, this is a technology that uses very little energy and needs much less construction than roads, bridges and parking lots for private automobiles. Reusing what has been mostly recreational technology, that is low environmental impact and can be electrically powered using renewable energy, suggests the kind of innovations that twenty-first-century cities are going to need to cope with the needs of their still-growing populations.

While new renewable energy systems, battery storage and electric vehicles are still a relatively small part of the overall energy systems of the present, they are growing rapidly. Tesla cars have already challenged the dominance of internal combustion vehicles in the United States, but the really rapid and large-scale production of electric vehicles, buses, trucks and cars has been happening in China in recent years, and this promises to change both how cities operate and remove much of the need for fossil fuels for transportation. The new International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA), recently set up a Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation which issued its first comprehensive report on these things early in 2019 titled very appropriately A New World. The rapid rate of technological innovation, rising Asian economies and the need to tackle climate change make thinking about these things together essential now for global environmental security. One of the key findings in A New World is that the rapidly dropping price of renewable energy is making fossil fuels uneconomic in many markets. States that are dependent on revenues from fossil fuels may have a tough time

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adjusting to these new circumstances unless they rapidly develop plans to transition their economies away from fossil fuels. They need to use the wealth they have already generated to invest in new energy sources and new business models that look to the future rather than try to perpetuate the use of climate change causing fuels. Not surprisingly, key states in IRENA are Norway and the United Arab Emirates, states with leaderships that understand that their responsibilities to provide security for their citizens require that they think ahead to plan for a very different future. They will be futures not dependent on fossil-fuelled development projects and internal combustion engines.

Conclusion: Anthropocene Security? Until recently, it was possible to see nature as vast and humanity as relatively insignificant. Or nature could be seen as potential dangerous but also something that, using modern ingenuity and lots of engineering and fossil fuels, could be tamed. But the last few decades have clearly upended these assumptions. Attempts to tame nature, engineer our futures and all that use of fossil fuel have changed how the Earth system works. Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, it will continue to change things for a very long time in the future. In trying to tame nature, the rich and powerful among us have changed humanity’s own circumstances, in ways that they frequently hadn’t anticipated. Now we live in an increasingly artificial world. But rapidly reducing our use of fossil fuels will make adapting to a changing world easier. Security is now about these considerations, not just the rivalries of states and military matters. This is the new context of the Anthropocene, one that challenges how societies might provide security in many new ways. Which is why it is so important that the new dynamic circumstances of the Anthropocene become the starting point for studies and policy suggestions of international relations. The old twentieth-century assumptions, such as the necessity of hegemony by the most powerful states in a world of competing states and frequently fractious politics, are badly out of date for dealing with the new challenges of global politics. These are about transitioning to new forms of economy that are not powered by fossil fuels and that allow states, societies and economies to be flexible enough to respond non-violently to the storms, droughts and social disruptions that are inevitable in the much-altered world in which we all now live.

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Key Points  1. Technologies are remaking the future; shaping the technosphere matters for the next stage of the Anthropocene. 2. The long legacy of colonization and fossil-fuelled capitalism has shaped the world in ways that have to be directly challenged for future security. 3. The next stage of the Anthropocene won’t look much like the world that twentieth-century International Relations took for granted. 4. Interconnections between ecology and economy at the global scale have to be worked into all-new thinking for International Relations. 5. Rapid adaptation is now key for all the world’s peoples in the Anthropocene. Key Questions  1. Which states are going to have the greatest difficulties in dealing with the new circumstances of the Anthropocene? 2. Why is the term Anthropocene useful for rethinking security? 3. What are the new dangers and insecurities in the Anthropocene? 4. Why are things like divestment campaigns now part of security politics?

Further Reading Chaturvedi, S. and Doyle, T. 2015. Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dalby, S. 2020. Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Davis, M. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation. 2019. A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation (www.geopoliticsofrenewables.org). Lewis, S.  L. and Maslin, M.  A. 2018. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Pelican. McNeill, J. R. and Engelke, P. 2016. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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References Belcher, O., P. Bigger, B. Neimark and Kennelly, C. 2020. Hidden Carbon Costs of the “Everywhere War”: Logistics, Geopolitical Ecology, and the Carbon Boot-­ print of the US Military. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45(1): 65–80. Blackstock, J. J. and Low, S. (eds) 2019. Geoengineering our Climate: Ethics, Politics and Governance. London: Earthscan/Routledge. Briggs, C.  M. and Matejova, M. 2019. Disaster Security: Using Intelligence and Military Planning for Energy and Environmental Risks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaturvedi, S., and Doyle, T. 2015. Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change. London: Palgrave Macmillan. CNA Corporation. 2007. National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation. Crosby, A. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalby, S. 2018. Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene. Geopolitics 23(3): 718–742. Dalby, S. 2020. Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Dannreuther, R. 2013. International Security: The Contemporary Agenda. Cambridge: Polity. Dauvergne, P. 2008. The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dauvergne, P. 2016. Environmentalism of the Rich. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Davis, M. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. Gaffney, O., Crona, B., Dauriach, A. and Galaz, V. 2018. Sleeping Financial Giants: Opportunities in Financial Leadership for Climate Stability. Stockholm: Stockholm Resilience Centre. Graham, S. 2016. Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London: Verso. Grove, J. V. 2019. Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Homer-Dixon, T. 1999. Environment, Scarcity and Violence Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klare, M. 2019. All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. New York: Metropolitan Books. Lewis, S.  L. and Maslin, M.  A. 2018. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Pelican. Malm, A. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

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McNeill, J.  R., and Engelke, P. 2016. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pierrehumbert, R. 2019. There is no Plan B for dealing with the climate crisis. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 75(5): 215–221. Pita, A. 2007. Statement to the United Nations Special Session of the Security Council. 17 April. Retrieved from http://www.tuvaluislands.com/un/2007/ un_2007-04-17.html [accessed 31 December 2019]. Sanger, D.  E. 2019. The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age. New York: Broadway. Sassen, S. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Selby, J. 2019. The Trump Presidency, Climate Change, and the Prospect of a Disorderly Energy Transition. Review of International Studies 45(3): 471–490. Steffen, W., et  al. 2018. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(33): 8252–8259. Stiglitz, J. E. and Kaldor, M. (eds) 2013. The Quest for Security: Protection without Protectionism and the Challenge of Global Governance. New  York: Columbia University Press. Trump, D. 2019. Remarks by President Trump to the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. Retrieved from https://ml.usembassy.gov/remarks-by-president-­ trump-to-the-74th-session-of-the-united-nations-general-assembly/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Williams, M. and Summerhayes, C. P. (eds) 2019. The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit a Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9 Security in the Anthropocene Maria Julia Trombetta

Introduction Environmental issues, ranging from climate change to scarcity of resources and diminishing biodiversity, present a set of challenges that have suggested that we are now living in the Anthropocene, a new geological era in which the destiny of the planet depends on human actions. Many of these challenges are expressed in security terms, with a growing emphasis on energy, environmental and water security, highlighting the emergence of new, non-traditional security issues. Meanwhile, old ones, like conflicts, remain relevant, and security paradoxes become evident (Nyman 2018). Analytical frameworks and existing institutions become dysfunctional, and problems cannot be dealt with in the old ways (Adler 2005, 75). 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 of flux 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 The original version of this chapter was revised: this chapter was previously published non-open access. It has been changed to Open Access. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_25

M. J. Trombetta (*) University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Ningbo, P.R. China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2022 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_9

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foundations and its categories of analysis (Luke 2003; Kavalski 2011; Corry and Stevenson 2017) and to security studies more specifically. The chapter adopts a perspective inspired by critical security studies and securitization theory. Critical security studies (see Krause and Williams 1997; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2014) questions the objective nature of threats, the naturalization of national security discourses and the narrow scope of security studies. Securitization theory (Buzan et al. 1998) considers security as a specific form of social practice. Securitization is a process of discursive construction of threats that, by turning problems into security issues, lifts them above politics and transforms the way of handling them. It legitimizes actors and specific practices, characterized by exceptional measures. Moving beyond securitization theory, however, the chapter questions not only how threats emerge in the Anthropocene but also how the practices and logic of security are challenged and transformed by dealing with them (Trombetta 2010). At the same time, the analysis warns against considering the Anthropocene as a unified discourse or a given condition. Many of the threats the Anthropocene is supposed to pose are constructed, and its representation is mediated, often through security assumptions. The way we think about security in the Anthropocene is thereby based on the way we think and conceptualize the Anthropocene. The chapter will begin by suggesting that the Anthropocene is not only a new geological era, which challenges modern assumptions about nature and humans, but also a security discourse. The chapter will proceed by exploring how different approaches to security engage with the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. It will show how Realist discourses are framing emerging challenges within traditional categories of analysis, often contributing to reinforcing them. Critical approaches, questioning how threats are constructed, provide relevant insights for interrogating security in the Anthropocene. Securitization, broadly understood as the discursive process that transforms a problem issue into a security issue, will be used as a heuristic to illustrate some of the challenges and to map alternatives.

The Security Challenges of the Anthropocene The Anthropocene, comparing human actions to a geological force, recognizes the impact of our species on the planet and emphasizes how the separation between human and nature is fading away as humans are transforming what was once natural (see Introduction). The environment is no longer a stable background against which human life and history unfold. The very

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destiny of the planet, of life as we know it and the survival of humankind, is in human hands. This is both empowering and threatening. This consideration has implications for IR theory and knowledge production. Firstly, new categories of threats are emerging, like the possibility of catastrophic climate change or massive species extinction, while more traditional ones, like conflict, are still present. Traditional categories of analysis and security logics remain relevant and yet they are limited when it comes to addressing new challenges, characterized by complexity and interdependence. Paradoxes and tensions emerge. So, for instance, the quests for energy security or access to resources, which are part of national security strategies, contribute to global warming and biodiversity loss that threaten the very foundation of security. Similarly, reactive measures or compensation are futile in the face of extinction, despite attempts to create insurance mechanisms for catastrophic events. Secondly, questioning the existence of nature as a stable background jeopardizes the possibility of objective, cumulative knowledge about threats. Nature is not only the anthropomorphized “Gaia”, symbolizing biosphere system interactions—powerful and yet in need of protection—that mobilizes traditional security tropes. Nature is the ground of modern Western epistemology and positivist approaches to social science, international relations and security studies. In order to understand the challenges that the Anthropocene presents to security studies, it is worth noticing that the Anthropocene is not only a condition but also a security discourse. Considering the Anthropocene as a condition reveals the necessity of reworking security categories, as new threats, with new characteristics call for new actors, institutions and practices. Considering it as a security discourse clarifies the challenges and the political dimensions that such a reworking involves, as that condition and the threats it poses are not given. Threats are constructed and reflect different priorities, identities and interests. Arguing that the survival of humankind is in human hands is inherently a security argument that mobilizes action by evoking an existential threat. It is an argument that reflects assumptions about security and existing ways of life. As critical scholars have pointed out, defining what counts as security—who deserves to be protected and how—reflects different political perspectives. Different formulations of threats legitimize the existence of different actors and their role in providing security. To paraphrase Cox: security “is always for someone and for some purpose” (1981, 129). The challenges posed by the Anthropocene call for a deep transformation of the way of conceptualizing security and providing it, as the Anthropocene transforms “the conditions under which it is now possible to think, speak, and

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make authoritative claims about what is referred to in the language of modern politics as ‘security’” (Walker 1997, 61). Expanding on arguments made in the environmental security literature (Dalby 2009; Litfin 1999), scholars embracing the Anthropocene discourse, question how attempts to take the environmental crisis seriously challenge what is understood as security. As Deudney (1990) warned, the environment may not be a national security issue, but environmentalism is a threat to a specific conceptualization of security; so is the Anthropocene. As positivist, rationalist assumptions are questioned, the objectivity of threats is challenged. As state centrism is questioned, the logic of national security is problematized and with it a specific geopolitical gaze and understanding of politics (see Chap. 2). As humans and nature became entangled, securing humans from nature and nature from humans becomes problematic. As complex flux and relations emerge, security may come from “being more connected, not less” (Burke et al. 2016, 4). At the same time, the transformation is not easy, as security refers to a political tradition that is difficult to escape (Walker 1997). Security remains a powerful, evocative term and framing problems as security issues allow recalling old categories of analysis, re-legitimizing actors and approaches that work within existing assumptions about security. The environmental conflict debate illustrates this dynamic as it shows how the new threats posed by environmental degradation are framed in the familiar language of conflict and national security (see Box 9.1). Similarly, fixing “planetary boundaries” (see Chap. 3) may be a way to set limits within which traditional approaches and assumptions about security can be applied. Normative arguments about the ways in which security needs to be reconceptualized are relevant. However, much of the work that transforms what is understood as security and the ways it is provided is done by actual, mundane processes through which issues are transformed into security issues and actors and practices are developed and legitimized. As Didier Bigo explains, security is not just an analytical tool; it is a category requiring a genealogical analysis (2002, 68; see also Chap. 7). Thus, security studies in the Anthropocene have to address a set of methodological, ontological, epistemological and normative questions. Below, I analyse how different theoretical perspectives are incorporating and questioning some of the issues raised by the Anthropocene, in order to understand better the challenges of moving out of the conceptual framework provided by IR.

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Box 9.1  Environmental Conflict The literature and the debate on environmental conflicts exemplify several assumptions that traditional security studies as a discipline deploys when dealing with the environment and nature: the focus on nature as the provider of resources and services, the centrality of the state and of military conflicts and a specific way of naturalizing threats. Concerns that environmental degradation, depletion of renewable resources and global environmental change may cause violent conflicts, gained relevance in the 1990s, both in academia and in political debates. In North America, Homer-­ Dixon coordinated an international research group aimed at studying the links between environmental degradation and violent conflict (Homer-Dixon 1991; 1994). His research was made popular by Kaplan’s article “The Coming Anarchy”, which presented an alarming image of chaos in the periphery, instability, violent conflicts and massive population displacement. He dubbed the environment the “national security issue of the early twenty-first century” (1994, 58). Even if the results of Homer-Dixon’s research showed that the link between environmental degradation and violence is not straightforward—that conflicts were likely to be low-intensity and subnational, that institutions and ingenuity matter—his research was quite influential on the Clinton administration. In Europe, a similarly extensive project, undertaken by Spillman and Bachler, identified a set of syndromes pointing at problematic relationships between environmental and other political, social and demographic factors (Bächler 1998). Research on environmental conflict has prompted an intense academic debate about the empirical validity of claims, the methodology adopted and the normative implications. The thesis that environmental scarcity causes conflict has been challenged by empirical research demonstrating that environmental degradation provides opportunities for cooperation and that it is the abundance of resources rather than their scarcity that causes conflict (Collier and Hoeffler 2004). It has been argued that the environmental conflict thesis implies environmental determinism and the assumption that conflicts are likely to occur in the global South. However, the conflict argument remains relevant in more recent literature. Klare (2012) has argued that competition for resources, including freshwater, will be a determinant of future conflict. An environmental component was identified in the uprising in Syria in 2011 (Kelley et al. 2015). Historically, the environment-conflict debate shows how early concerns for environmental degradation as a threat to global commons, calling for cooperation and common security, were translated in the more familiar language of threats to global order (Trombetta 2012, 153), reflecting traditional geopolitical imaginations (Dalby 2007). The way in which Realism theorized security and conventional ideas about what counts as a threat has shaped the way in which environmental conflict has become an object of knowledge (Trombetta 2012, 164).

Realism has been the dominant perspective in security and strategic studies. It is characterized by a focus on the state and an emphasis on war and conflicts. Within security studies, there has been a debate, since the 1980s to broaden and deepen the security agenda (see Buzan and Hansen 2009). Broadening refers to the extension of the security agenda to include new

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threats, like those posed by environmental problems. Deepening suggests a vertical move from the state down to the individual and up to referents like the humankind or the biosphere (Rothschild 1995). Despite these challenges to expand the agenda, Realism relies on a positivist notion of security that takes threats as objectively given. Furthermore, it assumes a zero-sum, antagonist logic of security. In the Anthropocene, this approach creates security paradoxes in which attempts to secure existing ways of life increase insecurity. The example of energy security is emblematic (see Box 9.2). As states try to secure access to fossil fuels, they increase insecurity by creating competition and contributing to global warming (Nyman 2018). “Gone are the days of billiard ball states and national security based on keeping the Other out or deterred” (Burke et  al. 2016, 4) critical scholars suggest. Nevertheless, the antagonistic zero-sum approach is still relevant and ready to be applied all the time a threat is evoked successfully. Framing climate change as a threat to national security is a way to reinforce that logic. Box 9.2  Energy Security The debate about what counts as energy security and how to achieve it is emblematic of the condition of the Anthropocene as energy is essential for modern societies, from sustaining the economy to projecting power. Securing access to energy sources and providing energy services are priorities for states; they involve national security considerations and human security ones. They have local, national and global dimensions. Contemporary energy systems rely on fossil fuels, often extracted from distant places. In 2015, more than 80% of global energy supply was based on fossil fuels. Energy systems are highly unequal and not sustainable. On the one hand, more than 1.2 billion people live without access to electricity. On the other, despite concerns for peaking oil, in order to limit the increase in global warming to 2 °C, one-third of existing reserves will need to be kept in the ground, and emissions are not the only environmental impact of energy systems, which spans from oil spills to local pollution (see Trombetta 2018 for an overview). As Mayer and Schouten provocatively ask: “Why has energy security policy caused widespread insecurities?” (Mayer and Schouten 2012, 14). Nyman (2018) has pointed to the paradox in which states’ attempts to increase security of supply end up in increasing insecurity by creating competition and conflicts and by contributing to climate change in an energy security dilemma. Mayer and Schouten (2012) emphasize how processes of securitization and energy security discourses have been selective in identifying threats, silencing some and naturalizing others. Pointing to how, for instance, climate and energy security discourses are kept separate, despite their connections, they call for an approach that is more inclusive and considers material and discursive aspects  (ibid.). The call is echoed by research focusing on critical energy systems that combine values, material and technical aspects (Cherp and Jewell 2014)  and by attempts to broaden, deepen and trandform the concept of energy security (Dyer and Trombetta 2013).

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Critical approaches, questioning the objective nature of threats and the centrality of the state, opened up the space for a critical analysis of the concept of security and its transformation in the Anthropocene. The concept of securitization (see Box 9.3) questions the objective nature of threats and of the state as the referent for security, thereby opening up the space for challenging the necessity and naturalization of any security formations. In this way, securitization provides the opportunity to analyse some of the limitations of traditional security approaches; at the same time, it is embedded in a modern account of security that the Anthropocene challenges. For this reason, the discussion is divided into two sections: first, securitization is used to discuss the problems of security; second, the limitations of securitization are exposed through the lenses of the Anthropocene. Box 9.3  Securitization Securitization, initially formulated by Ole Weaver and the so-called Copenhagen School (Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998), considers security as a discursive process that raises an issue above normal politics, presents it as a priority and justifies extraordinary measures (Wæver 1995; Williams 2003). While the decision of transforming an issue into a security issue is open to negotiation and involves securitizing actors and an audience, the practices that a successful securitization brings about are not. They follow a specific logic that reflects a long-standing political tradition that legitimizes exceptional measures and the breaking of otherwise accepted norms and rules. It allows governing by decrees rather than democratic measures. In this way, securitization opens up the security agenda to a variety of threats but keeps its coherence by identifying security with a specific form of social practice. Securitization theory combines the construction of threats with a rather fixed logic of security. Given the problematic character of the measures that a successful securitization can bring about, the normative suggestion offered by the Copenhagen School is to desecuritize issues, bringing problems back into an open political debate, as the logic of security cannot be changed, at least in a short time. Securitization has been used in the environmental and climate security debate (Trombetta 2008; Floyd 2010) and to analyse many security issues, like energy, health and food, which are relevant in the Anthropocene (see Balzacq et al. 2016).

Subjects and Objects of Security Securitization theory suggests that there are no objective threats waiting to be discovered and counteracted and highlights the political process of transforming an issue into a security issue. Securitization does not deny the materiality of threats, or their seriousness, but focuses on the process of selection and construction that makes them appear natural. The process legitimizes the

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survival of valued referent objects and of the actors that can provide security. Threat-construction matters. Discourses about planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015) warn about the catastrophic consequences of bypassing them, but also about the multiplicity of threats implied in tampering with them. Climate change contributes to problems like migration, biodiversity loss and the spread of disease. They have different implications for different people. The term “threat multiplier”, an expression formulated initially to address the security challenges posed by climate change, considers this tension. It captures not only the multiple dimensions, interconnection and overlapping of different threats but also the problems and the very political nature of establishing security links, reflecting different priorities and interests. Securitization theory is also important in arguing that security discourses are not necessarily about the state, as in national security discourses, or about the individual, as in the human security discourse or some critical approaches. The Copenhagen school—taking into account that different actors and political communities can make appeals for their survival—argues that it is possible to account for and “to study transformation in the units of security affairs” (Buzan et al. 1998, 207). Securitization opens up the possibility of transforming political communities through the social construction of common threats. As Beck argued: “threats create society and global threats create global society” (Beck 2000, 38). Moreover, it suggests the possibility of securing communities that can include human and other species or ecosystems. This possibility is considered by approaches that stress the limitations of both national and human security and call for ecological security, which considers the importance of preserving ecosystems (see Chap. 11) or argue for an ethos of care to include humans and non-humans (Chap. 12). Nevertheless, the Copenhagen School remains sceptical about the possibility of a security unit as large as the entirety of humankind, not only for the difficulties of identifying and acting on global threats but also for the antagonistic logic of security that the Copenhagen School assumes (Trombetta 2010). The Anthropocene poses the challenge of reconceptualizing agency when human and nature become intertwined and nature is no longer a stable background on which humans can act. The literature provides several suggestions to move away from anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. Audra Mitchell (2014), engaging with the problem of harm in the Anthropocene, introduces the concept of “mundicide” to describe the destruction of unique relations between humans, other species and their environment. She draws on green thought to show that weak ecocentrism provides a way to consider the importance of other species and relations, leaving responsibility to humans

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but avoiding the commodification of nature and the environment (Mitchell 2014). Following Latour, scholars drawing on actor-network theory consider agency as the “capability of making a difference in the world” (Rothe 2017a, 91), which is not necessarily a human prerogative. Within security studies, Aradau highlights the role of infrastructure as actants in the process of securitization (2010). Cudworth and Hobden analyse the commodification and objectification of animals in International Relations (2014) and discuss the possibility of recovering their agency. Hamilton, drawing on the premises of quantum theory and the condition of entanglement, analyses how attempts to secure an entangled human self imply a “disentanglement” and the “agency to mediate and act” from which ethical and moral responsibility derives (2017, 579). These attempts emphasize the challenges of reconsidering agency and point  at the limits of existing approaches, questioning, for instance, when, where and by whom security decisions are taken. On the one hand, an approach like securitization points to the possibility of securing a variety of entities and the role that material factors can have in the process. On the other, it remains deeply anthropocentric, with its emphasis on discursive aspects. Securitization, focusing on securing objects or specific aspects of the human-nature relations, like existing ways of life, tends to black-box fixed, pre-existing entities and situations. The problem of black boxing characterizes many security approaches and International Relations more generally. Traditionally, states are represented as sovereign and separate from other entities. Similarly, people are treated as individuals. The division goes further in dividing human from nature as part of the methodological individualism that characterizes modernity. In this way, different entities are boxed off so that their relations can be analysed as part of International Relations. Objects take priority over relations, “the ontological primitives of analysis are ‘things’ or entities—entities exist before interaction, and all relations should be conceived as relations between entities” (Jackson and Nexon 1999, 291). To some extent, securitization perpetrates this logic. The Anthropocene, on the contrary, re-values relations. From a complexity perspective, as Cudworth and Hobden (2013) explain, the world is made up of systems; systems constitute the environment for other systems in an interconnected universe. Even if boundaries can be drawn, systems overlap and interact with other systems. They are open rather than closed; they are contingent rather than deterministic, and they are self-organizing and emergent. “[L]ogically undeducible and physically irreducible to the component parts”, systems are both more and less than the sum of their parts as they put limits on the actions of their components (Cudworth and Hobden 2013).

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Similarly, actor-network theory adopts a relational ontology and analyses how entities or things gain identity and meaning through relations to other things in complex assemblages or actor-networks. Things in the world are real as far as they act on other things (Rothe 2017a, 91). In this perspective, the challenge becomes how to secure complex systems, assemblages and relations. The challenge has immediate implications as non-Western approaches have also been seen as an alternative to the reification and boxing of modernity, and a relational approach has recently gained relevance in non-Western IR (Qin 2016) and security studies (Huang and Shih 2016). From this perspective, the Western social world is compared to bundles of rice stalks which need norms to be bundled together. This is contrasted with the image of ripples in a lake that captures the perspective in which relations come before individuals (Qin 2016, 35–36). Alternative cosmologies and relational ontologies provide elements to address the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. However, a simplistic opposition between Eastern and Western approaches can be equally problematic, perpetuating the very dualism (and boxing) non-Western approaches claim to overcome. Moreover, for security studies, a relational approach can be a way to prioritize bilateral relations over multilateralism, downplaying the role of norms and institutions in bounding individuals and states together.

Security and Securitization in the Anthropocene This section seeks to consider how securitization approaches can be adapted for scholarship in the Anthropocene. As noted above, securitization tends to emphasize discursive aspects of environmental threats, downplaying the material ones. The focus on language and speech acts re-inscribes the nature/society distinction and emphasizes relativism, “delink[ing] ‘discursive’ security from the ‘objectively determined’ realm to which nature belongs” (Mayer and Schouten 2012, 16). As humanity is transforming ecological systems, with consequences that are often unpredictable and threatening, the modern, rationalist distinction between objective, fixed “dynamics of nature and the contingent processes of society” becomes problematic (ibid., 16). This calls for considering securitization, not just as a discursive construction but as a process that brings together discursive, social elements and material ones. It takes into account political and economic practices, narratives of security but also material flows, infrastructures, natural environments and weaves them together.

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Resources for this reconceptualization can be drawn from work in actor-­ network theory (ANT), Science and Technology Studies, New Materialism and related approaches. Scholars working in the ANT tradition have explored the securitization of assemblages in ways that question the material/linguistic distinction and, at the same time, take into account the contribution of differences in professional expertise and knowledge in the process of threat construction (Mayer 2012; Rothe 2017b). As Mayer and Schouten explain, actors do not only constitute discourses about aspects of nature as part of a process of securitization but also bring these aspects in by actively transforming them, by blending social, biological and physical elements, working on nature to fit specific agendas (Mayer and Schouten 2012, 19–20). “Entities are continually reconstituted through material-discursive ‘intra-actions’, where neither the material nor the cultural aspect takes precedence” (Pellizzoni 2019, 38). While the Copenhagen school accounts for the construction of threats and referent objects, the logic of security remains deterministic: security is about existential survival; it is a reactive, antagonistic logic; it assumes a defence against external threats; it operates in exceptional circumstances and legitimizes exceptional measures raising an issue above politics; it divides between friends and enemy. Commentators have challenged this security logic and its fixity, which is particularly problematic when dealing with environmental problems (Huysmans 1998, 232; Trombetta 2008, 2010; Oels 2012), and have shown that security practices developed within the environmental sector and to deal with environmental problems can be somewhat different. This has contributed to bringing into the debate risk, precautionary approaches and resilience, and discussions over the transformation of the logic of security. The focus upon risk is key to concerns in the Anthropocene, in more and more sectors, the logic of risk is replacing the logic of emergency and exceptional measures. Corry has identified a process of “riskification” in which risks instead of threats are constructed, and different practices are brought about. He considered the two logics as complementary (Corry 2012). Even catastrophic events are believed to become insurable, as new technologies of risk calculation and compensation, like catastrophic bonds, emerge. In this perspective, security is not defined in terms of protection from threats, dangers or harms but as the possibility of being compensated (Stripple 2012). However, these framings have been questioned as instability, complexity and uncertainty problematize a security logic based on reactive measures and compensation. “The logic of compensation breaks down and is replaced by the principle of precaution through prevention” (Beck 2006, 334). Just as Beck’s analysis of risk society and its transformative potential have called for a

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rethinking of modernity, the challenges posed by the Anthropocene are calling for a reflexive Anthropocene (Hamilton et al. 2015). As uncertainty and complexity became apparent, resilience has increasingly become the dominant strategy to ensure security (see Chap. 10). Initially welcomed optimistically, resilience is now permeating security discourse and practices. A new “hero in town” (Dunn Cavelty et al. 2015), resilience emphasizes the capability of actors and systems to resist shocks and return to their original status. It is supposed to provide the stability questioned by growing complexity and threatened by catastrophic, non-linear changes. It is behind discourses seeking to maintain systems within stable parameters, like the ones set by planetary boundaries (see Chap. 3). It emphasizes the ingenuity and adaptive capabilities of individuals and systems. Resilience, however, has been criticized for the emphasis on preserving the status quo, contributing to maintaining the existing order, which has determined the emergence of the environmental crisis, and for being a strategy of neoliberal governmentality that puts the responsibility of adapting and being resilient on the individual. As a response to these critiques, resilience has been reworked as the possibility of not only bouncing back but also bouncing forwards, and the emphasis has shifted towards considering and promoting the resilience of societies rather than that of the individual (see Chap. 10). Questioning the deterministic logic of security, originally assumed by securitization theory, allows attention to be paid to the fact that the logic of security is not given but reflects the problematization of an issue. Different discourses of danger will determine political rationalities and technologies of government (Foucault 2007). The subject of security, the logics of security and the means employed to provide it are deeply related. Foucault identified two main problematizations of security and related political rationalities. The first, geopolitics, has as its referent object the territorial state and the narrative of national security, with its inside-outside logic, binaries oppositions, reactive measures and the preservation of the status quo. To this narrative, Foucault adds biopolitics as exercised on life and on species, as an emerging rationality of government, which characterized the development of the modern state (and sciences). Species for Foucault include all kinds of complex systems; however, his analysis highlights the relevance of the human, national population with its dynamics. Phenomena that individually are aleatory and unpredictable, at collective level, display constraints that can be identified and acted upon (Foucault 2003, 246). Securing life and population is about governing the contingency of life, regulating fluxes and circulation. Yet, it depends upon modern sciences, like economics, statistics, ecology and assumes stable relations and dynamics. As Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero explain, the problematic

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of security posed by life is not the same as the one posed by territoriality, and it will not be the same as the one posed by securing humans (Anthropos) in the Anthropocene, and the “security apparatuses developed around these different referent objects” will also be different (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008, 274). Thus, much of the debate on security in the Anthropocene is about determining new political rationalities and technologies of government that reflect the enduring relevance of geopolitics, the expanding logics of biopolitics and the emphasis on securing life but taking into account that the human control on life and nature has reached new levels, and that the very distinction between human and nature is questioned. Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008) analysed how the molecular revolution has brought biology into politics, but the transformation involves other aspects like information technology and artificial intelligence. Foucauldian approaches or broad readings of securitization (Trombetta 2008; Harrington and Shearing 2017) imply that not only threats are constructed but also the very logic of security and the practices associated with it are subject to a constant process of redefinition and reworking, even if some can be more resilient than others. For the purpose of this chapter, the choice of focusing on securitization has allowed an emphasis on the persistence of some aspects and a more structured analysis of the challenges involved.

Conclusion Securitization has provided the lenses to consider some of the challenges in reconceptualizing security in the Anthropocene. Securitization theory has been focused upon because it emphasizes the political nature of doing security and has claimed to distil the meaning of security from current usage, allowing the identification of the assumptions behind specific articulations of security. In the process, it has been shown that redefining and questioning the subject of security in the Anthropocene does not involve only questioning how threats are constructed, and whose security is at stake, but also problematizing the logic of security and the measures it legitimizes. This calls for a genealogical account (see Chap. 7) of security, opening up the possibility of transformation but warning about the challenges it involves. Yet, two caveats need to be considered in discussing how the Anthropocene is transforming security logics and practices. First, it is not only a transformation in material conditions that brings about new threats and new conceptualizations of security. Security discourses and practices need to be rearticulated. As Bigo (2002) has pointed out, a variety of experts’ practices are constantly

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contributing to rearticulating security discourses. In this perspective, the Anthropocene is not a given condition, it is an evolving security discourse, and its multiple meanings materialize in very specific and different ways. Second, and related to that, the persistence of specific security practices and logics emphasizes the limitation of political imagination that makes it difficult to escape them (Walker 1997; Fagan 2017) and asks for critical engagement and alternatives. Key Points 1. In the Anthropocene, traditional approaches to security that characterize International Relations and security studies become problematic. 2. The recognition that humans are transforming the Earth to an extent that the separations of humans and nature are no longer tenable, that nature is no longer as stable background, and that humans, other species and material factors, are part of complex fluxes has deep implications for what it means to be secure, who can provide security and how. 3. An approach like securitization that questions the objective nature of threats, highlights the political nature of selecting threats and claims to distil the meaning of security from its usage, can provide relevant insights for engaging the problems of security in the Anthropocene. 4. Securitization can help open up the debate; however, it is necessary to move beyond securitization and consider the importance of new forms of agency, relational aspects, material factors and different logics of security. Key Questions 1. How does the Anthropocene challenge traditional assumptions about the study of security? 2. Is securitization a relevant framework to analyse security dynamics in the Anthropocene? Why? Why not? 3. Why are existing security logics problematic in the Anthropocene? 4. Why is it relevant to ask “Whose security?”, “Against what threats?” and “By what means?”, when analysing security discourses? 5. What are the implications of prioritizing relations over entities for security studies?

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Further Reading Dalby, S. 2009. Security and environmental change. Bristol: Polity Press. Dillon, M. and Lobo-Guerrero, L. 2008. Biopolitics of security in the 21st century: An introduction. Review of International Studies 34(2): 265–292. Hamilton, S. 2017. Securing ourselves from ourselves? The paradox of “entanglement” in the Anthropocene. Crime, Law and Social Change 68(5): 579–595. Mayer, M. and Schouten, P. 2012. Energy security and climate security under conditions of the Anthropocene. In Anceschi, L. (ed.) Energy security in the era of climate change. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 13–35. Trombetta, M. J. 2008. Environmental security and climate change: Analysing the discourse. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 21(4): 585–602. Walker, R.  B. J. 1997. The subject of security. In Krause, K.  and Williams, M.  (eds)  Critical security studies. Concepts and cases. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 61–82.

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10 Security Through Resilience: Contemporary Challenges in the Anthropocene David Chandler

Introduction 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 through 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. Many international organizations, as diverse as the United Nations and the European Union, have now adopted resilience strategies across various policy

D. Chandler (*) Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_10

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areas—highlighted by the UN’s risk and resilience framework for its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN 2017), the EU Action Plan for Resilience (European Commission 2013), the 2016 European Union Global Strategy (European Union 2016) and other policy documents. The mainstreaming of resilience reflects the broadening of the concept of security from a narrow state-level or military concern to a much more encompassing conception of capacities for “bouncing back” and adapting in the face of shocks and disturbances (European Commission 2019; Tocci 2019; Joseph 2018; Chandler 2014). Discourses of resilience (Tocci 2019; see also Chandler 2013) argue that a new, more “pragmatic” approach to security is called for because the complexity of contemporary problems undermines traditional forms of “top-down” or linear imaginaries of state-based security. They, therefore, emphasize that external actors cannot always provide solutions from the outside, as if they had all the answers and policy solutions came in “one-size-­ fits-all” packages. As the contexts in which societies address problems are seen to differ, resilience approaches emphasize the importance of enabling and capacity-building communities and systems held to be “vulnerable,” “at risk,” or “failing” and enhancing, developing or scaling-up endogenous, innate or inherent resources and productive capacities. In discourses of resilience, the focus is therefore upon the internal capacities and understandings of societies in relation to diverse external threats or problems. It’s a little like how in discussions of psychological or engineering resilience it is the internal capacities to respond to stresses and pressures that enable the resilience of individuals or structural components. Therefore, resilience is always relational: a relation between the entity at risk and the external stressor. A society may be resilient to one threat but not to another, for example, a mountainous region may be resilient to flooding but not to food shortages and so on. One thing that resilience discussions share is the assumption that no matter the context and apparent capacities of a particular society, problems, shocks and instabilities will always be “inevitable,” in a complex or “non-linear” world where life is much less predictable, highlighted by the growing prevalence of extreme weather events, environmental crises and the tipping points associated with catastrophic climate change. This framing constructs resilience as always a process of adapting to external or outside forces and resilience policy interventions then concern capacities for self-­organization, deploying different technologies and approaches to change, learn and adapt so as to enable social progress towards the liberal normative goals of “peace, rights, and development” (Tocci 2019). The Anthropocene, however, appears to disrupt the imaginaries of security through resilience. “Coping,” “adapting” and “recovering” are fine if the

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problem is external to the systems and processes concerned, but not if these systems themselves are part of the problem. In effect, the Anthropocene multiplies the interconnections and feedback, which discourses of resilience and complexity begin to recognize, questioning both the construction of the problem and the viability of the potential solutions. For example, funding for floodwalls and levees seems to only enable more building in flood plains, worsening flood damage; new developments in antibiotics seem to encourage resistant strains of bacteria; building more roads only makes traffic more congested and so on. Sometimes, it appears that confronting problems implies a more radical and long-term shift in thinking than enabling communities to become “resilient” to them. The argument of this chapter is that the Anthropocene problematizes the understanding of resilience as a security solution. This is for two reasons, firstly, discussions of resilience are rarely framed to take into account the structural causes of resource depletion and social and economic marginalization, which makes communities and societies more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances (Neyrat 2019; Whyte 2019). Secondly, as a consequence of this framing, the policy interventions, based upon enabling and capacity-­building for resilience, often tend to impose the costs of adaptation upon those who are already in a marginal position, attempting to tackle the effects of crises and shocks but never the structural causes (Moore 2019; Chandler and Reid 2019; Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2016). The claims made above are substantiated through the following three sections of this chapter. The first section provides a brief introduction to the concept of the Anthropocene and its disruption of the assumptions, which ground policy approaches to resilience. It then draws out how this disruption works by moving beyond current policy articulations of complexity, which seek to “defer” or evade underlying problems rather than to address them. This artificiality is sometimes expressed as a problem of technical, bureaucratic, depoliticized or “top-down” approaches which seek to achieve short-­ term solutions or to paper over the cracks. Then follows a second section dealing with “alternative” approaches to resilience, which seek to be more sensitive and responsive to feedback; these are divided between those that seek to develop a deeper engagement with local, community and indigenous forms of knowledge and those which seek to develop resilience through the application, at local and community scales, of new technologies such as satellite-­ based mapping. In the third section, I argue that these alternative framings merely highlight the limits of programmes of resilience in the face of Anthropocene understandings that “fire-fighting,” the effects or consequences of climate change and legacies of capitalist and colonial modes of being, merely reproduces the hierarchies and forms of understanding which drive these problems in the first place.

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The Anthropocene and Complexity The Anthropocene, initially a geological concept, claims that human actions have deeply affected and altered geologic processes, destabilizing earlier Holocene conditions of stability (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Stockholm Resilience Centre n.d.; see Introduction). Thus, we are threatened with catastrophic climate change, not as some sort of “external” threat to our modernist “internal” narratives of “peace, rights, and development” but precisely because our “internal” understandings of humanity as somehow separate to, or apart from, the non-human world were false. This attention to a new epoch in which humanity appears to have impacted the Earth, in ways which mean that natural processes can no longer be separated from historical, social, economic and political effects, has powerfully challenged the modernist divide between nature and culture, separating social and natural science, destabilizing the assumptions of both. Nature can no longer be understood as operating on fixed or natural laws, while politics and culture can no longer be understood as operating in a separate sphere of autonomy and freedom (Latour 2013; Stengers 2015; Chandler 2018). The end of the separations assumed by modernist or “linear” frameworks of policy governance is important to emphasize because it is precisely this aspect which makes the world more “complex” and less predictable: our actions have unexpected and non-linear consequences or side-effects because they are inserted into different sets of relations, different processes—so policy interventions often have different outcomes in different societies and at different times. For Anthropocene thinking, this complexity of inter-relation and interaction means that it would be a mistake to view problems or “shocks” as merely external: something that social, economic or ecological systems need to recover or “bounce-back” from. As long as policymakers and theorists presumed a modernist “world” external to us and amenable to governing and policy interventions, security approaches to resilience could still maintain normative goals of progress towards greater sustainability and adaptive capabilities. We could learn from disasters—even reimagining catastrophes as “emancipatory” (Beck 2015)—or as facilitating new forms of self-growth and improved systems of self-management; “bouncing-forward” with what the former President of the Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin (2015), described as the “resilience dividend.” However, the Anthropocene is seen to disrupt these understandings by viewing “complexity” as a global condition that has been generated by human action, which has made the world more interdependent and interconnected

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but at the same time removed the distinctions and separations that enabled discourses of resilience and “bouncing back.” In many ways, conceptualizations of the Anthropocene follow through on the promissory notes of the globalization discussions of the 1990s in drawing out the implications of relational and system-thinking, which hold that there is no longer an “inside” and an “outside” (e.g., Beck 1992). Constructions of “insides” are those of autonomous agency or actors, central to modernist framings of law and politics: thus, “individuals,” “states,” “minds” and so on were conceived to be separate from the world of relations which constituted them, rather than as integral parts. Likewise, “outsides” were seen to be merely passive, bound by natural laws and processes and amenable to objective knowledge and regulatory control, thus “nature,” the “environment”—“non-humans”—were constructed as objects to be known by subjects. This division between “insides” and “outsides” enabled modernist imaginaries of “progress,” “civilization” and “development,” based on the intensification of these binary divisions. For example, industrialisation was equated with “progress” and our separation from “nature” until we realized that the consequences in terms of resource depletion and climate change made clear that neither assumption was correct. The Anthropocene challenges the aspiration of international actors such as the European Union in their desire to place resilience at the centre of broader security strategies because complex relations of interaction destabilize the idea of a separate “inside” (Ghosh 2016; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; Tsing 2015)—a “we” that needs to be secured or bounce back from external threats. So, while resilience-thinking has achieved nearly universal success in the policymaking world—suggesting new sensitivities to problems and rejecting “high-modernist” technocratic approaches, which depended upon universal “one-size-fits-all” solutions from on high—resilience is still a “modern” construction which assumes that problems are “external” and that we need to develop policy solutions to maintain and to enable our existing modes of being in the face of shocks and perturbations. “We” need to be more responsive and adaptable. “We” need to be sensitive to minor changes and to “tipping points.” In short, that “we” are not the problem, but that “we” need to develop new approaches to preserve our modernist imaginaries of development and progress. It is precisely this framing that Anthropocene sensitivities bring into question. One example of the limits of resilience-thinking comes from a group of Swedish ecology scientists linked with the Resilience Alliance (Stockholm Resilience Centre 2014) and published in Ecosphere, the journal of the Ecological Society of America (Rist et al. 2014). These scientists argue that resilience-thinking has been slow to think through the implications of the

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Anthropocene and the hidden costs of “anthropogenic impacts on the environment.” The problem of ignoring these hidden costs is highlighted in their conceptualization of resilience as a policy which is “coerced” or counterproductive.

Box 10.1  Coerced Resilience International development assistance to enable communities to become more resilient has often involved the provision of techniques and technologies to increase the productivity of land and labour and the provision of infrastructural support. However, these external investments have often lacked sustainability, leading to greater dependencies arising. Rist et al. (2014) define “coerced resilience” as: Resilience that is created as a result of anthropogenic inputs such as labour, energy and technology, rather than supplied by the ecological system itself. In the context of production systems, coercion of resilience enables the maintenance of high levels of production. (Rist et al. 2014, 3) They define “anthropogenic inputs” as the external “replacement of specific ecosystem processes by inputs of labor and manufactured capital (e.g., fossil fuel, technology, nutrients, pesticides and antibiotics)” (2014, 73). Thus, policy interventions for resilience, which depend upon the taking of resources, technologies and materials from elsewhere, merely intensify and redistribute or spread the problems. Anthropogenic inputs to strengthen resilience may make the problem worse by weakening rather than strengthening natural ecosystem sources of resilience. For Rist et al. (2014), this can be clearly seen in the shift to anthropogenic dependencies which “mask” or hide the real costs of production through the import of external resources, enabling production to be sustained through “artifice” or falsity. This “masking” undermines the very feedback processes that complex adaptive systems require. In order to be productive, these systems rely on the maintenance of local ecological processes to retain a wider range of options for unforeseen future requirements, and thereby provide clearer feedbacks regarding proximity to ecological thresholds than do production systems … which require significant anthropogenic inputs. (Rist et al. 2014, 4) Thus, international policy interventions to enable resilience may merely enable tipping points to be reached sooner. The addition of anthropogenic inputs hides the growing loss of natural ecological system resilience, maintaining systems in “artificial” states, entirely dependent upon more and more external inputs: This raises an apparent paradox, whereby highly modified production systems can, through anthropogenic efforts rather than ecological processes, mimic the response of resilient natural systems to a specified disturbance, in their capacity to return to pre-disturbance system states. (Rist et al. 2014, 6)

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Artificial or “coerced” forms of support for resilience undermine the capacities of systems to draw upon natural ecological processes (highlighted in discussions of recent declines of wild and domestic pollinators and the plants and other species which rely upon them) (Rist et  al. 2014, 6). A striking example of the limits of forced or coerced resilience is provided by anthropologist Michael Taussig, in his work, Palma Africana, on the production of palm oil in Colombia. One of the unintended and ironic consequences of increasing reliance through anthropogenic inputs, for example, the development of mono-crops, such as “Hope of America” palm, is that although artificially designed to prevent the spread of insect predation, it needs additional anthropogenic interventions to artificially inseminate it. Thus, production becomes increasingly artificial, requiring more and more inputs, despite being sold to communities as a wonderful technical solution for raising productivity: I see these women inseminators hard at it in the lustrous photographs provided by the Colombian Palm Growers Association. One woman is kneeling by an adult palm with a plastic tube in her mouth blowing sperm into the tiny flowers. In another photo a dark-skinned young woman wearing bright pink jeans and a coal black jacket and cap guides the inseminating tool in her right hand while with her left she pushes back the palm branches studded with fierce thorns. With a look of equally fierce concentration she guides her instrument into its target all because “Hope of America” can’t get it up. One would hope for more from “Hope of America.” (Taussig 2018, 74)

Taussig highlights that policy interventions with the intention of building resilience or self-reliance can paradoxically increase reliance on external inputs and resources. It is this paradox that makes resilience “coercive,” making underlying problems worse, rather than halting or slowing down the process of environmental destruction and exhaustion. In the Anthropocene, it appears that many attempts to start from “pragmatic” resilience “problem-solving” assumptions merely obscure the initial problem or exacerbate deficiencies. This discrediting of practical solutions, which were previously seen as part and parcel of “sustainable development” and “progress,” is due to the complex global relations of interaction and inter-­ relation which come to the fore in the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene there is no “outside” from which to draw resources. Modernity—now recast as the development of anthropogenic forms of “cheating” nature—reaches its closure at a global scale, making international policymaking to enhance resilience actually the driver for the problems it attempts to address: “because

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continued inputs are largely dependent upon, and ultimately limited by globally finite resources, such as fossil-fuel energy and phosphorous” (Rist et al. 2014, 7). The Anthropocene thereby problematizes these forms of international assistance for resilience precisely through revealing the problem of “masking” the environmental implications, which the distances of time and space had previously concealed. High levels of production and the speed of “bounce-back” through resilience approaches were not enabling adaptation to new conditions but quite the opposite: merely working to “mask or camouflage the ecological signals of resilience losses and thus the true underlying constraints to production” (2014, 8).

Alternative Approaches to Resilience Criticisms of policy interventions to support resilience on the basis of their artifice and lack of attention to the “true underlying constraints” are rapidly increasing. Resilience-thinking, rather than being constructed as an alternative to the “policy silos” of linear security approaches, is more likely to be seen as the last redoubt of eco-modernizers and of modernist dreams of technological and technocratic approaches which attempt to short-cut problems rather than to tackle them at source (e.g., Schmidt 2013; Lorimer 2015; Tierney 2015; Yarina 2018; Neyrat 2019). Anna Tsing (2017, 16) notes that resilience imaginaries can be understood as part of an “eco-modernist” fantasy (see Chap. 7), which ignores the feedback effects of the Anthropocene. As Frederic Neyrat (2019) argues, these forms of intervention for resilience: “can only mean one thing, and this is one of the leitmotifs of post-­environmentalism: Intervene even more—in other words. ‘Creating and re-creating [the Earth] again and again for as long as humans inhabit it’” (2019, 85). In the Anthropocene, arguments for resilience appear to feed and reproduce the processes leading to catastrophic collapse. The difficulties facing advocates of resilience are starkly clear in the examination of alternative, “community” or “softer” approaches to resilience which seek to assist communities in being more sustainable without increasing external dependencies. One deeply problematic aspect of “alternative” approaches to resilience in the time of the Anthropocene is that the costs and burdens of sustaining the security concerns of international institutions are inevitably borne by those least able to resist the requirements of power. Resilience cannot possibly be undertaken in “soft,” or more “community-focused” ways without very clearly redistributing the burdens of risk and sacrifice. Even these approaches inevitably assume that there is a hidden or cost-free resource

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that can be used, whether this is understood to be found in “nature,” in “informal,” “indigenous” or “non-modern” modes of being or in the use of new technologies for the self-monitoring and self-policing of communities already coping on the edge of poverty. These “alternative” approaches merely reproduce the problems of more “technical” or “top-down” “coerced” approaches in, firstly, ignoring the unintended or future costs and, secondly, and most importantly, assuming that modernist modes of consumption and production can continue practically unchanged. For alternative approaches to resilience, the alternative to mono-crop agriculture, industrialized fisheries, sea walls and river “normalization” is never to “just let nature take its course.” In discursive framings that are little different to neoliberal constructions of governance interventions that are “for the market”—designed to enable or to “free” the productive and organizational capacities of market forces, “nature” (like market forces) is never assumed to be “natural” (see Chandler 2014). Nature, no longer separate to human systems, requires wise and active stewardship, like any other complex adaptive system. “Alternative” approaches to resilience are thereby not against technological applications and understandings but seek to apply them differently: to work with rather than against immanent productive processes, sensitive to feedback and unintended effects. Box 10.2  Community Knowledge Approaches to Resilience The United Nations’ sustainable development goals and its Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction both prioritize local community resilience capacity-­ building and emphasize that existing community skills, knowledge and experience can be learnt from and enhanced. In these policy discourses of community knowledge, two iconic figures of community often emerge, which embody the types of adaptive knowledge required. Both of which are constructed as non-­ modern or non-universalist ways of knowing and of becoming sensitized to feedback effects, gained through lengthy experiences of coping with contexts of difficulty and trauma. These are the figures of the informal slum-dwelling community, attuned to environmental turbulence, and of indigenous communities, respectful of their relations to non-human others. Both these figures are imagined as resilient and self-sustaining communities, capable of coping, adapting to and “bouncing back” from regular disturbances and disruptions. There are a number of problems with “community” approaches to resilience. Although often well-intentioned, it is difficult for Western agencies and activists to escape accusations that they are essentializing and romanticizing the life-­ styles and coping strategies of the marginalized communities they are offering up as role models for adaptive approaches. While there are many good arguments against the forced resettlement of informal communities, often to areas without suitable community support structures, the idea that slums should be scaled-up and enlarged so that informal ways of coping can be put at the dis(continued)

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Box 10.2  (continued) posal of the city dwellers, enabling them to continue undisturbed, seems to be exploitative rather than emancipatory (Castroni 2009; Ogunlesi 2016). A similar set of arguments would appear to undermine some of the claims made by environmental campaigners, seeking to ensure that indigenous communities maintain biodiversity on “our” behalf but only on the basis that they pledge themselves to maintain their ancestral beliefs and practices (Sissons 2005; Chandler and Reid 2019). Apart from being romanticizing and essentializing, a lot of the claims made on behalf of these marginalized communities do not stand up to close examination. In many ways, it is ironic considering that the interlocutors from informal communities, that Western advocates draw upon, repeatedly state that they can no longer adapt in traditional ways. For example, it may no longer be possible to know how to respond to changes in a river’s path and momentum (Yarina 2018; Chandler 2017, 121) or to the climactic and seasonal signs that used to provide a guide to everyday life, if these changes are now much more erratic and irregular (Raygorodetsky 2017, 59). Often the “voices” of the people themselves are rarely heard in the rush to instrumentalize these survival strategies as alternative forms of resilience. It seems clear that what is being drawn from these communities says much more about the desires of Western advocates and activists than about these communities themselves, many of which are adapting to change (including the impacts of climate change) in ways which have increasingly less and less relation to traditional or local knowledge-based practices (Raygorodetsky 2017, 243).

Beyond the backward imaginaries of informal or indigenous communities as “testing grounds” and “laboratories” (Raygorodetsky 2017, 258), there is often a slightly more sophisticated Western agenda of understanding and scaling-­up adaptive capacities. The capacity that informal and indigenous communities are imagined to have (and Western societies are imagined to lack) is the ability to see and respond to feedback effects. Alternative approaches to resilience thereby are increasingly moving beyond an understanding that local and traditional knowledge alone is key and towards scaling-up local knowledge through the assistance of new technologies, enabling communities to become resilient through being able to monitor and respond to changes in climactic and other conditions with greater speed and efficiency than waiting for government policy interventions. Thus, the second “alternative” approach to building resilience focuses less upon autonomous local knowledge capacities and more upon how new technological advances in algorithmic computation and distributive sensory capacities can enable local communities to be more self-sustaining. The use of technology, not as a “techno-fix” that artificially hides feedback effects but rather as one that enables them to be seen and responded to, is now central to “alternative” resilience imaginaries in the Anthropocene. The rolling out of

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Big Data and the Internet of Things approaches to local communities promises a level of responsiveness and sensitivity to environmental changes that was previously unimaginable (Morozov 2013; Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier 2013). For its boosters, in the international development agencies and corporations, these approaches will transform small-scale agricultural production. Box 10.3  Big Data Approaches to Resilience For some alternative approaches to resilience, the answer lies in the application of new technologies which do not seek to artificially enhance economic processes but to make them more responsive to changes and feedback effects. It is for this reason that Big Data discourses often concern patterns and correlations rather than knowledge of causal processes (Amoore and Piotukh 2016; Kitchin 2014; Chandler 2015). Big Data approaches seek to derive data from variable sources, linked through coding or datafication. According to the Rockefeller Foundation research group, “Large data collection and analysis may support communities by providing them with timely feedback loops on their immediate environment” (Crawford et al. 2013, 1). Rather than centralizing data produced through everyday interactions and applying algorithms that produce linear and reductive understandings, the aspiration of some Big Data approaches is that multiple data sources can enable individuals, households and societies to practice responsive and reflexive self-management in ways which were considered impossible before (e.g., Marres 2012; Halpern 2014, 242–243). In areas of policymaking such as disaster risk reduction and disaster management, the shift is already clear (de Coning 2016; Ramalingam 2013). Big Data is alleged to help empower precisely those that are most marginal and vulnerable at the moments of highest risk. Open information flows are thus held to contribute to the building of resilience by making communities aware of the risks and hazards they may encounter so that they can mobilize to protect themselves (Ahrens and Rudolph 2006, 217). This process is captured well by Meier (2013): Thanks to [Information and Communication Technologies] ICTs, social media and Big Data … we can better measure our own resilience. Think of it as the Quantified Self movement applied to an entirely different scale, that of societies and cities. The point is that Big Data can provide us with more real-time feedback loops than ever before. And as scholars of complex systems know, feedback loops are critical for adaptation and change. On this basis, international agencies, such as the World Bank, argue that it is possible for technological aids to enable communities to be more attentive to feedback effects and for resilience to have more of a positive impact for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (World Bank 2018; Chandler 2016).

If societies or communities were able to govern on the basis of feedback effects, tackling problems in their emergence through rapid or real-time adaptation, then, in the Big Data imaginary, they would achieve resilience, able to

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cope autonomously with risks and threats without the need for external support or assistance. Big Data thus becomes the “Holy Grail” of neoliberal disaster management. This view of self-governing systems relies on cybernetic thinking on the basis of homeostatic feedback loops (see Chap. 7). The more responses are automatic, the more the detection of signs and signals are all that is required; no knowledge is necessary any more than a thermostat needs to know why temperature changes occur. Thus, resilience discourses understand society as if it was a complex adaptive system, reworking “sustainable development” as a process of managing stability better in the wake of additional potential risks and threats (e.g., Rodin 2015). It is this alternative understanding of resilience that has driven the concern with information rather than with knowledge. Lazzarato (2014) has usefully highlighted that governance through signs displaces modernist views of subjectivity founded on universal linguistic, communicational and cognitive models: he understands this as “non-cognitive” capitalism (2014, 99–100). The removal of the knowing subject is key to the imaginary of the cybernetic world as one that is conflict-free, providing a cybernetic imaginary of a seamless interrelationship between the human, the machinic and the environment (Hayles 1999, 288). Thus, resilience as the desire to adaptively modulate around the equilibrium can be seen to erase the potential for human creativity (Halpern 2014, 244). Just as “coerced” resilience spread the problems of resource depletion and cascaded the lack of sustainability throughout the global system, it appears that “alternative” resilience approaches can easily spread “zones of sacrifice” (Yarina 2018). While earlier ecological approaches advocated that parts of the world should literally be preserved to enable the rest of the world to go on as before, “alternative” approaches to resilience argue that local communities should be maintained in precarious, adaptive, informal or indigenous modes of life to act as front-line “responders” in the Anthropocene. While local communities, seen as the key actors in discourses of resilience, are often romanticized as coping in traditional and pre-modern ways, alternative approaches to resilience also present these communities as “testing grounds” or “laboratories” for more high-tech coping mechanisms, based on new forms of computational power, seen to enable higher levels of responsiveness. In both cases, “alternative” imaginaries seek to monitor, police and regulate the most marginal communities that are seen to need external policy intervention to scale­up their capacities for resilience so as to enable others to continue producing and consuming as before.

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Conclusion Discourses of resilience recognize the limits of traditional security approaches in a complex and non-linear world. There are strong motivations for the adoption of resilience as part of a comprehensive security strategy, whether this is undertaken by the European Union, which has resilience as one of the core themes framing and cohering its 2016 Global Strategy or whether by the United Nations and other international bodies concerned with broadening an understanding of security in an unstable and unpredictable world. However, this chapter has drawn upon contemporary Anthropocene thinking to question whether resilience can achieve the goals claimed for it. In particular, it has sought to problematize the assumption that resilience can work on the basis of maintaining existing system states or enabling greater adaptive efficiencies. The reason that Anthropocene thinking disrupts these assumptions is that it understands them as dependent on an understanding that the problems being confronted are products of “inevitable” shocks external to the system rather than ones generated precisely by the governance practices and modes of understanding of the international institutions seeking to address them. Alternative approaches to resilience can also be seen to evade the problem through focusing on the effects or consequences of climate change impacts in communities which are already vulnerable, precarious and marginalized, rather than the structural causes of these vulnerabilities, which are the products of modes of production and consumption in wealthier states and their historical (and on-going) relations of colonial and capitalist subordination (Todd 2016; Moore 2019; Whyte 2019; Chandler and Reid 2019). In short, discourses of resilience seek to evade the real nature of the problems posed by the Anthropocene and to redistribute costs and burdens increasingly upon those least able to resist them. Thus, thinking through the stakes of the Anthropocene for international relations enables us to highlight the existing inequalities, exclusions and blind spots of resilience-thinking. Key Points 1. While approaches of resilience focus on “bouncing back” and adapting to changing circumstances, they can easily neglect that adaptation itself can be highly problematic, cascading problems through the system, making social systems less-resilient and increasingly vulnerable. 2. Alternative framings of resilience can also be problematic, placing the burden of adaption upon the most vulnerable and marginalized communities,

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romanticizing and essentializing the coping strategies of marginal or indigenous communities. 3. Focusing on the resilience of vulnerable or “at risk” communities can cast them as responsible for adapting to climate crises; they played little role in creating while taking the emphasis away from the need for changes in the modes of production and consumption in wealthier and more “resilient” Western states. 4. Many international institutions talk up the value of new technological approaches of algorithmic sensing and computation even though these are designed merely to enable communities to cope on the edge of crisis. Key Questions 1 . How does the Anthropocene problematize resilience approaches? 2. Which are the key assumptions of traditional security discourses which are at stake here? 3. Are vulnerable and marginalized communities victims or beneficiaries of resilience? 4. In what ways do resilience discourses romanticize or essentialize non-­ traditional modes of life? 5. How do Big Data approaches for development understand and seek to address social and economic inequalities?

Further Reading Mayer-Schonberger, V. and Cukier, K. 2013. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. London: John Murray. Meier, P. 2013. How to Create Resilience Through Big Data. iRevolutions, 11 January. Moore, J. 2019. Capitalocene and Planetary Justice. Maize 6: 49–54. Neyrat, F. 2019. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Whyte, K. 2019. Way Beyond the Lifeboat: An Indigenous Allegory of Climate Justice. In Bhavnani, K.-K., Foran, J., Kurian, P. A. and Munshi, D. (eds) Climate Futures: Reimagining Global Climate Justice.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 11–20. Yarina, L. 2018. Your Sea Wall Won’t Save You. Places Journal, March.

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References Ahrens, J. and Rudolph, P.  M. 2006. The Importance of Governance in Risk Reduction and Disaster Management. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 14: 207–220. Amoore, L. and Piotukh, V. (eds) 2016. Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data. Abingdon: Routledge. Beck, U. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Beck, U. 2015. Emancipatory Catastrophism: What Does it Mean to Climate Change and Risk Society. Current Sociology 63: 75–88. Bonneuil, C. and Fressoz, J.-B. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso. Castroni, M. 2009. Learning from the Slums: Literature and Urban Renewal. Arch Daily, 8 March. Retrieved from: http://www.archdaily.com/15271/learning-­from-­ the-­slums-­12literature-­and-­urban-­renewal/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Chandler, D. 2013. Resilience and the Autotelic Subject: Towards a Critique of the Societalization of Security. International Political Sociology 7: 210–226. Chandler, D. 2014. Resilience: The Governance of Complexity. Abingdon: Routledge. Chandler, D. 2015. A World without Causation: Big Data and the Coming of Age of Posthumanism. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43: 833–851. Chandler, D. 2016. How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure: Big Data, Resilience and Emergent Causality. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44: 391–410. Chandler, D. 2017. Securing the Anthropocene? International Policy Experiments in Digital Hacktivism: A Case Study of Jakarta. Security Dialogue 48: 113–130. Chandler, D. 2018. Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking. Abingdon: Routledge. Chandler, D. and Reid, J. 2019. Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Crawford, K., Faleiros, G., Luers, A., Meier, P., Perlich, C. and Thorp, J. 2013. Big Data, Communities and Ethical Resilience: A Framework for Action. Retrieved from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/poptech_uploaded_files/uploaded_files/66/original/ BellagioFramework.pdf [accessed 17 February 2021]. Crutzen P.  J. and Stoermer, E. 2000. The “Anthropocene”. Global Change News 41: 17–18. Danowski, D. and Viveiros de Castro, E. 2016. The Ends of the World. Cambridge: Polity. de Coning, C. 2016. From Peacebuilding to Sustaining Peace: Implications of Complexity for Resilience and Sustainability. Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 4: 166–181. European Commission. 2013. Action Plan for Resilience in Crisis Prone Countries 2013–2020. Brussels: European Commission.

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European Commission. 2019. Fact Sheet: Resilience. February. Retrieved from: https://ec.europa.eu/echo/what/humanitarian-­aid/resilience_en [accessed 14 February 2021]. European Union. 2016. Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe, A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign And Security Policy. Brussels: European Action Service. Retrieved from: https://eeas.europa.eu/sites/eeas/files/eugs_ review_web_0.pdf [accessed 17 February 2021]. Ghosh, A. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Halpern, O. 2014. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hayles, K. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Joseph, J. 2018. Varieties of Resilience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitchin, R. 2014. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures & Their Consequences. London: Sage. Latour, B. 2013. Facing Gaia, Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, Edinburgh, 18th–28th of February 2013 (draft version 1–3-13). Retrieved from: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/wakefield15/files/2015/01/LATOUR-­GIFFORD-­SIX-­LECTURES_1.pdf [accessed 17 February 2021]. Lazzarato, M. 2014. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Lorimer, J. 2015. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marres, N. 2012. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mayer-Schonberger, V. and Cukier, K. 2013. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. London: John Murray. Meier, P. 2013. How to Create Resilience Through Big Data. iRevolutions, 11 January. Retrieved from: https://irevolutions.org/2013/01/11/disaster-­resilience-­2-­0/ [accessed 14 February 2021]. Moore, J. 2019. Capitalocene and Planetary Justice. Maize 6: 49–54. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/39776872/The_Capitalocene_and_Planetary_ Justice?auto=download. Morozov, E. 2013. To Save Everything Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Allen Lane/Penguin. Neyrat, F. 2019. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Ogunlesi, T. 2016. Inside Makoko: Danger and Ingenuity in the World’s Biggest Floating Slum. Guardian, 23 February. Retrieved from: http://www.theguardian. com/cities/2016/feb/23/makoko-­lagos-­danger-­ingenuity-­floating-­slum [accessed 17 February 2021].

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Ramalingam, B. 2013. Aid on the Edge of Chaos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raygorodetsky, G. 2017. The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change. New York, NY: Pegasus Books. Rist, L., Felton, A., Nystrom, M., Troell, M., Sponseller, R.  A., Bengtsson, J., ... Moen, J. 2014. Applying resilience thinking to production ecosystems. Ecosphere 5(6): article 73. Rodin, J. 2015. The Resilience Dividend: Managing Disruption, Avoiding Disaster, and Growing Stronger in an Unpredictable World. London: Profile Books. Schmidt, J. 2013. The Empirical Falsity of the Human Subject: New Materialism, Climate Change and the Shared Critique of Artifice. Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 1: 174–192. Sissons, J. 2005. First Peoples: Indigenous Cultures and Their Futures. London: Reaktion Books. Stengers, I. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Paris: Open Humanities Press. Stockholm Resilience Centre. 2014. The Hidden Cost of Coerced Resilience: Centre Researchers Look into Forced Resilience of Intensive Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries and Aquaculture Systems. Stockholm Resilience Centre, 29 November. Retrieved from: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-­ news/2014-­11-­29-­the-­hidden-­cost-­of-­coerced-­resilience.html [accessed 17 February 2021]. Stockholm Resilience Centre. n.d.. The Nine Planetary Boundaries. Stockholm Resilience Centre. Retrieved from: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/ planetary-­b oundaries/planetary-­b oundaries/about-­t he-­r esearch/the-­n ine-­ planetary-­boundaries.html [accessed 17 February 2021]. Taussig, M. 2018. Palma Africana. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Tierney, K. 2015. Resilience and the Neoliberal Project: Discourses, Critiques, Practices-And Katrina. American Behavioural Scientist 59: 1327–1342. Tocci, N. 2019. Resilience and the Role of the European Union in the World. Contemporary Security Policy 41(2): 176–194. Todd, Z. 2016. An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is just Another Word for Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology 29: 4–22. Tsing, A. L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. L. 2017. The Buck, the Bull, and the Dream of the Stag: Some Unexpected Weeds of the Anthropocene. Suomen Anthropologi 42: 3–21. United Nations. 2017. United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination Second Regular Session of 2017, New York, 8 and 9 November 2017, Summary of Deliberations. New York: United Nations. Whyte, K. 2019. Way Beyond the Lifeboat: An Indigenous Allegory of Climate Justice. In K.-K. Bhavnani, J. Foran, P. A. Kurian and D. Munshi (eds) Climate Futures: Reimagining Global Climate Justice. University of California Press, 11–20 .

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World Bank. 2018. Machine Learning for Disaster Risk Management: A Guidance Note on How Machine Learning Can Be Used for Disaster Risk Management, Including Key Definitions, Case Studies, and Practical Considerations for Implementation. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yarina, L. 2018. Your Sea Wall Won’t Save You. Places Journal, March. Retrieved from: https://placesjournal.org/your-­sea-­wall-­wont-­save-­you/ [accessed 17 February 2021].

11 Protecting the Vulnerable: Towards an Ecological Approach to Security Matt McDonald

Introduction The Anthropocene is something of a ‘game-changer’ for the way we can and should view international relations, in theory and practice. The idea that humanity has become such a productive force on the planet as to push the Earth into a new geological era, regardless of debates about when this era began or how it is primarily characterised, tells us something about the profound effect we as a species have had on the planet. And in the process, 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, the environment is no longer a background to geopolitics or a site of interstate contestation (see Dalby 2020 and Chap. 8). It is, rather, a dynamic force that impacts profoundly—and indeed will increasingly serve to determine—key dynamics of global politics. Clearly, this has important implications for the way we view and approach key concepts like security, and the means used to preserve or advance it in practice. 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 rather how we might protect ecosystems

M. McDonald (*) School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_11

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themselves. If the Anthropocene means anything to us and the way we approach security, then it should mean the need to reflect upon—and ultimately transition away from—the idea of a separation between nature and humanity. In the process, it means orienting to a defence of ecosystems, in particular their functionality in the face of ongoing change. This focus constitutes the best means of advancing the rights and needs of the most vulnerable in the face of dynamic and ongoing (ecological) change: marginalised and impoverished human populations; other living beings; and future generations. In the process of making this case, the chapter focuses on the issue of climate change: perhaps the ultimate illustration of the arrival of the Anthropocene era and the extent of humanity’s effects on earth systems functionality. The chapter proceeds in four stages. The first addresses why we should engage with the Anthropocene—and in particular climate change— through the lens of security at all, outlining the costs and benefits of such engagement. The second section points to the idea of different discourses of climate security, noting what these discourses encourage and prioritise in terms of the nature of the climate threat and appropriate responses to it. The third section 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. The chapter concludes by briefly reflecting on the challenges associated with advancing or realising this approach in practice. Ultimately, the arrival of the Anthropocene—and the associated ecological crisis—suggests the need for radical changes in the way in which we conceive and approach security. Ecological security represents such a change, but it is an approach that faces profound impediments to its embrace or institutionalisation.

Why Security? When exploring the Anthropocene and the associated scale of ecological crisis—especially climate change—we see increasing engagement with the idea that we can approach these issues through the lens of security. This engagement is evident in national security strategy statements (see Scott 2015), a raft of think tank reports, and in discussions in the UN Security Council, for example (see Maertens 2021). Yet while there’s growing consensus that we can frame issues such as climate change as a security issue, there’s debate about whether we should.

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For some, there is an inherent danger that representing ecological change as a security threat risks suggesting that central security agents (states and their militaries) have a key role to play in addressing these challenges, in turn risking the militarisation of issues such as climate change (see Marzec 2015; Deudney 1990). Do we really want or need militaries taking primary responsibility for responding to the climate crisis, for example? For others, the logic of security is a largely problematic one of exception. Specifically, the concern here is that if we define an issue as a security issue, it will take it outside the realm of ‘normal politics’ and into a space where it is dealt with through urgent, secret and predominantly illiberal measures (see Wæver 1995; Neocleous 2008). Security, in this schema, does things (see Chap. 9). This is an important point. But while, for the above analysts, it counsels against linking the Anthropocene, ecological change or climate change more specifically to security, viewed another way, it necessitates our engagement with this relationship. Such an approach would suggest that if security constitutes ‘high politics’—if defining an issue as a security issue suggests priority, attention, urgency or even exceptional responses—then the choices made about what constitutes a security threat are politically important (see Booth 2007; Browning and McDonald 2013). This is further underscored by the fact that the promise of providing security underpins the political legitimacy of the key actors of international politics. For states, providing security is why they exist. At the heart of the social contract—in which individuals give up some degree of freedom and autonomy to the institution of the state—is the idea that the state provides for the protection of these individuals in an otherwise dangerous and anarchic environment (see Williams 1998). It is no surprise, then, that states consistently emphasise that their most important responsibility or obligation is to provide for the security of their citizens. And, while this relationship between security and political legitimacy is most evident in the context of states, the first article of the United Nations Charter also defines the UN’s primary responsibility as the maintenance of international peace and security. So, security matters. But when examining the implications of defining or approaching an issue as a security issue, we should be wary of assuming that ‘securitization’ will have specific effects. My argument here—building on earlier work (McDonald 2008, 2012, 2018)—is that what matters politically isn’t whether security is invoked, but how security is understood. If security is understood and approached in terms of the nation-state and its preservation, then that has very different implications (for addressing an issue like climate change) than if security is understood in terms of international stability, human welfare or ecosystem resilience, for example (see Chap. 10). Ultimately,

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a security framing might be dangerous but not necessarily. The big questions then become how is that relationship understood and subsequently approached, and what type of approach would best ensure actions oriented to the most vulnerable and to addressing the ecological crisis effectively? To make sense of this, and to explore the assumptions and implications of different accounts of the relationship between climate change and security, I suggest the need to approach this relationship through the lens of different—and competing—discourses of security.

Discourses of Climate Security It is one thing to argue—or accept—that issues like climate change might constitute a threat to security. But what exactly does this mean? Here, it is useful to distinguish between different discourses of security: frameworks of meaning with different conceptions of whose security matters; from what threats; by what means it is to be protected or advanced; and by what agents (McDonald 2018, 154). Recognising different discourses—as articulated or enacted by policy-makers and as advanced by analysts or activists—is important because the threat agenda looks different in each and they’re based on different sets of assumptions and commitments. But more importantly, recognising that there are different discourses is crucial because they ultimately encourage different sets of responses to the challenges we see in the Anthropocene. A dominant discourse of security—regarding climate change and more broadly in international relations thought and practice—is national security. Here, an issue like climate change becomes a security issue to the extent that it threatens the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the state. Ultimately, and with the possible exception of states whose territory is directly threatened by rising sea levels, the threat of climate change is an indirect one: it is a problem if it makes conflict, instability or large-scale population displacement more likely. And in managing this threat, the state needs to be self-reliant (it cannot rely on others to advance its security or protect its interests), and the responses are largely adaptive (see Busby 2008). In other words, rather than commit to cooperative mitigation action to prevent climate change from happening or minimise its severity, states will look to insulate themselves from the effects of these implications. An illustration of this discourse ‘in action’ is provided in Box 11.1 below.

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Box 11.1  National Security and Climate-Induced Displacement Some accounts suggest that framing an issue like climate change as a ‘security’ threat might be a way of building attention and concern about the impacts of the issue among conservative audiences and those unmoved by concerns about vulnerable outsiders (see Corner 2013). But while raising concerns, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the practices we will see in response to these issues will be effective in addressing climate change. At their worst, as the example of national security responses to ‘climate refugees’ suggests (Baldwin et al. 2014), we may see victims of climate change presented as threats to the security of the nation-state. In 2003, the US Pentagon commissioned a report on the national security implications of abrupt climate scenarios (Schwartz and Randall 2003). While focusing predominantly on the USA, the report made the claim that a range of states that were less likely to be immediately affected by climate change might seek to initiate stronger border control measures to prevent those displaced by climate change manifestations (e.g. rising sea levels or natural disasters) from entering the state. Here, national security in the face of climate change could apparently be achieved by physically preventing those most affected by it from reaching and penetrating the state. Is this an unimaginable response to those displaced by the manifestations of climate change? Former US President Donald Trump’s commitment to stronger border control measures (in the form of a wall at the border with Mexico) suggests not. And by some accounts, we already see climate barriers on the Bangladesh-Indian border, with Indian authorities looking to prevent an influx of Bangladeshi citizens displaced by rising sea levels (see Banerjee 2010; Chaturvedi and Doyle 2015, 122–6). And in countries such as Australia, where asylum-seekers arriving by boat are already viewed as security threats and held in detention centres for prolonged periods, and where a range of neighbouring Pacific island communities are on the frontlines of climate-induced displacement, a hard-line, border-security oriented response is all too easy to imagine. By contrast, there’s little evidence of genuine commitment to climate mitigation action in Australia, or Australia moving to curtail coal production and export. In this instance, a security framing seems more likely to encourage policies of interception and detention than strong action to reduce emissions.

Students of international relations will here note that this discourse largely aligns with Realist approaches to international relations. We see the same primary concern with the threat and use of force, the imperative of self-help, scepticism about effective multilateral cooperation and a moral universe that extends to fellow citizens but not beyond. As theorists working in the critical security studies tradition have long noted, this approach to world politics gives us few (if any) resources for effectively addressing what are genuinely global or transnational security challenges (e.g. Burke et  al. 2014; Booth 2007). And the emphasis on insulating the nation-state from challenges that pose immediate, direct or existential threats to the most vulnerable is difficult

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to justify. It certainly does little to address the nature of security challenges in the Anthropocene. Indeed, for some, this way of viewing and approaching the world has been a crucial driver of the ecological crisis we now face (see Gardiner 2014). An obvious corrective to this discourse is an international security discourse: one that recognises the transnational—even global—nature of the threat posed by climate change. Here, climate change is seen as a potential threat to regional and international instability, creating conditions in which large-scale population movements, government fragility or collapse and ultimately conflict become more likely. International organisations have, in this context, linked conflict in Darfur and Syria to climate change (e.g. UNEP 2007), while the UN Security Council has discussed the (international) security implications of climate change in 2007, 2011, 2018, 2019  and 2020 (Maertens 2021). While this threat agenda (instability and conflict) bears some similarity to the national security discourse, the focus is ultimately how these dynamics come to threaten the norms and rules of an international society, whether one defined by order or justice (see Bull 1995). And crucially, the range of means and agents widens here. While adaptation still plays a role in responding to the effects of climate change, this discourse suggests a role for mitigation as a preventive response to climate change. This is evident in attempts to apply the Responsibility to Protect principle to climate change through the ‘Responsibility to Prepare’, a commitment developed by the Center for Climate and Security in the USA (See Werrell et al. 2017). The Responsibility to Prepare still focuses substantially on ‘climate proofing’ existing communities and institutions, but the recent move to define the principle as the ‘Responsibility to Prepare and Prevent’ also endorses a focus on prevention (i.e. significant mitigation action)  (see Werrell and Femia  2019). There is also  a role in this discourse  for actors beyond states in providing security, including (as indicated above) international organisations. But this conceptualisation or approach is still not without its limitations. For one, the threat is still largely indirect—rather than climate change constituting a threat in and of itself, it is often presented as problematic if triggering instability or fragility. And while recognising climate change as a problem shared across states, there is limited recognition here of the particular threat posed to vulnerable populations and in particular other living beings or future generations. Finally, if it is a problem when contributing to large-scale disruption, then is there a danger that the everyday violence of climate change (that creates significant harm but doesn’t unseat leaders or trigger conflict) will not

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be identified as problematic when viewed through the international security lens? An attempt to identify and respond to the direct threat of climate change can be found in the human security discourse. Here, climate change is represented as an immediate and often existential threat to vulnerable human populations, in terms of their lives and life prospects/livelihoods. Theorists pointing to the human security implications of climate change emphasise the imperative of mitigation action as a means of responding to multiple sites and experiences of vulnerability that cannot be effectively insulated from the effects of climate change (see Matthew et al. eds 2010; O’Brien 2006). In the process, there is a suggestion here of a role for a wide range of actors not only in reducing emissions but also in addressing the structural forces and inequalities that define vulnerability in the first instance (i.e. poverty and marginalisation). This clearly constitutes a more progressive approach to the climate security threat: one likely to identify climate change itself (not simply its flow-on effects) as a problem, and likely to endorse strong mitigation action to address the challenge at its source. This is an approach that has found increasing political purchase, evident in UN Development Programme Reports (e.g. 2007) and IPCC Assessments (e.g. 2014). Yet even here there are limitations, especially regarding the extent to which this approach sufficiently recognises the particular vulnerability of other living beings and future generations. For other living beings and future generations, their acute vulnerability is a product not only of exposure to problems of climate change and limited capacity to respond. It is also a product of an inability to directly influence contemporary decisions and actions that will have significant implications for their life prospects. At this fundamental level, a human security discourse still risks endorsing a separation of human and nature that is precisely what needs to be challenged in the context of the Anthropocene. Indeed, from the perspective of the Anthropocene, the discourse of human security appears inherently anthropocentric, while also concerned with a particularly narrow time frame (focused on the present) in the context of a geological epoch. In the above accounts of security in the context of climate change, then— whether national, international or human security—we have core and crucial limitations from the perspective of the Anthropocene. These are limitations that the Anthropocene concept simultaneously helps illuminate, while also compelling us to respond to the problem of anthropocentrism and the problems of separation. The former, as Rafi Youatt (2014, 210) has noted, necessitates a ‘shift in human moral and political frameworks that orient our relations with other species’, while the latter elides the reality of entanglement

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with and between these other living beings in the context of the Anthropocene (see Hamilton 2017). Simply put, the Anthropocene points to the problematic limitation of our moral universe to (currently living) humans alone, while also illustrating the necessity of escaping the separation at the heart of the traditional emphasis on protecting ourselves from (a violent and external) nature.

Ecological Security: What Is It? Recognising the limits of these discourses of security in the context of the Anthropocene and the scale of the challenge posed by climate change in particular, I want to make a case here for ecological security. Ecological security can be defined as a concern with the resilience of ecosystems themselves, especially in the face of ecological change (such as climate change). What constitutes an ecosystem and what resilience means as an orientation and concern, however, are both contestable and contested. An ecosystem is understood here as a complex of organisms, their environment and their interactive relationship. It is composed of three elements: 1. The living beings in a given area that interact with each other; 2. The non-living parts of the physical environment (from atmosphere to earth and water) that surround those beings; and 3. The relationships between these. These ecosystems have no definitive size and are overlapping: they can be as large as a desert or as small as a pond. And a tree may be viewed as an ecosystem in itself, or as part of a broader ecosystem (e.g. a forest). Ecosystem resilience, meanwhile, refers to the capacity for ecosystems to continue to function in the face of perturbation or change (see Adger et  al. 2011). ‘Resilience’ here—as opposed to preservation or the maintenance of balance—involves some degree of recognition of the inevitability of change. This is important in the context of the Anthropocene and climate change in particular—dynamics that point respectively to the force of ongoing human action on Earth systems and to the reality of a changing climate, with some degree of climate change now ‘locked in’ (see Christoff 2013). For some, the focus on ecosystems might be seen as problematic because they are particularly broad and amorphous as a referent object of security (see Fagan 2016). The complexity of ecosystem functions also poses challenges: when it comes to climate change, for example, we can’t say for sure just if, how

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or when different ecosystems will be irrevocably compromised by changing temperatures or rainfall, for example (see Palmer 2011). Ultimately, we have to—as the precautionary principle suggests—err on the side of caution. This means, in the context of climate change, significantly limiting the production of greenhouse gas emissions. I’ll return to this point in a moment. The lack of precision or specificity is clearly, then, a challenge for making sense of what constitutes ecological security. Yet what constitutes ‘international society’ or ‘humanity’ in the context of international or human security is not a great deal clearer. And whether at the national, international or human security level, we are still confronted with clear challenges about whether and how to interpret what constitutes a threat and how to respond to it. The endorsement of resilience is also somewhat controversial and contested (see Chap. 10). Yet while critics of resilience suggest that it implies that responsibility for managing threats are to be borne by those exposed to them (Schick 2011; Schlosberg 2013), or that it can enable business as usual for existing practices and institutions (see Chandler 2014; Buxton and Hayes 2015), it is also a concept that allows us to identify a goal in the face of ongoing change. This is partly why it has such a strong tradition in ecological thought (see Bourbeau 2018; Boas and Rothe 2015). Ultimately, ecological security is best viewed as an orientation or sensibility, rather than as a definitive or objective condition. There will always be contestation over whether ecosystem functionality is threatened or compromised by climate change, how severely and in what form. The appropriate response, then, is to encourage us—whether researchers or policy-makers—to orient towards viewing an issue such as climate change through the lens of ecosystem resilience as a way of encouraging progressive and effective responses to it. This clearly involves a significant cognitive shift. So why is it necessary? Most fundamentally, a focus on ecosystems in the face of ecological change allows us to prioritise the rights and needs of the most vulnerable: not only those marginalised and impoverished communities directly exposed to manifestations of climate change in developing states, but also to future generations and other living beings. As noted, vulnerability here is defined as a product of exposure; adaptive capacity; and capacity to input into existing decision-making and practices (see Adger 2006). By this account, future generations and other living beings are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and a focus on ecosystem resilience is here viewed as the best means of addressing this vulnerability. If ecosystems continue to function, then the well-being of other living beings and future generations is ensured through limiting the first dimension of vulnerability noted above: exposure.

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In the ecological security discourse, the central threat posed by climate change is a direct one: to the functionality of ecosystems themselves. Viewed in this light, climate change is less a ‘threat multiplier’ (that might ultimately trigger conflict) than a threat in and of itself. This in turn necessitates a direct response to it, one that addresses the issue of exposure to climate change noted above. Ultimately, it suggests a central role for mitigation: action oriented towards significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions to ensure the degree and severity of climate change is minimised. The centrality of this response to climate change in the ecological security discourse is discussed in Box 11.2. It is important to note that adaptation and even potentially controversial projects, such as geoengineering through carbon dioxide removal or solar radiation management, may also be viewed as a means of providing ecological security (see Dalby 2015; Symons 2019). This is particularly the case given that global emissions continue to rise and some degree of climate change is now inevitable. But these approaches—to managing the effects of climate change or intervening through technological intervention to sever an otherwise natural feedback loop—should remain secondary to addressing the problem at its source. Box 11.2  Mitigation and Ecological Security It is hard to reject a role for adaptation to manifestations of climate change, especially now some degree of climate change is already locked in. But from the perspective of an ecological security discourse, it is imperative to focus on mitigation for two central reasons. First, the focus in this approach is on the threat of climate change itself. This might seem circular: what else would the threat be? But it is striking that in the national security discourse, climate change isn’t actually the central problem: it is the indirect and follow-on effects of climate change that matter. Here, as noted, adaptive measures like border controls or military preparedness might be the central means of ensuring (national) security in the face of the indirect consequences of climate change. By contrast, when we focus on the direct implications of climate change, we need to emphasise mitigation as the central means of addressing the threat itself head-on. In this case, that involves minimising the extent and severity of climate change by (significantly) reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The second consideration that encourages an overwhelming focus on mitigation is that the focus on ecosystems is viewed as the best means of addressing the rights and needs of the most vulnerable. To reiterate, these are those beings most directly exposed to the effects of climate change, least able to adapt to it, and least able to input into decision-making that contributes to or addresses climate change. When these beings are central to our consideration, the focus of our response must shift to significantly minimising or at best avoiding any effect of climate change, bearing in mind that these effects are most likely to directly threaten the most vulnerable.

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Of course, all the above raises questions about the agents of ecological security: who provides security in this discourse? This is particularly important here, given that ecosystems don’t have a specific identity or form, and those most exposed to the effects of ecological insecurity are almost by definition those with the least capacity or resources to address the causes of that insecurity. Here, and drawing on distributive justice concerns with equity (see Caney 2005; Shue 2014, 2017), responsibility for addressing the security implications of climate change for ecosystems is determined by capacity. This is defined in two terms: the ability to knowingly contribute to climate harms, and the ability to consciously engage in practices to address the problem itself. The degree of responsibility, then, is determined ultimately by how much a particular actor contributes to the problem of climate change and how able they are to address it. Clearly, even with recognition of varied levels of responsibility determined by capacity, this is a broad definition of agency. It extends feasibly from our individual choices and actions to a role for private companies (especially fossil fuel companies), international organisations and states. All bear (some degree of ) responsibility for addressing the threat posed by climate change, in particular through pursuing urgent mitigation action. While there is much about the ecological security discourse that is challenging for the way we think about security, the absence of a clear constituency or agent is often identified as central to the obstacles facing such a reorientation (see Barnett 2001). But if ecological security encourages ethically defensible practices oriented towards the rights and needs of the most vulnerable, then the question should arguably be not how do we work with existing institutions, but rather how can we create a constituency, institutions and practices to help advance or realise it in practice? That’s the focus of the remainder of this chapter.

 owards Ecological Security: How Do T We Get There? If the key objection to ecological security as a framework through which we might view and approach an issue like climate change in the Anthropocene is that it resembles a Utopian enterprise, then it is important to be clear about substantive possibilities for its articulation and even institutionalisation. Under what circumstances, if any, is ecological security likely to find purchase? Clearly, there are profound obstacles. Among other things, we might point to the institutional framework of the state system that militates against action oriented towards global concerns; the limits of existing ethical frameworks

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that encourage us to focus on obligations to fellow citizens or even members of our own family; modes of economic exchange/political economy that generally value extraction and exploitation for short-term gain; cultural practices (eating red meat or driving large cars) that encourage destructive behaviour; or the challenges of genuinely knowing either the needs or interests of the most vulnerable or the precise points at which ecosystem functionality is (irrevocably) compromised (on these points, see Gardiner 2011). And from the perspective of ‘security’, the dominant discourse of security we usually work with—the orientation towards the territorial preservation of the nation-state from (usually external) military threat—is wholly inconsistent with an approach to security emphasising the extension of ethical responsibility across space (marginalised and impoverished populations in the developing world), time (future generations) and species (other living beings). Yet we see principles consistent with this already articulated and endorsed in existing normative frameworks and even evident in existing forms of practice. Critical theorists refer to these as ‘immanent’ possibilities: possibilities for progress that exist within a particular order (see Linklater 1998). The precautionary principle, for example—part of the ‘Rio Declaration’ at the 1992 Earth Summit (UNCED)—endorses the idea that ‘lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation’. The concept of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’, also endorsed at UNCED as part of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), recognises universal obligation to act but indicates that states have different obligations that should be calculated ‘on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’. And the concept of the Anthropocene itself has emerged as a compelling reason to revisit the notion of a separation between humanity and nature, in the process encouraging us to orient towards recognising our embeddedness in the natural world. In different ways, these different norms, principles and concepts all endorse key elements of the ecological security discourse: the imperative to act in the face of uncertainty; the idea of responsibility based on capability; and the imperative of moving beyond a separation between nature and humanity. These are principles that can potentially be built upon. We can also see evidence of ecological security in practice. A range of NGOs and civil society groups actively endorse principles of ecological security, including most recently the Extinction Rebellion movement, discussed in Box 11.3. In negotiations for the most recent climate agreement in Paris in 2015, meanwhile, recognition of particular vulnerabilities of—and obligations to—communities of developing countries at the front line of climate change was prominently invoked in the push to limit warming to 1.5 °C, and in recognition of ‘loss and damage’, for example (see Falkner 2016).

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Box 11.3  Extinction Rebellion and Ecological Security Of a range of movements and organisations that endorse principles consistent with ecological security, the Extinction Rebellion movement is one that has done so perhaps most explicitly and directly. Emerging in the UK in 2018, its members called originally for recognition of an ‘ecological emergency’, urgent actions to ‘halt biodiversity loss’, and outlined a vision of change focused on ‘creating a world that is fit for generations to come’ (BBC 2019; Extinction Rebellion 2019). Since then, it has rapidly grown into an international movement, with major protests not only in the UK in 2018 and 2019 but also in the USA, Germany, Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland. While it remains a small movement in international terms, and one concentrated in developed states, its rapid growth in members and international scope suggests it speaks to growing global concerns consistent with the sentiments of ecological security.

Of course, all this might not take us far enough. If a genuine orientation towards ecosystem resilience and the rights and needs of the most vulnerable is to be realised, with an associated urgency in response to the ecological crisis we are facing, then we arguably need to do more than locate possibilities within the existing order and within new institutions. Indeed, Eva Lövbrand and colleagues (Lövbrand et al. 2015, 214) refer to this tendency as a ‘post-­ political ontology of the Anthropocene’; one in which we try to locate solutions to unprecedented ecological challenges within existing institutions and sites of policy. For them, we might need to move beyond a discussion of how we might build on existing norms or ‘green’ the state (see Eckersley 2004): we might need to imagine radically alternative institutional arrangements and practices that aren’t presently evident in existing sites of policy. This was arguably at the heart too of Burke et al.’s (2016) ‘Planet Politics Manifesto’, which inverted the conversation about the way institutions of international relations might manage the ecological crisis to one which began with the ecological crisis and asked which institutions and practices were needed to address it. This is—in practical terms—more of a challenge for advocates of an ecological security discourse. But rather than attempt to outline what institutional frameworks or practices should look like specifically, the suggestion here is that approaching the Anthropocene era and the issue of climate change through the lens of ecological security will provide a sensibility that will in turn inform the types of institutional arrangements and practices that are needed. Here, I suggest the need to begin with first principles—tempered with a commitment to reflexivity, humility and dialogue (see McDonald 2018)—and allow these to guide shifts in existing institutions and practice.

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Conclusion The apparent arrival of the Anthropocene era clearly raises profound and challenging questions, not least around the nature of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. So often separated—in modern thought, in policy and in practice—we need to find ways to recognise our embeddedness within the natural world rather than continue to work with problematic assumptions of the possibility of distinction from it. This will be at the heart of a progressive politics of the Anthropocene, as Lövbrand et al. (2015) note. When it comes to security, as noted at the outset, it is not only possible to include questions of security in a discussion of responses to the Anthropocene or the ecological crisis. It is also essential because the promise of providing security is central to the political legitimacy of key actors in the international system—most notably states—and the ‘high politics’ space security considerations command needs to extend to urgent and global challenges that cannot be addressed through unilateral action alone. The case for ecological security noted here was presented as a means of addressing these challenges, and in the process extending our ethical register beyond fellow citizens and towards the most vulnerable over time, space and species. While facing significant challenges to its embrace and institutionalisation as a framework for viewing security in the Anthropocene era, ideas consistent with this approach can already be discerned in existing principles, concepts, institutions and practices. And perhaps more importantly, we cannot allow dominant conceptions and practices of IR to determine the limits of how we respond to a genuine existential crisis. Key Points 1. In the context of the Anthropocene and the scale of the ecological crisis, it is hard to defend an approach to security that focuses on the preservation of self-contained political communities, and that separates humanity from nature. 2. There is significant debate over the desirability of a ‘security’ framing, but it is possible to view the politics of security (the question of what security does) as being contingent on the way security itself is understood. 3. If we are interested in fundamentally addressing the origins of the ecological crisis, then we need to focus on what renders ecosystems themselves insecure.

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4. A focus on the resilience of ecosystems provides the best means of addressing the rights and needs of the most vulnerable: impoverished and marginal human populations; other living beings; and future generations. 5. Realising and advancing ecological security in practice is challenging for a range of reasons, but we can identify principles and practices associated with this approach in a range of contemporary contexts. Key Questions 1. Why should we approach the Anthropocene through the lens of ‘security’? Is it helpful? Is it politically important? 2. Can ‘security’ feasibly be defined in terms of the resilience of ecosystems? 3. Would conceiving and approaching security as ecological security be a good thing? Would it encourage environmental stewardship or the militarisation of the environment? 4. How optimistic are you that security might come to be viewed and approached through the lens of ecosystem resilience? What are the key impediments and possibilities? 5. Are those concerned about issues like climate change better served focusing on the threat posed to currently existing (and vulnerable) human communities?

Further Reading Boas, I. and Rothe, D. 2015. From Conflict to Resilience? Explaining Recent Changes in Climate Security Discourse and Practice.  Environmental Politics 25(4): 613–32. Burke, A. et al. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–523. Dalby, S. 2020. Anthropocene Geopolitics. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Eroukhmanoff, C. and Harker, M. (eds) 2017. Reflections on the Posthuman in International Relations. Bristol: E-International Relations. Harrington, C. and Shearing, C. 2017. Security in the Anthropocene. Bielefeld: Transcript. McDonald, M. 2018. Climate Change and Security: Towards an Ecological Security Discourse? International Theory 10(2): 153–80.

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References Adger, N. 2006. Vulnerability. Global Environmental Change 16: 268–81. Adger, N., Brown, K. and Waters, J. 2011. Resilience. In J. Dryzek, Norgaard, R. and Schlosberg, D. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 696–707. Baldwin, A., Methmann, C. and Rothe, D. 2014. Securitizing “Climate Refugees”: The Futurology of Climate-Induced Migration. Critical Studies on Security 14(2): 121–30. Banerjee, B. 2010. The Great Wall of India. Slate, 20 December. Available at: https:// slate.com/technology/2010/12/india-­is-­fencing-­off-­its-­border-­with-­bangladesh-­ what-­will-­that-­mean-­for-­millions-­of-­potential-­climate-­refugees.html [accessed 17 February 2021]. Barnett, J. 2001. The Meaning of Environmental Security. London: Zed Books. BBC. 2019. What Is Extinction Rebellion and What Does It Want? BBC News, 7 October. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-­48607989 [accessed 14 February 2021]. Booth, K. 2007. Theory of World Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourbeau, P. 2018. On Resilience: Genealogy, Logics and World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Browning, C. S. and McDonald, M. 2013. The Future of Critical Security Studies? Ethics and the Politics of Security.  European Journal of International Relations 19(2): 235–55. Bull, H. 1995. The Anarchical Society, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. Burke, A., Lee-Koo, K. and McDonald, M. 2014. Ethics and Global Security. London: Routledge. Burke, A., Fishel, S., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S. and Levine, D. J. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–523. Busby, J. 2008. Who Cares about the Weather? Climate Change and US National Security. Security Studies 17(3): 468–504. Buxton, N. and Hayes, B. 2015. Introduction: Security for Whom in a Time of Climate Crisis. In N. Buxton and Hayes, B. (eds) The Secure and the Dispossessed. London: Pluto, 1–19. Caney, S. 2005. Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility and Global Climate Change. Leiden Journal of International Law 18: 747–75. Chandler, D. 2014. Resilience: The Governance of Complexity. London: Routledge. Chaturvedi, S. and Doyle, T. 2015. Climate Terror. London: Palgrave. Christoff, P. (ed.) 2013. Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World. London: Routledge. Corner, A. 2013. A New Conversation with the Centre Right about Climate Change (COIN). Available at: http://www.truevaluemetrics.org/DBpdfs/ClimateChange/

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12 Caring for the World: Security in the Anthropocene Cameron Harrington

Introduction How might one respond to the ongoing tragedy of the Anthropocene? The current age of the Anthropocene is, in many ways, defined by the terrifying data that accompanies it. Temperatures on land have already warmed 1.5 °C since the industrial revolution, the amount that world leaders and climate activists have pledged to prevent on a global scale (IPCC 2019). Global CO2 emissions continue to rise, reaching new heights in 2019 and putting the world even further behind its climate change goals under the Paris Climate Agreement (Jackson et al. 2019). The global species extinction rate is accelerating and already unprecedented in human history, with up to one million species threatened with extinction, many in the next few decades (IPBES 2019). Radioactive debris left over from the height of nuclear weapons tests in the mid-twentieth century will remain embedded in the Earth’s sediment and glacial ice for tens of thousands of years (see Chap. 4). One could continue at length with an onslaught of facts and figures to convey the central point: the world is in deep crisis. The Anthropocene, as a discursive construction, was created to capture the scale and speed of this ongoing predicament. The originator of the term (Paul

C. Harrington (*) School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_12

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Crutzen) hoped that—by focusing on the human components of these vast and accelerating global changes—an acknowledgement of the deadly stakes involved would eventually emerge and appropriate global action would be taken. By emphasizing the power of ‘humans’ to create an entirely new geological epoch, he was also putting forward a specific claim of responsibility that ‘we’ must act to prevent the worst effects from emerging. The focus of this chapter is the specific forms these actions might take. If, as most signs indicate, we have entered a new age of unparalleled danger and decay, then many International Relations (IR) scholars might predict a hardening of security logics built around national self-interest, exclusion, and conflict. Indeed, there are many signs that climate change and resource scarcity are contributing to increased suffering, conflict, and displacement in various places around the world—from Lagos to Los Angeles. But the Anthropocene is not like other global threats that have emerged in the modern world such as the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the growth of ethnic conflict, the rise of global inequality, or the materialization of debilitating cyber-attacks. For one, the Anthropocene, despite its monumental effects, is primarily understood as a matter of geological debate with little connecting it to the conventional concerns of IR. Second, the concept itself envelops a suite of entangled effects and threats (e.g. heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires, etc.) that cannot be easily triaged. Third, these effects are also slow-­ moving and lack an easily identifiable enemy to hold accountable, at least compared to other conventional security threats. Fourth, they are felt most acutely by already-vulnerable peoples and, therefore, go unnoticed or are attributed to other more overtly political factors like poverty, violence, and poor governance (Nixon 2013). Though these are all legitimate reasons for viewing the Anthropocene as a unique event, perhaps the fundamental reason why traditional security logics are absent here is because the risks are internal or immanent to social processes. They do not emerge as a result of easily identifiable external decisions and choices but are themselves a part of the functioning of modernity. Because the Anthropocene erases the modernist divides between culture and nature and subject and object (see Introduction chapter), it inevitably influences the coherence of security as a concept for international relations. It is not simply that states choose not to refer the Anthropocene to the UN Security Council, or that Anthropocene threats like global warming and ocean acidity are generally unfamiliar to security professionals (though both are historically true). Nor would such discussions, in fact, truly solve the predicament of the Anthropocene given its strange temporal, spatial, and material aspects. A more troubling critique is at play here. The Anthropocene undermines the

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modern Western divide between a security referent and a security object (or threat). As a result, scholars and students are confounded by the lack of causal connections, generalizations, and historical lessons in the Anthropocene (Chandler 2017). These fundamental Western metaphysical assumptions have helped define the modern security project. The question is then: how one can pursue security in their absence? This chapter will explore an alternative logic and ethic of security—care— that may faithfully represent the unique conditions of the Anthropocene age and help create better responses. 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 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 (see Box 12.2), bacteria, materials, and technology. Learning how to navigate this entanglement with care will be a primary task for international relations in our Anthropocene world.

The History and Development of Care Ethics Over the past four decades, care has developed into a complex and interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Its academic origins are found in feminist moral philosophy and psychology circles, but it has slowly spread into new intellectual fields. Much of this spread can be attributed to the influence of political scientist Joan Tronto’s ground-breaking book, Moral Boundaries (Tronto 1993), which established a set of political arguments for an ethic of care. Since then it has slowly made its way into IR scholarship. The fact that the two have come together at all may come as a surprise given how we are taught that global politics is mostly composed of danger, violence, and mistrust amongst autonomous units (see Box 12.1). The starting point of an ethic of care is that humans are relational beings. Individual autonomy is an illusion. We do not begin our lives as individual and discrete units that over time have to develop relationships with others. In fact, our very survival depends on care that is received at birth. Indeed, throughout our lives, we depend on relationships to learn, grow, and live well.

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Our very self-identities are in large part tied up in relating ourselves to others. The world is relational (see Chap. 5). To be is to be in relation with others. Care is about the concrete, particular needs of the self in relationship with others. Moral action should derive from a consideration of the self and the other that exists in relation to the moral agent. This perspective contrasts with other ethical standpoints that emphasize broad principles and rules derived from rational calculations of duties and responsibilities. It also stands apart from conventional conceptions of justice which emphasize the role of contractual reciprocity. In place of all this, we should consider the unique value of personal relationships and ongoing patterns of interactions and responses. This means being aware of the needs, wants, and desires of the “world”, defined as one’s self, loved ones, near and distant others, society, and the planet (Engster 2004). Early care ethicists like Nel Noddings (Noddings 1984, 2013) did not believe that a generalizable political theory could be derived from care ethics, which was better left as an individual’s particular moral outlook. For Noddings (1984, 103) “no institution or nation can be ethical. It cannot meet the other as one-caring or as one trying to care. It can only capture in general terms what particular ones-caring would like to have done in well-described situations.” She, therefore, veers close to a type of philosophical anarchism, where individuals should attend primarily to particular individuals within their circle of care (Engster 2004). Joan Tronto, in Moral Boundaries, rejected this claim. She argued that it encouraged parochialism—a form of narcissistic retreat, where “everyone should cultivate one’s own garden, and let others take care of themselves” (Tronto 1993). Her solution was to build radically democratic forms of care that could be connected to ideas about global justice and as a tool for critical political analysis. For her, the boundaries between morality and politics, between private and public life, could be broken down. Tronto held care to include “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto 1993, 103) Tronto laid the groundwork for new analyses that emphasized the political nature of care and its potential to address the propensity for violence in international affairs. Virginia Held (2010)—another key moral philosopher—has used the ethics of care to address issues of military intervention, political violence and terrorism. She does not naively believe that we can stop violence simply by caring. However, she does suggest that we might view violence and terrorism as extreme examples of the absence of care; those who use force in this way fail to consider and empathize with the victims that exist in relation.

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For her, we should (re)build the groundwork for valuing nonviolence over violence in a political context (Held 2010). This requires listening to the views of others, even those who employ violence, in order to understand their points of view. Care is meant to attune oneself to others and to respond to their needs in order to prevent or diminish the use of violence—especially in response to violence—which is almost always counterproductive. Held acknowledges that violence may sometimes be necessary in order to uphold justifiable law but it should never preclude or replace education, treatment, and negotiation (Held 2010). Ideas on care have slowly moved into IR scholarship over the last 20 years. One major intervention came from Fiona Robinson’s 1999 book, Globalizing care. The book established care as an alternative to global rights or justice-­ based frameworks, which have been so dominant in IR. Rather than trying to uncover or develop universal moral codes or supranational ethical principles, Robinson wrote that a global ethic of care requires an examination of the contexts in which caring does or does not take place, and a commitment to the creation of more humanly responsive institutions which can be shaped to embody expressive and communicative possibilities between actors on a global scale. (Robinson 1999, 47–48)

Since Robinson’s original intervention, a number of studies have emerged that emphasize the international practices of care-giving, including ones which underpin aid, development, memory, migration, and global political economy (Fierke 2014; Mahon and Robinson 2011; Robinson 2018). These works help demonstrate the embeddedness of care in global politics while also alerting us to the need for further studies that can push it in new and compelling directions. Box 12.1  Karin Fierke on Care and the Role of Memory: The Case of Palestine and Israel Students often wonder whether care ethics can be used to understand the world of international relations, given its preoccupation with the image of a violent inter-state world riven by conflict. How can care be at all relevant when analysing structures and acts of power, violence, oppression, and persistent inequality? For those living in the shadow of conflict, care seems very far away. One intervention from Karin Fierke examines a “hard case” for care ethics: that of Israel and Palestine. Fierke uses this relationship—one characterized by ongoing harm and entrenched memories of earlier trauma—to explain the difficulties in culti(continued)

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Box 12.1  (continued) vating care (Fierke 2014). Whereas many previous studies on care in IR delved into the problem of caring about distant others (Wheeler 2000), the key issue in the case of Palestine and Israel is “less one of distant others than of how a close relationship of conflict might be transformed into a relationship of caring” (Fierke 2014, 802). Fierke uses the role of memory, specifically the memories of the Holocaust (Ha Shoah) and the Palestinian al Nakba, to show how they continue to resonate as lived trauma in both populations. She argues that memories, specifically the dually held memories of the Holocaust and the al Nakba, can lead to a more reflexive analysis that looks at the conditions leading to this harmful relationship and its reproduction. The distinct but interdependent memories and experiences of trauma, dispossession, and statelessness by both populations show a shared vulnerability which could be “the basis for a rethinking of what it means to return home and for a redefinition of both self and neighbour” (Fierke 2014, 802). Fierke’s argument provides a telling case for the political and moral roles of care. Here, memory serves as a way to acquire new forms of knowledge about morality—a way to learn to “know” the other and a place to build a relationship of care (Robinson 2018, 326). Fierke’s use of care here is novel and it presents a vision of care activated in even the most seemingly intractable conflicts. As we move further through the Anthropocene, we will need to learn how to cultivate care in a variety of new and old contexts. This will require us to demystify the moral boundaries that distinguish neighbours from the self and highlight the potential for building relational forms of empathy and care.

Care and Security in the Anthropocene The concept of care can help move security concepts into the Anthropocene. Care is able to emphasize the types of deep relational thinking that are so appropriate when discussing the Earth’s ongoing and unknown patterns of interactions and responses. Existing in a world where socio-ecological processes and feedbacks are so entangled, complex, and unpredictable requires a type of moral and political thought that does not rely solely upon purely foundationalist views and attachments to strict causality in world affairs. To put it plainly, “Economic crises or mass migration due to transformations of the Earth system will not be confined to some countries; they will affect all. Spatial ecological interdependence binds all countries” (Biermann 2014, 38). Of course, such phenomena do not affect everyone equally, or in the same ways, so to speak of security in the Anthropocene requires an acknowledgement of the ontological state of dependency and contingency. One cannot easily pinpoint a cause-and-effect relationship in the Anthropocene partly

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because the current predicament does not just bind countries together but also species, social processes and even time itself. For instance, Anthropocene security means caring about a distant future while also acknowledging the lasting effects of the historic slave trade and European colonization of the Americas. Without the spread of extractive capitalism around the world, there could be no Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin 2015). Care is an approach to the world that listens and recognizes the needs of others and attempts to respond and provide for those needs, partly as a way to preserve the self. It transcends the traditional boundaries of justice (Gilligan 1993), which do not fit so neatly into a complex and multi-scalar world. It also centres the unequal power relationships that define life in the Anthropocene—moving beyond critique to advocate “new forms of relationships, institutions, and actions that enhance mutuality and well-being” (Lawson 2007). Attuning ourselves to care also allows us to emphasize the unequal historical and institutional relationships which produce the need for care. Such a perspective can be transposed onto human-nonhuman relationships as well as the relationships within and between human communities (see Box 12.3). In practical terms, this could mean interrogating how political decisions created the conditions for (un)natural disasters like arctic ice melt, drought, famine, flooding, mass extinction, and so on. Depending on the particular need, care may also mean retreating from action and intervention. Though many students of security may find care to be a foreign concept, it has always been central to security. Security is at a fundamental level about our relationship to care. John T.  Hamilton, in his book Security: Politics, Humanity and the Philology of Care, explains that our desire for security is ultimately the desire to be without-care (Hamilton 2013). The modern idea of security stretches back all the way to Roman fables with a character Cura as the personification of care and concern. From this comes the etymological root of security—securitas—which translates into modern English as “the state of being removed from care” or the state of being care-free.” Hamilton explains, The word is transparent enough, featuring three distinct components: the prefix sē- (apart, aside, away from); the noun cura (care, concern, attention, worry); and the suffix-tas (denoting a condition or state of being). Securitas, therefore, denotes a condition of being separated from care, a state wherein concerns and worries have been put off to the side. Man will be literally secure when he is removed from Cura’s governance, when his unified being is split apart, back into its discrete elements. (Hamilton 2013, 5)

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By stretching security back to ancient Rome, we are meant to see the desire for security as universal and timeless. Everyone wants to reduce uncertainty and the risk of harm it brings. Thus, securitas is the ideal state where there is no risk and thus there is no care—a time when an individual can exist without any care in the world, a state of serene tranquillity, without worry and with certainty that no harm is coming. Yet, the flip side of the security-care relationship points to an inherent contradiction. Securitas can just as well refer to “indifference” (the lack of interest) or “negligence” (the lack of concern for a person or object). By removing cura as commitment or concentrated effort, by ignoring the loved one or neglecting one’s work, the elimination of care denotes “heedlessness,” implying that one is no longer driven by the concerns that are believed to define and guide human existence, moral behavior, or practical action. Free from these kinds of concern, we are secure in the sense of being inattentive or indifferent, foolhardy or delinquent. In this case, the privation of devoted attention threatens to leave us deprived. (Hamilton 2013, 11)

The desire to eradicate care continues to drive our security decisions. Yet Hamilton also makes clear that the contours of security have always been contested. He weaves in a variety of sources, from ancient Greek poetry to Roman stoicism, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, to underline the “vast network of mythical, linguistic, and cultural valences and traditions that have motivated the term’s usage across histories” (Hamilton 2013, 276). Given the unique ability of the Anthropocene to undo this promise of security, more care, not less, is needed in our complex, entangled world. Though the ethics of care is one of the most important ethical theories to emerge from feminist analyses, how it impacts the world of security—so often filled with risk, harm, and violence—is still an ongoing discussion. For whatever reason, the diverse field of feminist security studies has generally avoided engaging extensively with care. However, there are scholars like Sara Ruddick (Ruddick 1995), Fiona Robinson (Robinson 1999, 2011, 2018), Kimberly Hutchings (Hutchings 1999), Elizabeth Frazer (Frazer and Hutchings 2014), Karin Fierke (Fierke 2014), and Laura Sjoberg (Sjoberg 2006) who have all brought care ethics into security debates. Whether talking about violence, just war theory and the Iraq war, or drone warfare (Clark 2019), looking to care helps counter the dominant security logics that emphasize the ontological primacy of the independent, value-maximizing, and self-reliant subject. Those dominant security logics obscure the particular social reality of the world, particularly the experiences felt by women. More directly, those versions of

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security help maintain an unjust and violent international society that sees militarism as an inevitable by-product of human nature, rather than a masculinized ideology produced through social practice. Studies of care in IR have emphasized the persistence of everyday material insecurities (Robinson 2016). Instead of strictly focusing on the spectacular moments of conflict and violence that accompany the breakdowns in social order, a feminist care ethics of security also looks to marginalized sites (Ackerly et al. 2006). It acknowledges the relentless insecurities in the unexceptional. Rather than focusing solely on spectacular forms of Anthropocene violence like climate wars, care allows us to contemplate what author Rob Nixon refers to as “slow violence.” He writes, Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. (Nixon 2013, 2)

Thinking through security as a form of care means acknowledging flows of violence that are often absent from IR analyses including structural violence, micro-practices of violence, and violence against nonhuman forms of life. All told, what can care offer IR students when studying the Anthropocene? First, it shows how it is possible to reposition security away from fatalistic conclusions that environmental breakdown will inevitably or solely lead to violent conflicts over dwindling resources. Second, care allows us to cross the massive scalar and temporal zones that are impenetrable to conventional security studies. We can care for future unborn generations or past ancestors in ways that transcend conventional ethics (Randall 2019). Third, it bypasses the human-nature binaries that restrict who or what is worthy of ethical consideration. Finally, it makes visible the immanent forms of relationality that bind us with distant others, including nonhumans.

Box 12.2  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, often referred to as the ‘Doomsday Vault,’ was built in 2008 in the small Norwegian mining town of Longyearbyen (perhaps the world’s most northern human settlement) on the Svalbard archipelago about 1300 kilometres from the North Pole (see also discussion in Chap. 6). The government of Norway paid for its construction and they jointly manage it along with (continued)

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Box 12.2  (continued) a number of international organizations including the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The vault’s function is to hold and preserve a wide variety of plant seeds and their genetic makeup in order to protect against regional or global upheavals that would eradicate crops that are crucial to local and regional food security. This genetic “subterranean Ark” (Williams 2006) is a particular global intervention intended to care for—through agricultural memory—human and nonhuman life in the face of catastrophe. Designed to last 500 years, the vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from across the world and has walls thick enough to withstand a jet airliner crashing into it. It is classified as an exsitu (off-site) form of crop conservation, which forms part of a global conservation strategy that is meant to halt the worsening loss of global plant diversity. Seed banks such as the one in Svalbard conserve plant genetic material in order to make it available to parties when necessary to improve food security. Because it exists in one of the remotest corners of the world, far removed from where the seeds naturally occur, the aim is to make the seeds largely inaccessible except to designated state authorities and thus secure them from climate change, natural disasters, and war. Unfortunately, it only took seven years before the first depositing institution requested a portion of their samples back. This occurred in the midst of the Syrian Civil War at the end of 2015 when a regional seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, was destroyed. In a strange twist of fate so increasingly common to our new Anthropocene world, in May 2017, the access tunnel to the vault was flooded with meltwater after an unusually warm winter in Svalbard. The event emphasized how the effects of climate change were growing so extraordinary that they were able to overwhelm a building that was designed specifically to withstand these types of challenges. As one Norwegian official put it, “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that” (Carrington 2017). By holding seeds in a frozen vault at the seeming ‘end’ of the Earth, the vault is a particular representation of security governance which emphasizes an ethic of care built around more-than-human relations. In many ways, one can consider it through, scale and form, to be at the forefront of debates on how Anthropocene security is enacted.

Care Beyond the West A number of discussions have emerged in recent years that emphasize care from non-Western contexts and traditions. Many of these studies challenge the Western-centrism of global care scholarship, asking what care looks like for different people from different centres (Raghuram et  al. 2009). This is meant to disrupt the tendency to position the Western subject as the one-who-­ cares-for and the non-Western subject as the one-who-is-cared-for. Indeed, European settlers (and the modern institutions inherited from them) frequently believed they had a duty of care to protect Indigenous populations

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and assist them in attaining a good life defined by liberal progress. This form of care displaces indigenous sovereignty with settler sovereignty over life (Slater 2019). Thus, one should view sceptically forms of care that derive from universal ethical imperatives, seeing that universality is a legacy of violent colonial history. There is no singular form of non-Western care. Instead, there are shared perspectives that emphasize caring practices that emerge in communities suffering prolonged and systematic neglect and active oppression; communities suffering from the colonial legacies of uncaring in other words. These perspectives will always be open to multiple meanings but derive from a shared focus on interdependence and coexistence and their limits. Studies in this tradition show how care (and un-care) are articulated as an alternative collection of enunciations, doings and propositions to make sense of, and navigate through, otherwise intractable conditions after…decades of continuous suffering: a grammar and a programme to cope with the cadence of slow violence. (Tironi and Rodríguez-Giralt 2017, 91)

Care, viewed as a particular logic found simultaneously in areas of neglect, is shown to be open-ended and worldly; attentive to the affective and complex dimensions of injustice. In a recent ethnographic study by Tironi and Rodríguez-Giralt, the people of Puchuncaví, Chile, are said to live “toxic lives” that are abandoned by the government of Chile, who simply do not care about them. Yet the authors find that the people of Puchuncaví still employ multiple forms of care, including self-care (e.g. joy), collective memory-­ building, mutual support, and domestic care (e.g. cleaning, repairing, mending). Each form of care, the authors find on display, is intimately related to others; helping to express problems and make connections while also being used as a way to heal, soothe, and bring people together. In more abstract terms, the care helped create “spaces of ethical and affective endurance and to produce knowledge about beings, things and relations” (Tironi and Rodríguez-­ Giralt 2017, 104). It helped politicize the personal and the public—connecting the local smelting plant to an individual’s ruined vegetable garden to Chile’s late capitalist forms of development. Kyle Powys Whyte and Chris Cuomo have written about the ethics of caring and its connection to environmentalism in indigenous communities around the world (Whyte and Cuomo 2016). They discuss a group of Anishinaabe grandmothers and other community allies who, in 2003, organized the Mother Earth Water Walk around the North American Great Lakes.

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The aim of the walk was to raise consciousness of water’s sacredness, our interdependence with it, and the responsibilities that connect water, humans, and other beings. The Walk, which was not a particularly unique occurrence, demonstrated how concepts of care are often integral aspects of the communications and practices of indigenous environmental movements, although they may not use English language terms for caring, and when they do their meaning can differ from traditions of care ethics articulated by people of other cultures and heritages. (Whyte and Cuomo 2016, 236)

According to the authors, indigenous conceptions of care (1) emphasize the importance of awareness of one’s place in a web of different connections spanning many different parties, including humans, non-human beings and entities (e.g., wild rice, bodies of water), and collectives (e.g., forests, seasonal cycles); (2) understand moral connections as involving relationships of interdependence that motivate reciprocal responsibilities; (3) valorize certain skills and virtues, such as the wisdom of grandparents and elders, attentiveness to the environment, and indigenous stewardship practices; (4) seek to restore people and communities who are wounded from injustices by rebuilding relationships that can generate responsibilities pertinent to current environmental challenges such as biodiversity conservation and climate change; (5) conceive of political autonomy as involving the protection of the right to serve as responsible stewards of lands, the environmental quality of which is vital for sustenance. (Whyte and Cuomo 2016, 236)

These foundations are not criteria to judge whether or not an act can be rightly conceived of as indigenous care. They do show, however, the importance of seeing an individual’s place within a larger web of diverse relationships, which spread across time and space to include nonhuman life and different generations of ancestry. These relationships generate reciprocal (though not necessarily equal) responsibilities among caring participants who understand one another as relatives. In the approaches highlighted here, care is central to the lived realities of specific non-Western communities. This is true in both a practical and ontological sense. Indeed, in some southern African philosophies, there are distinct ontological categories derived from the idea that Motho ke motho ka batho (‘a person is a person through other persons’). This way of being is captured by the term Ubuntu, or humanness. One becomes oneself through an association with others (Ramose 2005; Coetzee and Roux 2003). Engaging

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respectfully and on their own terms with non-Western traditions can help build creative security logics that embrace plurality, kinship, and care. It can open us to further “worlding,” which means recognizing that different worlds, knowledge systems, and notions of nature and security exist. It opens space up to see how our own theories and concepts are just one amongst many “reals,” in the sense that different realities exist and are worthy of respect (Inoue 2018). Box 12.3  Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Posthuman Care One of the most influential recent additions to the literature on care is Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s 2017 book Matters of Care. The book engages with a variety of posthumanist research to speculate about how to act ethically in a world undergoing multiple and simultaneous ecological crises. For her, care is vital in the current age because it works simultaneously to maintain the world we live in while also opening up ruptures and cuts in ‘the real’ to expose new political agencies beyond the human. This allows Puig de la Bellacasa to add a posthumanist spin to Joan Tronto’s famous definition that care is about everything we do to our world. For Puig de la Bellacasa, “care is everything that is done… to maintain, continue and repair ‘the world’ so that all (rather than ‘we’) can live in it as well as possible” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 161). She continues, What the “all” includes in situation [sic] remains contingent to specific ecologies and human–nonhuman entanglements. What counts is the “interweaving” of living things that holds together worlds as we know them, that allows their perpetuation and renewal—and even that which helps to their decay…. Acknowledging the necessity of care in more than human relations, not as all that there is in a relation, not as a universal connection, but as something that traverses, that is passed on through entities and agencies, intensifies awareness of how beings depend on each other. (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 161) Puig de la Bellacasa attunes us to the importance of nonhuman forms of care that create, maintain, and repair the world. She wants to show how it is not only humans who care. To emphasize this point she examines the permaculture movement and the science of soil. The dominant human relation to soil has been to see it as largely inert and passively accepting of human demands for increased production demand. Our knowledge though of soil (and other ecological beings) is changing, leading to a rising awareness that their ecologies are endangered and in need of urgent care. But rather than imposing utilitarian forms of care that advocate for rapid intervention in the service of ‘progress’ and mastery, we need to become entangled in the collective web of life within soil; we need to see it as a living object which needs to thrive for its own sake. It is not a resource or container for crop production but rather its own living world which may be better cared for if we left it alone. Puig de la Bellacasa’s book is a radical and important intervention in care studies, one that is built for our Anthropocene times. Thinking about care in new posthuman ways is crucial to imagining new political and ethical horizons that do not depend on abstract individualism but appeal to our new sense of interdependent vulnerabilities.

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The Hazards of Care Though this chapter has argued in favour of care as a way to understand security for the Anthropocene, it is important to be aware of its limits and the dangers of using care uncritically. One of the most common critiques of care is that it represents what Nietzsche called a “slave morality” (Nietzsche 2013). Paley (2002) has suggested that care is actually an expression of the profound resentment held by the weak against the strong. Holding up care as a virtue means viewing one’s own weakness as a good, which inevitably helps cement unequal and unjust relationships. Another critique levelled against care ethics is that it holds within it a deep neoliberal tendency. Some scholars, drawing from Foucault’s notion of biopower, have argued that neoliberal governance is really an exercise in the care of all life. Through a variety of biopolitical techniques, life becomes administered and ordered in the name of care, while life’s undesirable components are eliminated. Coercive and brutal forms of control, once exercised to rule and protect over populations, have been replaced by biopolitical modes of governance that spread out in the name of care and empathy (Dillon 2005; Prozorov 2007). The effects can be deadly. Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen have argued that if indigenous communities are to escape the violence of colonial state systems they need to reject its “loving care,” which always requires them to persevere endlessly (Lindroth and Sinevaara-Niskanen 2017; see also Chap. 10). In a similar vein, Miriam Ticktin, in her influential 2011 book, Casualties of Care, has shown how international regimes of care are held to be morally and ethically legitimate, even as they continuously fail to bring about positive change. Via an ethnographic study of French government agencies and NGOs caring for refugees and irregular migrants (i.e. “sans-papiers”), Ticktin shows how these regimes depend upon the suffering body, which is configured as a universal, morally legitimate subject. She writes, So, when sans-papiers make claims based on their suffering bodies, they appeal not to a nation-state but to an understanding of humanity as a biological species, where suffering finds its universal measure in medical science. However, this book demonstrates that, on the ground, these universal claims are mediated by transnational regimes of care, grounded in a moral imperative. (Ticktin 2011, 12)

The above authors offer important warnings that care is not a trouble-free elixir. It carries with it the potential for cooptation and subversion and may contribute to the perpetuation of violence. We should be aware that care politics is still deeply political.

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Conclusion Care for, and in, the Anthropocene requires a recognition of multiple lifeworlds across space, time, and species. But this alone will not lead to safety and liberation. That is partly why it is so essential for the age of the Anthropocene, which tells us that, at least for the foreseeable future, the earth will continue to warm and the profound divisions that separate humans from each other and from the wider webs of life are likely to remain. Yet care helps reorient security for the Anthropocene. Rather than posing the same old questions and about security and expecting new results, care radically pushes our boundaries. By activating multiple traditions of care, found across different discourses and practices, we can reclaim security away from its focus on apocalyptic conflicts over dwindling resources. We can also use it to cross the scalar and temporal zones traditional security studies so rarely interrogate. If the Anthropocene is partly defined by the erasure of the human-nature binary, then care opens up the space for who is worthy of ethical consideration and makes visible the immanent forms of relationality that bind us with our human and nonhuman companions. Key Points 1. Care ethics emphasize the concrete and the particular. It contrasts with other moral theories that focus on broad principles and rules of action. It depends upon an understanding of the self-in-relation. No one exists outside of relations with others, broadly defined. 2. Care is intimately tied to understandings of security. The ancient roots of security have viewed it as the state of being ‘care-free’. This is a damaging ideal form that has traditionally emptied security practices of the care necessary for creating and maintaining a good life. 3. Care can help us understand Anthropocene security because it helps us break down modernist boundaries which have held human subjects as central, isolated, and selfish. It helps us identify and understand other relational ontologies that decentre the human without discharging humans of ethico-political responsibilities. 4. There are troubling aspects to the concept, including its cooptation by neoliberal and biopolitical modes of governance that create and perpetuate violent regimes of care.

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Key Questions 1. What are the key characteristics of care ethics? 2. Why is care helpful for understanding the Anthropocene? 3. What are some of the main critiques of care ethics? 4. What might nonhuman forms of care look like? 5. Why do you think international relations theory has largely avoided discussing care?

Further Reading Collins, S. 2015. The Core of Care Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Harrington, C. and Shearing, C. 2017. Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Held, V. 2006. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, F. 2011. The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Tsing, A. L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

References Ackerly, B.  A., Stern, M. and True, J. (eds) 2006. Feminist Methodologies for International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Biermann, F. 2014. Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carrington, D. 2017. Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts. Guardian, 19 April. Chandler, D. 2017. Securing the anthropocene? International policy experiments in digital hacktivism: A case study of Jakarta. Security Dialogue 48: 113–130. Clark, L. 2019. Gender and Drone Warfare: A Hauntological Perspective. Abingdon: Routledge. Coetzee, P. H. and Roux, A. P. J. (eds) 2003. The African Philosophy Reader: A Text with Readings. New York: Routledge. Dillon, M. 2005. Cared to death: The biopoliticised time of your life. Foucault Studies 2: 37–46.

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Engster, D. 2004. Care ethics and natural law theory: Toward an institutional political theory of caring. The Journal of Politics 66: 113–135. Fierke, K. M. 2014. Who is my neighbour? Memories of the Holocaust/al Nakba and a global ethic of care. European Journal of International Relations 20: 787–809. Frazer, E. and Hutchings, K. 2014. Revisiting Ruddick: Feminism, pacifism and non-violence. Journal of International Political Theory 10: 109–124. Gilligan, C. 1993. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hamilton, J. T. 2013. Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Held, V. 2010. Can the ethics of care handle violence? Ethics and Social Welfare 4: 115–129. Hutchings, K. 1999. International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in a Global Era. London: Sage. Inoue, C. Y. A. 2018. Worlding the Study of Global Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene: Indigenous Voices from the Amazon. Global Environmental Politics 18: 25–42. IPBES. 2019. The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat. IPCC. 2019. Climate change and land: An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. Geneva: IPCC. Jackson, R., Friedlingstein, P., Andrew, R.  M., Canadell, J.  G., Le Quéré, C. and Peters, G. P. 2019. Persistent fossil fuel growth threatens the Paris Agreement and planetary health. Environmental Research Letters 14: 121001. Lawson, V. 2007. Geographies of Care and Responsibility. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97: 1–11. Lewis, S.  L. and Maslin, M.  A. 2015. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature 519: 171–180. Lindroth, M. and Sinevaara-Niskanen, H. 2017. Global Politics and its Violent Care for Indigeneity: Sequels to Colonialism. New York: Springer. Mahon, R. and Robinson, F. 2011. Feminist Ethics and Social Policy: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care. Vancouver: UBC Press. Nietzsche, F. 2013. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. London: Penguin Books. Nixon, R. 2013. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noddings, N. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press Noddings, N. 2013. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics & Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Paley, J. 2002. Caring as a slave morality: Nietzschean themes in nursing ethics. Journal of Advanced Nursing 40: 25–35.

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Prozorov, S. 2007. The unrequited love of power: Biopolitical investment and the refusal of care. Foucault Studies 4: 53–77. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Raghuram, P., Madge, C. and Noxolo, P. 2009. Rethinking responsibility and care for a postcolonial world. Geoforum 40: 5–13. Ramose, M. B. 2005. African Philosophy through Ubuntu. Harare: Mond Books. Randall, T. 2019. Care Ethics and Obligations to Future Generations. Hypatia 34: 527–545. Robinson, F. 1999. Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Robinson, F. 2011. The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Robinson, F. 2016. Feminist Care Ethics and Everyday Insecurities. In Nyman, J and Burke, A. (eds)  Ethical Security Studies: A New Research Agenda. Abingdon: Routledge, 116–130. Robinson, F. 2018. Care Ethics and International Relations: Challenging Rationalism in Global Ethics. International Journal of Care and Caring 2: 319–332. Ruddick, S. 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Sjoberg, L. 2006. Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq: A Feminist Reformulation of Just War Theory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Slater, L. 2019. Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism: Australia, Race and Place. New York: Routledge. Ticktin, M. I. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tironi, M. and Rodríguez-Giralt, I. 2017. Healing, knowing, enduring: Care and politics in damaged worlds. The Sociological Review 65: 89–109. Tronto, J.  C. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Wheeler, N.  J. 2000. Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whyte, K. P. and Cuomo, C. 2016. Ethics of Caring in Environmental Ethics. In Gardiner, S. M. and Thompson, A. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 234–248. Williams, N. 2006. A Subterranean Ark. Current Biology 16: PR475.

Part III Governance and Agency

Introduction The chapters in this section discuss how forms of governance and political agency are changing in the context of the Anthropocene. Governance is a broader concept than government and refers to the processes of steering or managing problems, involving a wider range of actors, including governments but also international organizations, NGOs, private businesses and scientific communities. Over the past 25  years, scholars in the field of International Relations (IR) have used the governance perspective to make sense of the political shifts brought about by globalization. Such changes involved the emergence of new political actors beyond the nation-state and complex multi-­ level networks between them, as well as new forms of governing by other means than top-down regulation. The global environmental crisis has played a crucial role in this reconfiguration of political landscapes since global problems such as the ozone hole or climate change cannot be tackled by any single government alone. However, the potential of existing governance structures to address the challenges arising in the Anthropocene is limited, as the chapters in this section demonstrate. The popular notion of ‘global governance’ belies the reality of existing governance frameworks, which remain fragmented and dominated by actors from Western industrial countries. While some vulnerable populations, such as Pacific islanders or indigenous communities in the Arctic, have successfully made themselves heard, others remain silenced and excluded from the main arenas of environmental governance. Proposed techno-fix solutions to environmental problems, such as intentional interventions in the climate system

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through geoengineering, shut down possibilities of political contestation and thus depoliticize the environmental crisis. Furthermore, with their underlying liberal-modernist worldview, existing regimes of governance fail to address interdependencies with non-human beings and entities. Taken together, these problems pose a major challenge to understandings of the effectiveness and legitimacy of existing governance institutions. The six chapters in this section sketch out the contours of other forms and possibilities of governance in the Anthropocene—ones that acknowledge non-human forms of agency, open up to non-Western knowledges and cosmologies, foster mutual learning, embrace creativity and experimentation and allow for contestation as well as multiplicity. The first chapter, ‘Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecology and Global Politics’ by Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, introduces posthumanism as a novel approach to study and theorize international politics. In short, a posthuman view of International Relations is one that rejects the view that the human is in some way unique, exceptional, essential or distinct from the rest of nature. The chapter begins by describing two approaches that have particularly influenced posthumanist thinking: actor-network theory and complexity theory. The second section outlines how these approaches can enrich International Relations by opening up its analytical toolkits to new forms of agency beyond the human. Microbes, non-human animals, algorithms or Earth system forces are not passive objects subject to political regulation, but they actively shape political processes and their outcomes in an unpredictable manner. The final section of the chapter uses this perspective to trouble a dominant understanding of the Anthropocene—one in which humankind takes centre stage as a manager or steward of the entire Earth system through a comprehensive system of governance. A posthuman International Relations, on the contrary, overcomes such an ‘imperial position’ of the human and instead calls for a total rethink of our relations with the rest of nature. In ‘Agency in More-than-Human, Queerfeminist and Decolonial Perspectives’, the second chapter, Franziska Müller describes how the concept of the Anthropocene challenges existing accounts of International Relations. As IR’s dominant worldviews, analytical categories and problem-solving strategies have been developed against the background of a stable Holocene world—these are becoming increasingly inadequate to grasp the complex reality of the Anthropocene. The chapter identifies three key limitations of ‘Holocene IR’. First, it relies upon an anthropocentric worldview that conceptualizes the international as an anarchical system of states. Second, its analytical categories reproduce a Cartesian dualism that separates the human

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from its environment. Third, it focuses on modes of governance that are ill-­ equipped to address non-linear and complex phenomena. Müller discusses how more-than-human, queer and decolonial readings of the Anthropocene could help to overcome these limitations. More-than-human perspectives would replace the discipline’s focus on inter-state relations with a new sensitivity for inter-species relations and inter-species agencies. Queerfeminist perspectives would decentre the white, male, heteronormative subject at the heart of the discipline just as it would do away with the artificial demarcation between human and nature. Decolonial perspectives, finally, would undo the silencing of non-Western worldviews and provide a space to engage with indigenous forms of agency as well as resistance. The third chapter, ‘Disrupting the Universality of the Anthropocene with Perspectives from the Asia Pacific’ opposes the universalizing discourse of the Anthropocene with a regional perspective. It traces the repercussions of European colonialism in the Asia-Pacific and demonstrates how these contribute to current environmental problems in the region. As Simangan argues, these colonial legacies have fostered a global capitalist system, in which European excess CO2 emissions are increasingly outsourced to countries such as China or Bangladesh. In addition, they increase vulnerabilities to the negative effects of climate change and diminish local resilience across the region. Taken together, this places a heavy burden on countries in the Asia-Pacific to massively reduce their emissions while guaranteeing the well-being of their populations. The Asia-Pacific is thus a site of hierarchies and inequalities that testifies to the multiplicity of experiences in the Anthropocene. Recognizing these contextualized experiences of planetary processes represents a first step towards empowering and emancipating the agency of vulnerable regions and marginalized groups. Simangan concludes that indigenous knowledge and cosmologies across the Asia-Pacific region could provide a valuable source of inspiration and learning for Anthropocene governance. ‘Challenges to Democracy in the Anthropocene’ authored by Ayşem Mert, the fourth chapter, discusses how democracy can be reimagined in times of the Anthropocene. The first part of the chapter summarizes how existing IR scholarship has approached the problem of democracy beyond the nationstate. This literature has focused on three core democratizing principles that could help make up for the lack of representative democratic structures at the international or global level: accountability, transparency and inclusion (stakeholder participation). The second part scrutinizes how the conditions of instability, uncertainty and complexity in the Anthropocene challenge the established structures of (global) democratic governance. It is not sufficient,

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Mert argues, to simply scale up and strengthen existing governance structures to meet new global threats like climate change. Rather, we need to reinvent democracy anew—a collective exercise that could involve, for example, reimaging a novel kind of demos. Deciding about who and what should be included in the demos of Anthropocene democracy is a decidedly democratic act. The final part of the chapter outlines possible ways to move in this direction—by building reflexive international institutions; by enabling democratic experimentation and learning; and by opening up to alternative, non-Western and radical democratic practices—suggesting that many of the democratic challenges in the Anthropocene could be better addressed. The fifth chapter, Basil Bornemann’s ‘Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene: Challenges, Approaches and Critical Perspectives’, discusses different governance models in relation to the problematique of the Anthropocene. In the first section, Bornemann outlines how existing environmental governance is challenged by the Anthropocene along four analytical dimensions. In spatial terms, the planetary character of the Anthropocene erodes governmental capacities of nation-states as well as the institutions of the existing liberal international order. In temporal terms, existing forms of governance are unable to cope with deep geological time horizons and with the ultra-speed of unexpected shocks and cascading events. In substantive terms, the entangled nature of problems in the Anthropocene poses a challenge to the sectoralized approach of environmental governance that divides the Earth system into a range of environmental sectors (such as biodiversity, the ocean or climate change). Finally, the deep interdependence of nature and humans also forces us to rethink the social power bases of environmental governance. The second section introduces and compares two particularly prominent models of governance in the Anthropocene, Earth system governance and ecological reflexivity, that each seek to overcome the outlined challenges. The third section problematizes the missing normative foundation of such models. These would justify the need for policy interventions simply with recourse to ‘the new reality of the Anthropocene’. Bornemann instead proposes a plural and open understanding of sustainability as the normative foundation of an emerging Anthropocene governance. The final chapter of this section, ‘Experimental Government in the Anthropocene’, by Stephanie Wakefield, discusses urban government in the Anthropocene. Criticizing managerial approaches towards governing challenges such as climate change and rising sea levels, the author introduces the concept of resilience, as a way that allows life to thrive and sustain even under adverse conditions. Resilience, however, requires different forms of

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government and governance that are flexible, experimental and open towards uncertainty and crisis. In the field of urban planning this means replacing traditional approaches, which are driven by a functionalist and technocratic rationale, with ones that regard cities as living and self-sustaining systems. Several examples from New York and Miami illustrate how urban planning and experimental government could respond to Anthropocene challenges.

13 Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecology and Global Politics Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden

Introduction In recent years, together with the influence of complexity thinking, actor-­ network theory and critical animal studies, posthumanism has come to occupy an increasing, though contested, location within International Relations. Posthumanism is not a unified body of thought, but rather a range of approaches which reconsider the position of the human, either in relation to other material things or with other—non-human—animals. Posthumanism can be considered first and foremost as providing a challenge to the idea that the human is the centre of all things—in other words, a challenge to all theorising about the social world that is anthropocentric (Naess 1973). A key feature of anthropocentric theorising is that it draws a sharp division between the human world and the rest of nature. Anthropocentrism sees the human as separate from nature rather than a part of nature (Eckersley 1992). Nature is seen as something outside and apart from human experience—something to be understood by the so-called ‘natural sciences’ as opposed to social sciences, and something to be seen as a resource for human activities. Across the

E. Cudworth (*) De Montfort University, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Hobden University of East London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_13

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disciplines, anthropocentric thinking has been a central feature, though we would argue that International Relations has been particularly negligent in this regard (Cudworth and Hobden 2011). Posthuman thinking suggests that significant as human beings are on the planet, as the term Anthropocene indicates, social theorising has been marked by a concentration on the human. This focus is to such an extent that other essential features of the world become overlooked. While there are a variety of posthumanisms (Miah 2009), in this chapter we will make two key claims which provide a direct challenge to the variety of ways in which International Relations have been studied. First, we will make a claim about the focus of study, arguing that posthumanism challenges the human-centred focus of International Relations. Second, we argue that posthumanism has an ethical imperative—that our responsibilities are not only to our kin, nationality and species, but also across the species barrier (see Cudworth and Hobden 2017). This chapter has three sections. The first section looks at a variety of approaches to posthumanism. We will commence by making some comments about what we consider posthumanism not to be and then focus on two main approaches to posthumanist thinking. The first is associated with the work of Bruno Latour and focuses on the notion of assemblages (Latour 2005). This work has a focus specifically on the human embedded within a network of things that operate in a network or assemblage. Secondly, we will look at work that draws on thinking from complexity approaches. This work has focused primarily on relations between the human and more-than-human world (Capra 2001). In particular, drawing on critical animal studies, there is a focus on relations with other animal species (Cudworth and Hobden 2017). While examining these as different approaches to posthumanism, we also assess this work as part of a joint project. A unifying feature of posthuman thinking is a challenge to the enlightenment notion of humanism wherein the human became the central source for knowledge rather than religion. However, humanism did not replace monotheistic religion’s position of the centrality and uniqueness of the human. Posthumanism provides a challenge to this central tenet of Western thinking, religious or secular. In the second section, we look at how posthumanism has intervened in thinking about International Relations. We will argue that posthumanism provides a challenge to the main focus of International Relations as a discipline and offers ways of thinking that move away from traditional state-­ focused approaches to the subject towards ones that allow for a more extensive range of intersectionalised forces. We argue that International Relations has focused on the wrong types of objects and has asked the wrong types of

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questions. Posthumanism, therefore, provides a challenge to the fundamentals of contemporary International Relations theorising. In the third section, we address the question of the Anthropocene. There can be no doubt that we are living in an era when the relations between humans and the rest of nature are in transition, and the term Anthropocene is an attempt to capture the dynamics of this change. Posthumanists have however found the term Anthropocene troubling as it reinforces the notion of the human as separate from the rest of nature and appears to emphasise the significance of humans. Atmospheric chemist Crutzen and biologist Stoermer, who are considered to be the originators of the term (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), did not intend it as a celebration of human activity; yet it can be interpreted as such (Chiew 2015). In addition, the Anthropocene implies that we all, as a species, are responsible for the climate crisis, as opposed to a subsection of humanity operating within a particular form of the organisation of production, namely capitalism. Posthumanists have sought to provide a more nuanced account of the changes that are occurring and to consider the types of actions that might be appropriate in the new environmental situation that we confront. In this section, we will argue that only a posthuman approach, with its focus on unpredictability and intersectionality, can provide us with the tools to understand the contemporary series of crises that are labelled as the ‘Anthropocene’. A Posthuman International Relations is one that calls for a total re-think of our relations with the rest of nature.

What Is Posthumanism? Humanism, as a philosophical position, is one with a long and changing position. As a view of the world, humanism emerged during the renaissance and enlightenment period. This view put a priority on the human, rather than the spiritual, so that the human mind became the source of authoritative knowledge as opposed to religious revelation. It became closely associated with liberal ideas, seeing the individual as an autonomous being. At the same time as making a break from religion, humanist ideas also came to see the human as distinct from nature, with, especially the idea that culture was strictly different from nature. Ideas about the unique character of the human as a species emphasised this distinction, with the claim that humans are unique in being the only species that used language, had culture and used tools. Humanism is an inherently optimistic viewpoint, giving priority to the use of reason to better the human position and seeing the possibilities for the improvement of humanity through the expansion of human rights.

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Posthumanism is a comparatively recent term, which also has had a variety of concepts associated with it. The ‘post’ could, of course, mean after, and there is a literature which has speculated on the post-apocalypse disappearance of the species and the implications for the rest of nature (Rees 2003; Weisman 2008). Writers have also used the term to refer to various forms of uplift to the human, in the sense of modifications that either transform us into cyborgs (Hables Gray 2000) or involve the possibility of uploading human consciousness into computers (Bostrom 2016). Our preferred term for this literature is transhumanism. This is because it is a human-centred project that seeks to enhance the human and transcend the limits of our (animal) bodies (Thomas 2020). Our use of the posthumanism focuses on the de-centring of the human. While humanism saw the human species as central, and unique, we use the term to challenge that idea of the human being separate from the rest of nature. Donna Haraway (2008, 12–13) suggested that the notion of human centredness has suffered from four challenges: first, the Copernican revolution which displaced the planet from being the centre of the universe; second, the work of Darwin which explained the character of species development and the close relationship of humans to the rest of nature; third, Freud’s work on the subconscious which challenged the idea of the possibility of rational action and, finally, the emergence of the cyborg which raised questions about the purity of the human. Although Haraway personally rejects the term posthumanism (Haraway 2016), her work has been central to the development of this perspective. Box 13.1  Donna Haraway: Cyborgs and Companion Species Although Donna Haraway has distanced herself personally from the term posthumanism, her work has been a considerable source of inspiration for posthumanist theorists. This is because of the way in which she has challenged the idea of human exceptionalism and has theorised the various ways in which humans have interacted with the more-than-human world. For Haraway (2008, 11), human exceptionalism is ‘the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies’. This human exceptionalism has been a key part of Western thinking, either with regard to religious thinking where humans have been given dominion of the rest of nature by a divine being or as a key element of enlightenment humanist thinking that has retained the idea of the human species as unique, exceptional and necessary while making a break from divine authority. Humans have made a number of claims to their uniqueness, but all of these capabilities have been shared by other species. For example, the use of tools has been considered to be unique to humans, but many other species make use of tools including chimpan(continued)

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Box 13.1  (continued) zees, dolphins, sea otters and crows. Culture was understood as unique to humans, but again, it is clear that many other species share culture and cultural differences—for example, song is a very significant part of whale groups with different communities having marked variety in the variety of songs that they produce. Haraway’s most significant contribution to this debate is with regard to the cyborg and how questions of the machine-human interface raise questions about what constitutes the human (Haraway 1985). In The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway (2003) moved from challenging human exceptionalism to assessing the human situation in a web of relations with other species. Her focus here was especially on her relationship with her dog, but also reflected on a large array of relationships with other creatures. Her most recent work is perhaps her most controversial, in particular her call that we should ‘make kin, not babies’ (Haraway 2016). Going against much of the narrative of the left regarding population levels, Haraway indicates that while capitalism as a system is an important element in the pressures on the planet, account also needs to be taken of the sheer numbers of humans. Rather than increasing the number of humans on the planet, she encourages increasing our links across species.

Two theories which have particularly influenced posthumanism are actor-­ network theory and complexity thinking. Actor-network theory is associated with the work of Bruno Latour who understands the world in terms of the agency or humans and non-human beings and things in terms of networks of relationships. Complexity thinking understands the non-human and (usually also) the human world in terms of interrelated systems. The key contribution of both approaches has been to understand humans as not separate from the rest of nature; rather, as Latour would put it, we humans are ‘attached’ (Latour 2009). We will now consider each of these in more detail.

Actor-Network Theory Central to Latour’s approach is the notion of actor, or more usually, ‘actant’ (Latour 1993, 2005). Actants are those that make a difference in the world. Crucially, actor-network theory argues that agency is not restricted to humans, and a whole range of actants exist in the world, from microbes to the vacuum pump. The crucial thing for Latour is that we do not focus on the human, but instead trace the impacts that actors have. ‘No science of the social’, Latour (2005, 72) argues, ‘can even begin if the question of who and what participates in the action is not first of all thoroughly explored, even though it might mean letting elements in which, for lack of a better term, we would call

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non-­humans.’ In day-to-day life, Latour (1987, 2–3) argues we tend to overlook the role that non-human actors take—we ‘black box’ them. The purpose of actor-network theory is to raise questions about these black boxes, to reveal in effect how the non-human can also be an actor. This can happen through innovation when actors take on new functions whereby their effects become apparent. For example, the move from transporting goods by ships and barges to road haulage meant the key function of a bollard shifted from mooring to controlling or directing traffic. Alternatively or additionally, this can also occur through denormalising situations where fresh insights become apparent. If we continue with the bollard example, the function of controlling traffic has led to new uses and appreciation of bollard functionality as they are more recently used in crime prevention (such as in front of shops to prevent ram-raiding) or in order to secure buildings from potential terrorist attacks. However, actors do not stand alone and coexist in networks. Latour uses the term network as a tool for describing the links between actors. The role of the social scientist is to describe the network, which Latour sees in very flat terms. Rejecting the notion of context, which Latour sees as a speculative activity, the role of social scientists is to observe what is there and what they can directly observe. Key to the idea of the network is the process of translation that occurs between actors in the network. Translation refers to the way changes in one part of a network affect another part of the network. Regarding the work of scientists, Latour (1987, 65) describes how a change in a recording device can result in the marking of paper by a pen which then becomes the basis for an academic article. Each action is a translation from one part of the network to another. Actors, in this view, are not autonomous beings; they have agency only as part of and as part of a more extensive network. In one of his most influential texts, We Have Never Been Modern, Latour (1993) describes what he calls the ‘Modern Constitution’. The modern constitution is the vision of the world sharply divided between nature and culture. We have never been modern because acts of translation continually create hybrids between nature and culture, despite our attempts at purification—the process which attempts to maintain the sharp distinction between nature and culture. Climate change scepticism could be seen as an example of such attempts at purification. For example, Bjørn Lomborg (2001) sees global warming as non-anthropogenic and considers that any risk temperature change might pose is straightforwardly remedied through the application of (Western) technology. Climate change is not understood in the complexity terms of Earth systems science but as a global problem wealthy governments and scientific establishments are able to address through ‘cost effective’ technologies (Lomborg 2010). Such thinking runs counter to the concept of the Anthropocene which is an example of a new hybrid in terms of relations

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between humans and the rest of nature. Latour argues that we have never been modern because to do so would require the total separation (or purification) of society from nature. The ‘modern constitution’ for Latour (1993, 38) has made humans (or at least Western humans) ‘invincible’ by establishing two separate realms, the political from the scientific in which scientific reason backs up political power, and political power backs up scientific reason. The division, however, is illusionary—humans have never been separate from the rest of nature.

Complexity Thinking Complexity thinking starts with the claim that everything above the most elemental particles is a system. Hence, an atom is a system, a body is a system, a flock of birds is a system and social structures are also systems. Systems can be complex or complicated. The presence of complexity is an indication that the way the system comes together is unpredictable—in other words, how the units of a system interact occurs is not predictable by merely observing the units themselves. In that sense, the whole is greater than the parts. A complex system cannot be disassembled and then put back together. A watch is complicated, in the sense that it can be taken to bits and then re-assembled, but a rainforest is complex. It cannot be disassembled and then re-created from the bits—there is an interaction at the unit level that creates unpredictable systemic effects. Complexity theorists describe this as emergence. Underlying this process is a tendency for matter to self-organise. In other words, there is a tendency for matter not to remain inert but to form ever more complex formations. The transition from a universe made up of elemental particles at the time of the big bang 14 billion years ago, to the complex world we see around us suggests evidence for this. On earth, life has transitioned from single-celled organisms to the vastly complex creatures that currently populate the earth. The claim by complexity theorists within the social sciences is that we can observe the same features in the social world as can be seen in matter. Hence, social systems also display a tendency towards complexity. Interactions within and between complex systems are non-linear. A linear relationship is one where there is a direct and proportional relationship between action and reaction. For example, if I hit a ball twice as hard and it goes two times the distance, this is a linear relationship. In non-linear relationships, there is no such proportional relationship between action and reaction, and hence, a minimal action could have a huge impact, while a substantial action might have a little impact.

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One further aspect of complexity thinking is that systems are inherently interrelated. The environment of any one system is made up of all other systems, and an event in any one system can have an impact on any other. Systems do not develop independently, but in the environment that is constituted by all other systems. The combination between co-constitution and non-linearity is illustrated by what Edward Lorenz (1993 [1972]) called the ‘butterfly effect’—the speculation that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could result in a tornado in Texas. A key influence on complexity thinkers within the social sciences has been the work of the sociologist Edgar Morin (2007, 2008). Morin distinguished what he called ‘restricted’ accounts of complexity and ‘generalised’ accounts. Restricted accounts acknowledge the existence of complexity but claim that we can maintain our traditional ways of understanding the social world. In particular, restricted accounts make that claim that with sufficient computing power we can crack the non-linear characteristics of complexity. This has led to the development of approaches to complexity in the social world that focuses on networks (Barabási 2002). The concept of a network here is in a different form to those advocated by Latour. Generalised approaches to complexity, which Morin advocated, suggest the underlying unpredictability of the world. In other words, we need an epistemological shift from one that claims that we can scientifically understand the world, as if it was a giant complicated machine, to one where we accept its underlying unpredictability and learn to live with complexity. Complexity thinking has been taken up across a range of social sciences, though in particular business studies and sociology. As such, complexity thinking does not have an underlying normative position. Elsewhere we have argued for an application of complexity thinking that emphasises the interlinked character of existence as a way of re-thinking the human relationship with the rest of nature (Cudworth and Hobden 2011). Posthumanism, in this form, stresses the co-constitutional relationship of systems. Human systems are not separate from the rest of nature but in an interdependent relationship. Humans, as a species, are ‘of ’ instead of ‘in’ nature. There is no separation between the human and the rest of nature. This reconsideration of human relations with the rest of nature implies some over-riding guidance in terms of human action. Firstly, we suggest that the precautionary principle should be a priority in terms of decision-making. Given the inherent unpredictability of complex systems, and the possibility of small-scale changes having a large outcome, greater consideration needs to be given to thinking through the outcomes of policy decision. Whilst there are no guarantees, what the outcomes greater consideration needs to be given to the possible negative impacts

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of any decision. Secondly, humans as a species need greater humility when confronted with the possibilities that our actions can have. As Morin (2008, 96) notes, ‘action escapes the will of the actor’. Finally, greater concern should be given to the resilience of systems. Resilience is the capacity of systems to withstand shocks, and while there may be systems whose resilience we want to reduce, when thinking about more-than-human nature, we should consider how policies could negatively affect the resilience of systems (see Chaps. 10 and 18). Complex systems therefore are dynamic and unpredictable, self-­ organising and interlinked, and we consider providing a useful framework for posthumanism—thinking about our co-constitution, in various kinds of relationship with the non-human systems that make up our world.

Posthumanism(s) and International Relations Posthumanism challenges the central tenets of traditional International Relations on a number of grounds. Where International Relations is an anthropocentric discipline (i.e. it is focused on the human), posthuman perspectives perceive human action as occurring within, and related to, morethan-human actors (or actants, if we follow Latour). International Relations has sought to uncover regularities and law-like relations in events. Posthuman perspectives suggest that in a complex world, while there might be regularities over the short term, these are unlikely to be permanent and may flip at any moment. A central claim of posthumanisms of various stripes is that in order to understand the world around us we need to look beyond the human. Both complexity inflected posthumanism and actor-network theory aim to provide this analysis. In this section we will focus more on complexity-­oriented thinking. While there have been considerable challenges to the discipline of International Relations from a variety of post-positivist approaches, the core of the discipline remains focused on state and international institutions. Furthermore, International Relations remains wedded to a Newtonian perspective of the world that seeks to find regularities and direct links between cause and effects. For example, the democratic peace theory, championed by Liberals, is based on the perception of a regularity, liberal states do not go to war, plus a cause, democratic states are more peaceful in terms of their relations with each other. Posthumanism challenges this by altering the focus of study and differing understandings of the character of cause and effect. The starting point for posthuman approaches is that human action is seen as occurring within a context of more-than-human forces. In other words,

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instead of seeing human activity as the sole focus of activity, agency beyond the human is part of the analysis. For example, while war is often seen as the defining feature of the practice of international relations, war, as we know it through much of human history, has relied on the mobilisation of more-than-­ human animals (see Box 13.1). Box 13.2  The Posthuman Way of War For a subject that claims its origins in the study of war, International Relations has been remarkably uninterested in the practice of war, and especially in the role that non-human animals have played. For millennia, war has relied very heavily on the conscription of other species. Even with the advent of motorised forms of transport, non-human animals continue to play a significant part in military operations (see Cudworth and Hobden 2014). Recently, there has been the celebrated case of Conan, the dog involved in the assassination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who President Trump tweeted a photoshopped image of himself giving the dog the medal of honour. What is remarkable is the range of creatures that have been used in conflict. During the Second World War, Japan deployed ‘maggot bombs’ in order to spread cholera leading to an estimated number of more than 400,000 Chinese deaths, a figure comparable to the deaths from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the other end of the size scale, elephants have been used in battle, to intimidate the enemy and transport heavy loads. North Vietnamese forces made extensive use of elephants during the Vietnam War to move equipment over difficult terrain. The variety of roles that other species have been called upon to fulfil is also notable. For example, glow worms were used in the trenches during the First World War for reading maps and sending signals, and marine mammals continue to be as part of the US Navy Marine Mammal programme for a variety of activities including locating mines. A significant role has been as weapons, weapon carriers and weapon testers. Bees have been used weapons, from the rather basic form of throwing beehives at an enemy to more advanced forms using bee cannons and bee grenades. A variety of attempts have been used to deploy more-than-human animals as weapon carriers. During the Second World War, the Soviet army trained dogs to act as bomb carriers to be used against German tanks. Animals have also been used as test subjects, a practice which continues as the British army uses pigs to assess the possibility of survival from battlefield injuries and to test surgical procedures. More-than-human animals have been used, and continue to be used, for their sensory capabilities. Dogs, for example, have between 15 and 25 times the number of smell detectors compared to a human and the part of their brain that processes this information is 4 times larger than the equivalent part of a human brain. Dogs were used extensively by US forces during the Vietnam War for their capabilities in detecting the movements of North Vietnamese forces. Dogs have been continued to be used in more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly to detect the presence of ‘improvised explosive devices’. A final area where more-than-human animals have played a significant role is in terms of morale. In the trenches of the First World War, adopted stray dogs frequently served as mascots and provided comfort. Hospital wards frequently included caged songbirds as a means of improving the morale of wounded soldiers. Close bonds also emerge in battlefield situations, and there are many stories of the bonds between humans and horses and between dog handlers and their dogs.

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For actor-network theory this often involves human interaction with the inanimate. For example, Jonathan Austin analysed the different roles that aeroplane technology played in the activities of death flights in Argentina during the 1970s and 1980s in comparison to instances of rendition carried out by the United States as part of the so-called war on terror. While there were similarities between these two operations, Austin argues that the differences cannot be explained by differences in regime type, but rather in terms of differences between the functionality of different types of aeroplane (Austin 2017, 62). It is not that in carrying out acts of rendition the United States was acting in a more civilised way, the explanation lies in the greater safety and range of the aircraft available to the United States. A key aspect of posthuman approaches to International Relations is the notion of unpredictability. Mainstream International Relations has emphasised the ability to predict future events as a key feature of theoretical undertakings. Posthuman approaches, while acknowledging that we are attempting to derive an understanding of the world, emphasise that it is, at some level, unknowable. Unpredictability, from a posthuman perspective, has to be built into the undertaking. We all want to have some confidence in what is going to happen tomorrow, but we cannot be certain. International relations would appear to be a realm where unpredictability rules, which events such as the end of the Cold War and the attacks of 9/11 being unanticipated. This is in part due to the character of complex systems with both non-linearity and emergence resulting in unpredictable outcomes. It is important to stress though that from a posthuman perspective there is a need to look at agency (in the sense of causing things to change) exists beyond the human. As an example, the wave of unrest that marked the so-called Arab spring culminating in the civil war in Syria is linked for many analysts to drought in the region (e.g. see Gleick 2014). Cudworth and Hobden (2017) have pointed to the significance of inter-­ species relations, with the possibility of posthuman communities being a model for future communities. Posthuman communities are ones where humans and other animals interact on a regular basis and involve changes in behaviour in both species. Posthuman communities are not necessarily without hierarchies, but in some instances, no hierarchy is immediately obvious. For example, there are instances where dolphins and humans co-operate in fishing activities. These co-operatives involve changes in behaviour in both humans and dolphins, where each group enters voluntarily and involves cross-­ generational learning (Whitehead and Rendell 2015, 113). Although many International Relations scholars would acknowledge environmental issues, and particularly climate change, as comprising a, if not the,

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major challenge that confronts humanity at the start of the twenty-first century, there has been a surprising lack of urgency in addressing the issue. This, posthumanist scholars would suggest, is down to the framework through which the discipline operates. The discipline focuses on states and their interactions in global institutions. This focus has prevented a full engagement with the issue, as both states and institutions have proven to be largely incapable of confronting the issue. States, though particularly democratic ones, have been focused on short-term issues, and democratic governments have gained legitimacy through promising a better future for their populations. To expect states to have the long-term vision to address issues of climate change is thus potentially unrealistic. At times of economic crisis, which has been largely the case since the economic crisis of 2008, states have given less priority to environmental issues. This lack of concern at a domestic level has played out internationally, perhaps most dramatically with the withdrawal of the United States in 2017 under the Trump administration from the Paris agreement, signed by Obama in 2015.

Re-thinking the Anthropocene from a Posthuman Perspective Those who subscribe to a posthuman perspective accept completely that at the start of the twenty-first century all life on the planet is confronting a significant ecological change which will be final for many species, including possibly the human one. The term Anthropocene has become a catch-all term for the purpose of labelling these shifts and has entered popular media discussions. While it might be useful to have a term that encompasses the current state of affairs, posthumanist scholars have raised questions about this particular term. In the International Geo-sphere-Biosphere article where Crutzen and Stoermer (2000, 17) proposed the use of the term, they described it as signalling the ‘major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere and at all, including global, scales’. What posthumanists have been concerned with is not to question that these impacts were happening, but rather to raise concerns about the ‘human’ in this formulation, in terms of the uniqueness of such events, the elevation of the human that is signified and the unitary notion of the human (e.g. see Hathaway 2015; Nimmo 2015). Certainly, there are major changes occurring which are leading to what has been described as the sixth extinction (Kolbert 2014). However, this is not the

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first instance in which the composition of the planet’s atmosphere has been altered by the activity of one type of creature. The fact that the atmosphere supports a vast array of life in the first place is the result of photosynthesising activity of tiny bacteria more than two billion years ago. Other writers have used terms to express the perspective that it is particular groups of humans that are responsible for the current situation rather than the ‘anthropos’ as a totality. The term ‘capitalocene’ has been used, particularly by Marxist scholars, to indicate that the current changes are very much associated with a particular form of social organisation, capitalism, to benefit a particular social group, the bourgeoisie (Moore 2015). ‘Anthrobscene’ has been used as a term to indicate the ecological damage caused by our dependence on digital technology (Parikka 2014), while ‘plantationocene’ has emerged as a term to indicate the on-going human and environmental impacts of the slave plantation system (Haraway 2015). What these alternative terms emphasise is that it is not humanity as a species that is responsible for the current situation, but rather a subset of humanity and/or a particular form of social organisation. The Anthropocene may be a useful term for alerting us to the severity of the global situation; however, it might also be misleading, and if misleading might lead to an incorrect diagnosis of what is to be done. Posthumanists have seen the current situation as a complex intersection of forces, which require not only a transition to a more sustainable form of social organisation but also a radical re-thinking of human relations with the rest of nature. In our earlier work we have drawn on the critique of neoliberalism outlined by geographer Simon Springer (2016) to develop what we have called a ‘Terrarist Manifesto’ (Cudworth and Hobden 2017). The manifesto calls for expressing rage against neoliberalism (through both research and protest), rejection of neoliberal practices (ignoring neoliberalism as far as possible or doing things differently) and a prefigurative politics which experiments with new ways of living to create alternative worlds. This links to the call to develop and support posthuman communities which display the interdependent character of human relations with the more-than-human world. Together this implies a ‘creaturely politics’. Such a politics emphasises the human position within vital networks of other beings and things. Well-being, in this perspective, extends beyond the human through to nature as a totality (see Chap. 12). A ‘creaturely politics’ involves a shrinkage of the human from its ‘imperial position’ of a claimed dominance to that which recognises its animal position, sharing a vulnerability with other living entities.

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Conclusion In our view, posthumanism provides the most radical challenge to the study of International Relations to-date. As with much of the social sciences, International Relations has been a human-centred discipline which has implied that human relations can be studies abstracted from our relations with the rest of nature. For posthumanist scholars this is a crucial mistake, because it provides an incorrect, partial account of the human situation and as a result fails to provide solutions for the multiple crises in which we find ourselves. A Posthuman International Relations is one that calls for a total re-think of our relations with the rest of nature. This is key, we think, to the creation of a sustainable and just future. This will involve International Relations and the social sciences more broadly in analysis that goes beyond the human and includes a complete re-orientation of human relations with the rest of what lives on the planet. A posthumanist lens requires a shrinking of the idea of ‘the human’ as we know it, an appreciation that we are attached, rather than detached, from the enormous variety of beings and things on the planet for we are constituted with and by them and depend on many of them. We also consider that in moving away from the centring of a Western conception of what it means to be human we might and a transition to a more embodied ‘animal’ condition in which we humans share vulnerabilities with other creatures and living things. Key Points 1. Posthumanist thinking provides a direct challenge to human-centred International Relations by stressing the embodied character of human relations with the rest of nature. 2. Posthumanists have queried the term Anthropocene on the grounds that it reproduces a view of the human as the dominant actor on the planet. The term also relies on a universal notion of the human, whereas it is only a subset of the species that is causing extensive harm to the rest of the ecological system. 3. The ‘terrarist manifesto’ calls for a creaturely politics that not only provides a critique of oppressive forms of social organisation but also calls for a re-­ thinking of human relations with more-than-human nature on the basis of a shared vulnerability.

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Key Questions 1. On what grounds do posthuman scholars challenge the term Anthropocene? 2. What are the main elements of a ‘creaturely politics’? 3. How do posthumanist approaches to environmental issues differ from traditional approaches in International Relations? 4. What are the core assumptions of complexity theory and why does it matter for the study of international politics? 5. What are the differences between transhumanism and posthumanism?

Further Reading Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2017. The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism. London: Routledge. Cudworth, E., Hobden, S. and Kavalski, E. 2017. Posthuman Dialogues. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Morin, E. 2008. On Complexity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Tsing, A. L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

References Austin, J. 2017. We Have Never Been Civilized. European Journal of International Relations 23(1): 49–73. Barabási, A. 2002. Linked. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing. Bostrom, N. 2016. Superintelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Capra, F. 2001. Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. London: Harper Collins. Chiew, F. 2015. The Paradox of Self-reference: Sociological Reflections on Agency and Intervention in the Anthropocene. In Human-animal Research Network (eds)  Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human Futures. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1–18. Crutzen, P. and Stoermer, E. 2000. The Anthropocene. International Geo-sphere-­ Biosphere Newsletter  41. Retrieved from  http://www.igbp.net/download/1 8.316f18321323470177580001401/1376383088452/NL41.pdf  [accessed 17 February 2021]. Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2011. Posthuman International Relations. London: Zed. Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2014. The Posthuman Way of War. Security Dialogue 46(6): 513–529.

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Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2017. The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism. London: Routledge. Eckersley, R. 1992. Environmentalism and Political Theory: Towards an Ecocentric Approach. New York: SUNY. Gleick, P. 2014. Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria. Weather, Climate and Society 6(3): 331–340. Hables Gray, C. 2000. Cyborg Citizen. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. 1985. A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Socialist Review 80: 65–108. Haraway, D. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm. Haraway, D. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. 2015. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene. Environmental Humanities 6(1): 159–165. Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hathaway, M. 2015. Wild Elephants as Actors in the Anthropocene. In Human-­ animal Research Network (eds) Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human Futures. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 221–242. Kolbert, E. 2014. The Sixth Extinction. London: Bloomsbury. Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press. Latour, B. 2009. A Plea for Earthly Sciences. In Burnett, J. et al. (eds) New Social Connections. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 72–84. Lomborg, B. 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lomborg, B. 2010. Smart Solutions to Climate Change: Comparing Costs and Benefits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lorenz, E. 1993 [1972]. Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas, presented to the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reprinted in Lorenz, E., The Essence of Chaos. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 181–184. Miah, A. 2009. A Critical History of Posthumanism. In B. Gordijn and R. Chadwick (eds) Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity. London: Routledge, 71–94. Moore, J. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. London: Verso. Morin, E. 2007. Restricted Complexity, General Complexity. In Gershenson, C.  et  al. (eds)  Worldviews, Science and Us. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 5–29. Morin, E. 2008. On Complexity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Naess, A. 1973. The Shallow and the Deep, Long-range Ecology Movement: A Summary. Inquiry 16(1–4): 95–100.

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Nimmo, R. 2015. Apiculture in the Anthropocene: Between Posthumanism and Critical Animal Studies. In Human-animal Research Network (eds) Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human Futures. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 177–200. Parikka, J. 2014. The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rees, M. 2003. Our Final Century? London: Heinemann. Springer, S. 2016. Fuck Neoliberalism. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geography 15(2): 285–292. Thomas, A. 2020. On Progress and Reason: Stories of Gods, Animals and Humans. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, published online first 29 April 2020. Retrieved from  https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/ doi/10.1108/IJSSP-­09-­2019-­0179/full/html [accessed 17 February 2021]. Weisman, A. 2008. The World Without Us. London: Virgin. Whitehead, H. and Rendell, L. 2015. The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

14 Agency in More-than-Human, Queerfeminist and Decolonial Perspectives Franziska Müller

Introduction The Anthropocene enters our world as a rupture. It breaks with the comfortable belief that humankind was able to get away with the damages caused to the planet so far, and it invites us to reflect over the role of humankind as both a shaper and destroyer of the planetary ecosystem (see Chap. 2). Debates on the Anthropocene often reaffirm the idea of a common responsibility for the global ecosystem, but also feed the assumption that harmful ecological effects are in principle governable and manageable. According to this view, humans could use their newly gained geological agency in a rational way to rebalance the planetary ecosystem and create a “safe operating space” for humanity (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2011). This optimistic understanding acknowledges the loss of political control, yet counters this with deep trust in the possibility of greening late-capitalism and eventually preserving the world-­ economic system. A more sceptical understanding regards the Anthropocene as proof of the fallacies of environmental governance and hence creates imaginaries of ecological apocalypse (see Chap. 21). This understanding poses ethical questions of human responsibility for ecological disasters (Scranton 2015; Vince 2014).

F. Müller (*) Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_14

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It analyses policy failure, especially with respect to the ways in which capitalism has changed nature-society relations, has fuelled colonial expansion and has, since the 1950s, resulted in the so-called Great Acceleration. In this period, we have seen the exponential growth of environmental and socio-­ economic indicators such as carbon dioxide emissions, ocean acidification, fertilizer consumption and car ownership (McNeill and Engelke 2016). This understanding also allows for more metaphysical thoughts concerning the further existence of humankind in the aftermath of ecocide, that is, the destruction of planetary ecosystems. As a gloomy narrative of human apocalypse, the advent of the Anthropocene not only calls for stronger political regulation but also underlines the need for ecological survival strategies and for a different understanding of ‘the political’. Beyond usual subjects such as earth sciences and environmental sciences, also International Relations (IR) is a discipline that has acquired a reputation for dealing with system change and system preservation, for instance regarding the Cold War and the dangers of a “nuclear winter” (see Chap. 4). However, IR has so far focused on such questions primarily from the perspective of security policy. Thus, IR’s typical categories might not be apt for analysing the Anthropocene problematique, that is, the danger of an ecocide (Burke et al. 2016; Mitchell 2017). This chapter starts from the assumption that although central IR categories seem no longer adequate to deal with the fundamental ruptures associated with the Anthropocene, we still find IR texts which focus upon traditional liberal or ‘Holocene’ understandings of ‘the state’, ‘the system’ and ‘agency’. In short, I argue that the Anthropocene poses a challenge to traditional IR theory’s analytical categories on several levels. This, first, refers to worldviews and research paradigms. Second, the Anthropocene challenges the understanding of actor and agency as this category is central for understanding the relation between human agency and man-made ecological crisis. Third, it affects problem-­solving strategies such as problematizations/problem definitions and modes of governance. The engagement of IR with the Anthropocene, however, does not always reflect the radical challenges of the Anthropocene condition and can tend to focus upon the easier-to-integrate aspects. Existing works still seek to reconcile our approaches to the Anthropocene with late capitalism, the world system and Western-liberal global governance. An explanation may be that IR has mainly related to the Anthropocene as a concept that stems from the earth sciences, without sufficiently questioning its built-in biases, such as anthropocentric, masculine and white perspectives. In response, dissident debates that seek to decentre the human perspective (see Chap. 13), the Western

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perspective (see Chaps. 5 and 22) or cis/masculine perspectives are increasingly becoming points of reference. This shift matters, especially for rethinking International Relations, as it paves the way for a more pluralistic notion of the Anthropocene. So, what are the challenges, options or even joys of decentring and reframing? What differences do ‘more-than-man’, ‘more-than-human’ and ‘non-­ white’ perspectives make for understanding and conceptualizing IR’s views on the Anthropocene? The second section of this chapter explores modernist/Holocene limitations that pervade IR and recaptures the ways in which IR theory is currently approaching the Anthropocene. The third section, then, engages thoroughly with three perspectives that could help to overcome these limitations: queerfeminist and decolonial approaches as well as more-than-human approaches.

 aking Sense of the Anthropocene: IR’s M Holocene Limitations International relations scholars have only recently started their conversation with the Anthropocene concept. A reason may be that large parts of IR’s various ‘schools’ and ‘camps’ are rooted in the discipline’s long-standing traditions of foreign policy analysis, regime theory or liberal institutionalism. Their analytical categories follow the logics of the Holocene and render them unfit to approach new ontological and epistemological challenges that, like the Anthropocene, cannot be grasped within their characteristic worldviews. Yet, what exactly are ‘Holocene’ qualities within IR? ‘Holocene’ qualities refer to the key assumptions underlying IR theory’s central categories, such as (1) world-building and the international system, (2) actor and agency, and (3) modes of governance. (1) A Holocene understanding of the international system is shaped by an anthropocentric worldview (see Chaps. 13 and 24). Anthropocentrism works as an ontological condition which in our case means that human agency and human interventions into the global ecosystem such as industrial meat production, commodification of resources, tourism or transportation are—even if controlled and regulated—taken for granted. Anthropocentrism therefore works as a lens that normalizes and centralizes human agency, resulting in social, political or economic institutions, which decentre non-human agency. In the IR sphere, an anthropocentric worldview translates into certain assumptions on the shape and structure of the world system. So far, Holocene

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IR has conceptualized the international system in several different ways, with all revolving around the idea of state anarchy. In short, IR understands the international system as an anarchical structure without central leadership. State anarchy can—according to neorealist theories—result in power games, a competition for hegemony and a uni-, bi- or multipolar system. According to institutionalist schools, anarchy can also be ‘tamed’ through the creation of international organizations and institutions. Social constructivists, on the contrary, have prominently argued that “anarchy is what the states make of it” (Wendt 1992) and have stressed how agents and (normative) structures co-­ produce each other. This highlights the potentials of mutual trust and learning between normative actors and cherishes the creation of problem-solving entities above the state level. Still, one common denominator of all these approaches is their joint focus on system preservation (rather than transformation), that is, the anthropocentric shape and structure of the world system and its institutionalized problem-solving strategies. Yet, facing Anthropocene conditions, the Westphalian Order of sovereign nation-states seems to be no longer apt as a fundamental structure for interstate relations. The Anthropocene clarifies that the emphasis on system preservation rather than system transformation has resulted in a golden cage that severely limits ecological agency. (2) Holocene qualities can also be identified in IR’s analytical categories: Holocene IR theories usually take humankind and human agency as their initial analytical category and promote anthropocentrism without always being aware of its ontological consequences. There is consent that the definition of actor and agency is based on the activities of human beings (read: man, according to Tickner 1988; Weber 2014, or else: Western researcher, according to Appadurai 2006), human interests and a Cartesian worldview that clearly separates the human subject from nature as object (Freyberg-Inan 2004). As a result, IR has so far dealt with the ecological problematique mostly by regarding environmental problems as another ‘issue’ to be resolved. However, IR has only scarcely engaged with green political thought and the consequences any critique of anthropocentrism holds for theory development and worldviews. (3) Lastly, certain modes of governance proposed in IR thought bear Holocene qualities. While the creation of global institutions, the inclusion of various stakeholders into global fora or the move towards flexible polycentric governance structures within global environmental governance may facilitate environmental problem-solving, the trust in solution-oriented containment strategies still echoes an anthropocentric worldview. The Anthropocene, in its attention to contingency and unexpected ‘tipping points’, can be considered

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a historical departure from such strategies (see Introduction). While prominent concepts of Anthropocene governance reaffirm the idea of a common responsibility for the global ecosystem, they also feed the assumption that harmful ecological effects were governable and manageable, by guaranteeing a “safe operating space” for humanity (Rockström et  al. 2009; Steffen et  al. 2011) or “transtemporal organizations”, which will even in the unforeseeable future regulate and monitor the Earth system (Biermann et al. 2012; Hanusch and Biermann 2019), as this concept is in a similar fashion based on system preservation and system transformation. In response to these problematic assumptions, IR debate on the Anthropocene and its political implications (Burke et  al. 2016; Chandler et al. 2017; Dalby 2013; Hamilton 2016; Harrington 2016; Mitchell 2017; Young 2016) is developing a vital critique of IR’s disciplinary fallacies and blind spots. Drawing upon Anthropocene thinkers, including Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Donna Haraway, this literature has brought philosophical and sociological interpretations of the Anthropocene into IR. At the same time, some authors in this emerging debate echo the narratives brought up in global environmental governance debates, adapting them for the IR context. A widely discussed example is the “Manifesto from the End of IR” (Burke et al. 2016). The authors argue that IR as a discipline and as a diplomatic practice had failed and was lacking adequate theoretical instruments for developing global political solutions to the looming ecological catastrophe; thus, IR “both a system of knowledge and institutional practice is undone by the reality of the planet” (Burke et al. 2016, 3). This results in IR being trapped in categories such as power games or maximization of interests that limit analytical perspectives. In essence, this means that the status of the planet remains unseen, when observed through IR’s epistemological lenses (Burke et  al. 2016, 3). According to Burke and his co-authors, the Anthropocene concept is at odds with typical thought patterns of IR, as “our existence is neither international nor global, but planetary. Our anthropocentric, state-centric and capital-­centric image of International Relations and world politics is fundamentally wrong” (Burke et al. 2016, 5). An essential objective for IR theory development would therefore be to learn from Earth System Science’s systemic view (especially from the planetary boundaries framework) and support the Anthropocene debate in environmental sciences by a framework rooted in international political theory, which would argue in favour of social/political change in line with the planetary boundaries. This conclusion may be understood as ‘planet politics’ in a liberal-cosmopolitan sense. Such a project would

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build on existing approaches, namely ‘Earth system governance’, while being aware of the dangers any universalized and state-centric approach entails. The authors eventually call for “a practice of governance and of subversion, of regulation and resistance, at multiple scales and locales. Indeed as resistance it is already underway, but as governance it is struggling to be born” (Burke et al. 2016, 9). The ethical foundation for such an enterprise would require going beyond mere ‘Earth management’ and would replace an anthropocentric world view by a more pluralistic one. The manifesto has found wide praise, but also provoked a critical reception in the IR community for not being radical enough. According to its critics, it is still preaching to the choir of liberal cosmopolitanism instead of leaving IR’s golden cage and accounting for the forces of the ‘capitalocene’, that is, the ‘Great Acceleration’ of capitalist expansion and resource commodification, which laid the basis for the Anthropocene condition (Chandler et al. 2017; Mitchell 2017). In response, the manifesto authors reaffirm that their understanding of the Anthropocene as a fundamental rupture would call for a theory of survival, based on a pluralist theoretical framework that brings together both post-colonial/indigenous approaches, critical theory and cosmopolitan strands of thought (Fishel et al. 2017). By doing so, the authors forward the need for a more plural reading of the Anthropocene that seeks to overcome certain built-in biases, but also seek to find a middle ground that accounts for a transformation and pluralization of global governance structures towards ‘planetary politics’. This debate highlights how attempts to save liberal cosmopolitanism and global governance and secure their relevance can run counter to attempts to rethink the current situation in more fundamental ways (Conway 2019). Indeed, taking cosmopolitan governance as the point of departure suggests that a mere taming of capitalism and its built-in growth imperative is still possible, in line with the advocates of green growth or a Green New Deal. Furthermore, this reaffirms certain built-in biases such as anthropocentrism, a general trust in global governance concepts and in the capabilities of states and global institutions in handling problems. Even promising examples of ‘glocal’ governance need to be carefully assessed in terms of their appropriateness and aptitude for problem constellations in the Anthropocene, as they may still contain anthropocentric limitations, for instance regarding questions of political representation, actor proliferation or instrumentalization of subaltern stakeholders (Müller 2020).

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Moving Beyond Holocene IR Many ‘dissident’ approaches to the Anthropocene do not put so much hope in governability, in the power of innovation or in global political institutions. They emphasize how important the critique of modernist illusions of power and domination is regarding counterproductive attempts to globally govern the Anthropocene condition. Furthermore, a common feature of dissident approaches to the Anthropocene is that they do not unconditionally accept the natural-science-driven understanding of universal or global solutions to the Anthropocene, but rather regard it as an ‘Anthropocene multiple’, based on varying ontologies, different starting points and differing gender perspectives. When referring to nature-society relations, and more specifically to the fundamental relation between the colonization of human beings and colonization of nature, questions concerning power relations and anthropocentrism gain in importance. Certain historical phenomena such as capitalist expansion, colonialism, their functional intertwining and their implications for nature-society relations are brought to the fore and emphasize the need for radically different interpretations, politics and ways of governing the Anthropocene. Indeed, we can find several readings of the Anthropocene, which provide radical openings for theory development in IR, namely ‘more-­ than-­human’, ‘more-than-man’ and ‘non-white’ perspectives. In the following I refer to (1) approaches that mobilize more-than-human ontologies and juxtapose our perspectives on nature, civilization and wilderness, (2) approaches that seek to queer our understanding of nature and nature-society-relations and (3) decolonial readings of the Anthropocene. All three contain vital implications for traditional or ‘Holocene’ approaches to IR and for IR’s conversation with the Anthropocene in a wider sense. To explore these perspectives paves the way towards future IR approaches of Anthropocene (un)politics, love and making kin. (1) More-than-human interpretations of the Anthropocene seek to decentre the human perspective and question anthropocentrism. When Donna Haraway speaks of “making kin” or of “companion species” (Haraway 2016), this refers to the possibilities of intertwining human and non-human agency and to anthropocentrism’s limited and control-driven worldview. When relating such views to the more mainstream discourses on the Anthropocene, this opens possibilities for radical critique. According to Haraway, Anthropocene discourses that promote ever closer regulation and control of ‘planetary boundaries’

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sap our capacity for imagining and caring for other worlds, both those that exist precariously now (including those called wilderness, for all the contaminated history of that term in racist settler colonialism) and those we need to bring into being in alliance with other critters, for still possible recuperating pasts, presents, and futures. (Haraway 2016, 50)

Furthermore, in Haraway’s perspective, the ‘Capitalocene’, that is, capitalism’s growth imperative and its extractivist implications (Moore 2017), is primarily characterized by its relations between nature and society, and consequentially “the Capitalocene must be relationally unmade” (Haraway 2016, 50). What this means is that exploitative, commodifying and alienating relations between natural resources, production and consumption sites need to be either ruptured or remade. This focus on relationality implies that alternative ontologies offer an antidote to modernist forms of agency in the Anthropocene, as they break with extractivist and expansionist nature-society relations. In order to put an end to these nature/society divides and to modernist problem-solving strategies, Isabelle Stengers suggests conceptualizing the Earth as Gaia. Yet, in doing so, she emphasizes that this should not imply associations of motherly care and planet protection, but rather refers to an ultimate loss of control. Reintroducing Gaia means making way for a concept that consists of multiple, messy and contingent entanglements and cannot be simply equated to a “sum of processes” (Stengers 2015, 44–46) as occurs in scientific modelling of the Earth system. Still, Stengers’ work should not be understood as giving in to post-truth thought, but rather as a reflection over the human-nature interface and the ways in which ecosystemic concepts act in a reductionist and functionalist way. By reinstating Gaia, Stengers emphasizes a sense of powerlessness that calls for a limitation of governance and control by human actors: “No future can be foreseen in which she will give back to us the liberty of ignoring her” (Stengers 2015, 47). This understanding of entangled agency comes close to Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of ‘earthbound people’, that is, an imaginary collective of people who consider themselves sensitive and responsive, due to being bound by and to the Earth (Latour 2017, 251–253). (2) Queerfeminist perspectives on the Anthropocene are closely linked to more-than-human perspectives. They may help us to historicize, irritate or refine current understandings of the Anthropocene and do so by questioning universalism and gender-blindness (‘humankind’ as a geological force). Coming from the field of environmental humanities, Stacy Alaimo asks, “Who is the ‘anthro’ of the ‘Anthropocene’?” (Alaimo 2017, 89), and wonders how this prefix privileges a specific subject position, which is by default a c­ is/

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male one. She claims that whatever is stressed by referring to ‘anthro’, from a feminist point of view the Anthropocene needs to refer to “the multitude of creatures that will not be reconstituted, will not be safely ensconced, but will, instead, dissolve” (Alaimo 2017, 89). In a similar sense, Rosi Braidotti (2017) conceptualizes Anthropocene feminism as a posthuman feminism that promotes a relational ontology, centring on life itself, but decentering humanism. Indeed, a queer positionality is interested in the gendered underpinnings of nature-society relations, as it seeks to de- and reconstruct our understanding of nature and, more so, ‘wilderness’. A broad body of works in queer ecology has carved out how Western understandings, of nature and of apparently ‘wild’ spaces, are pervaded by heteronormative thought and how even a concept such as ‘wilderness’ is not natural, innocent or gender-neutral and subject of masculinist fantasies of domination and exploitation (Azzarello 2016; Sandilands 2016). Consequentially, a queerfeminist perspective seeks to deand reconstruct such relations and create awareness about their gendered power dynamics. In an attempt to reclaim materiality, Stacy Alaimo criticizes Anthropocene depictions and conceptualizations for being overly abstract. Even though the concept of the Anthropocene overcomes a strict separation of nature and culture, its enhanced focus on geology suggests an externalized and no-longer-­ human sense of materiality (Alaimo 2017, 95). Regarding humankind as a geological, biological or chemical force does away with any emotional, irrational or social agency, and regards humankind as an ahistorical aggregation of individual activities: “Thinking human as ‘force’ represents a retreat from the radical risk, uncertainty, and vulnerability of the flesh, as humans are rendered strangely immaterial” (Alaimo 2017, 96). In this light, rather than impose human control over an unruly nature, a new materialist, feminist perspective speaks out against ever more abstraction and aims at materializing and localizing the Anthropocene, so as to strengthen interrelatedness with the Earth-­ world (DeLoughrey 2015). Alaimo therefore suggests countering abstract conceptualizations of human agency in the Anthropocene and considers the Anthropocene subject as a relational one, “immersed and enmeshed in the world” (Alaimo 2017, 103). Following from this, we can therefore understand Anthropocene feminism as an “ethos of disruption” (Grusin 2017, xi) that redistributes agency much more widely across human and non-human actants. (3) Decolonial perspectives on the Anthropocene highlight the extent to which the Anthropocene as a concept is pervaded by Eurocentric and white perspectives, and how this contributes to epistemic neglects, epistemic racism and epistemic violence.

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Box 14.1  The ‘Orbis Spike’ as Alternative Start-Date of the Anthropocene Decolonial critique has pointed out that taking the ‘Great Acceleration’ as the beginning of the Anthropocene is problematic for several reasons. Focusing on the period in the 1950s, where mass production and the ‘golden age’ of capitalism resulted in an exponential rise of indicators such as CO2 emissions, ocean acidification or forest loss, decentres any previous interventions into nature-­ society relations and neglects the genocidal and ecocidal consequences colonialism has caused since 1492. Also, focusing upon acceleration means centring a perception that locates the Anthropocene in the Western world, thereby universalizing the acceleration narrative, but silencing the consequences of the Cartesian nature-society dichotomy already brought up during the age of enlightenment. Indeed, a contrary understanding suggests taking the year 1610 as an initial date. The year 1610 refers to the ‘Orbis Spike’, which marks the all-time low of CO2 emissions, caused by the conquistal genocide against indigenous peoples in the Americas. Estimations state that 50 million people lost their lives between 1492 and 1610, which meant that farming activities and therefore CO2 emissions declined rapidly (Lewis and Maslin 2015; also see Mitchell 2015 from the perspective of post-colonial IR). The two dates result in different political and socio-­ ecological interpretations of the Anthropocene’s historical and current impact. Authors like Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017) argue that the “Orbis Spike” would be a more appropriate start-point for the Anthropocene, as this would emphasize how colonialism and capitalist expansions are intertwined and how this results in destructive nature-society relations. In this sense, the narrative of the Anthropocene seems inadequate and echoes a “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2000), both by hiding the history and ongoing consequences of colonialism, and by proposing a universalizing kind of problem-solving governance.

Kathryn Yusoff’s work on the ‘Black Anthropocene’ centres the problem of epistemic violence, carving out how the geological obsession with the Holocene/Anthropocene shift and with the Anthropocene as an unprecedented phenomenon draws on an anti-black regime of knowledge that silences environmental injustices experienced by black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) populations (Yussof 2019; Laughland and Lartey 2019; Ledwaba 2020). In search of more inclusive concepts, several authors have created counter-narratives and aim at centring subaltern voices and indigenous cosmovisions that go beyond the nature/culture divide and disrupt a linear perception of time. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies”, as Kyle Whyte suggests, consider climate change as an intensification of environmental destruction imposed by settler colonialism. The renewal of traditional ecological knowledge may serve as a strategy for indigenous peoples to foster adaptation and develop climate resilience, closely connected to their deep collective histories (see Whyte 2017a, Whyte et al. 2018). Still, as Whyte and his

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co-authors argue, there is a risk of exploiting indigenous voices in debates on the Anthropocene. Indigenous participation is cherished as a sign of greater diversity or disruptive engagement (Whyte 2017b). Also, indigenous peoples find themselves portrayed as the ‘real’ Earth stewards, whose wisdom is needed for successful environmental governance and to whom planetary responsibility can easily be shifted (Müller 2017, 2020). Instead of universalizing or homogenizing indigenous voices, a decolonial approach to the Anthropocene would strengthen connections to transnational social movements and to multiple forms of resistance in the Anthropocene (Armiero and De Angelis 2018, 347; Temper et al. 2015). In this context, the concept of environmental (in)justice needs to be mobilized (Bullard 2001), to underline intersectional vulnerabilities and to become aware of the timelines that connect genocide and ecocide. The Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities, and Trade (EJOLT) Atlas (https://ejatlas.org/) is an illustrative example of activities to render the colonial violence of environmental change in the Anthropocene visible. The EJOLT Atlas maps environmental conflicts worldwide and features the activities of environmental justice organizations as well as activist-led research. Data for the Atlas was retrieved in close collaboration with environmental justice organizations. The Atlas provides an intuitive online platform which allows exploring ecological conflicts and civil society activities. Focusing in on certain commodities, companies or forms of conflict, the users are able to visualize and localize environmental struggles.

New Approaches in the Anthropocene These three perspectives hold far-reaching consequences for the development of new approaches in IR. Their critiques of a Western Anthropocene concept suggest decentring, provincializing and delegitimizing Anthropocene IR’s discursive positions, institutions and understanding of agency, while at the same time amplifying dissident and subaltern voices. For IR in the Anthropocene, an engagement with these perspectives allows reflecting on Western-centred biases especially in the field of global environmental governance and its political arenas, but also, on a meta-level, with the epistemology or methodology of IR’s forms of inquiry, and with research topics themselves. Taking these criticisms seriously means that central IR categories become inherently problematic. Referring to the three categories mentioned earlier— (1) the international system, (2) actors and (3) modes of governance and agency—the integration of more-than-human, queerfeminist and decolonial perspectives challenges, redefines and expands each of them (see Box 14.2 for

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a summary). This demonstrates, how some of IR’s categories are not adequate for exploring questions of extinction, grievance and survival in a post-Holocene world. Box 14.2  Dissident Approaches to IR in the Anthropocene

More-than-­ human

Worldview

Actors

Gaia Pluriverse Ecosystem

Actors and actants Companion species’ perspectives

Queerfeminist/ Gendered nature-­ new society relations materialist Ecosystem

Pluri-­gendered Multi-­species

Decolonial

Centre indigenous actors; decentre Western/ settler-colonial actors

Critique of colonial worldviews Non-­Eurocentric conceptualization of transnational relations

Governance and agency Limitation of human activities Less invasivegovernance Inter-species care Making kin, that is, relational care and responsibility for all human and non-human actants More-than-­rational agency Survivalist and resilient strategies Resistance Reparations

A more-than-human perspective—drawing on concepts such as inter-species relations and the Gaia narrative—introduces a different view of the international system, as anthropocentrism becomes decentred, whereas—as Haraway would put it—‘companion species’ and their needs get integrated. Accordingly, agency and actorness are expanded and include inter-species relations and inter-species agency (Cudworth and Hobden 2011). Following Stengers, agency centres on practices of mutual care, while problematizing and ultimately limiting human agency, domination and control. In essence, this calls not for more intense environmental governance, but rather for less governance in the Anthropocene, that is, all practices that would limit the anthropocentric footprint. Overall, a more-than-

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human perspective conceptualizes the Earth primarily as an ecosystem, a pluriverse or, if we follow Stengers’ suggestion, as Gaia, a holistic, selfregulating entity. Closely related, queerfeminist and new materialist perspectives also question actorness and agency and seek to overcome their limitations and universalist claims. From their perspective, especially the heteronormative nature of IR actors comes under question and consequently also the worldviews that derive from a supposedly male subjectivity (Enloe 1990; Freyberg-Inan 2004). This refers especially to nature-society relations and the dichotomy between culture and wilderness, which seems characteristic for Western industrial societies. Queering IR in the Anthropocene requires conceptualizing actors as pluri-gendered and more-than-rational, and replaces  a masculine, rational and objectivist understanding of agency. Similar to more-than-human approaches this also has consequences for agency. Following Haraway’s “making kin”, agency rather refers to a sense of responsibility for both human and non-human actors. From a queerfeminist perspective, multi-gendered relations would form the baseline structure for conceptualizing politics in the Anthropocene. Thirdly a decolonial perspective emphasizes—as the Orbis spike suggests— the colonial history of world-building both in IR and in the Anthropocene concept. Agency and actorness are problematized for their built-in Eurocentrism, as the figure of the Western expert goes mostly unquestioned. Consequently, a decolonial perspective on IR in the Anthropocene highlights indigenous agency and resistance (while being aware of the tokenism that takes place when the international sphere seeks to reach out to ‘the subaltern’ to empower them). From a decolonial perspective, political agency in the Anthropocene concentrates on questions and practices of resilience and survival, as well as climate reparations. To demonstrate how each of these perspectives sheds light on Anthropocene phenomena and visualizes certain features that would otherwise go unnoticed, one example (see Box 14.3), South Africa’s decarbonization process, provides additional insights (Müller and Claar 2021).

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Box 14.3  African Anthropocene: Fossil Dependency and Decarbonization in South Africa South Africa’s contribution to the Anthropocene is largely defined by its carbon emissions, which are higher than the combined emissions of all Sub-Saharan states. Being one of the world economy’s most important coal exporters further contributes to climate change. One region, the Kriel area in Mpumalanga, where 15 coal mines are located, has been considered the worldwide ‘hot spot’ for sulphur dioxide emissions and particulate matter. A more-than-human perspective conceptualizes coal mines as socio-technical systems and maps how the mines and their various actors redefine, disrupt or destroy the complex inter-species relations in surrounding ecosystems. A connection to other coal mines creates a worldview from a more-than-human perspective, highlighting the political economy of coal and its devastating socio-ecological effects. A decolonial perspective would relate this example of an ‘African Anthropocene’ to South Africa’s minerals-energy complex, dating back to colonial times and creating a complex system of labour migration, but also trade unionism across Southern Africa. Furthermore, as the post-Apartheid transformation concentrated on rapid electrification, coal path-dependency is closely connected to the political economy of liberation and black independence. A queerfeminist perspective explores how mining and extractivism affect human relations, how gender is negotiated and how certain images of hegemonial masculinity shape mining communities. At the same time, the country’s impressive efforts in decarbonizing the national energy mix may count as a positive case of socio-ecological transformation, as more than 6 giga watt have been added to the national grid. Focusing upon one particular solar project—the Tsitsikamma Community Wind Farm in the Eastern Cape—allows a re-reading of socio-technical change and connects this to global transformations in the Anthropocene. Concentrating on technological ownership and land use, a decolonial perspective reveals an exciting story of liberation’s unexpected outcomes. During Apartheid, African National Congress activist Mike Mcebisi Msizi, who had found political exile in Denmark, developed an interest in the still nascent wind industry. After liberation, he and his community reacquired land-ownership and established the wind farm. Building on this foundation, a more-than-human perspective would reconstruct the ways in which a new socio-technical system recreates or thwarts ecosystemic relations, be it animal activities around the wind farm or changing land use practices. Closely related, a queerfeminist perspective may emphasize the community structure or may explore how a socio-technical innovation may change gendered perceptions towards technology. Altogether, these perspective provide more plural and inclusive insights, taking into account the gendered, ecosystemic and historicized nature of socio-­ technical transitions. Taking these perspectives to a global—and more typical ‘IR’—level would allow for a better understanding of global climate politics, their ambivalences and especially their embeddedness in gendered relations, a colonial past and present, and in a wider ecosystem. It specifically demonstrates how path dependencies, but also policy innovations, might structure political change in Anthropocene times.

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Conclusion All three perspectives demonstrate that the Anthropocene disrupts previous conceptualizations of international politics and what is thought to be ‘the political sphere’ and, in doing so, provide potential contours for future theory development. Indeed, while Oran R. Young (2016) speaks of the “twilight” currently overshadowing the Westphalian Order of IR, it is not yet clear to what extent the transformative pressure of the Anthropocene as a concept will encourage different schools of thought to adapt and change and how strong the forces of inertia are. So far, the Anthropocene concept has certainly provoked debates that seek to reformulate the epistemological and ontological grounds of IR theories facing planetary crisis. In this sense, dissident approaches all share a critique of traditional understandings of power and dominance, and have opened up spaces for new possibilities and approaches to emerge for IR in the Anthropocene. Still, regarding future theory development, the ‘golden cage’ to which traditional ‘Holocene’ IR is confined clearly demonstrates that future IR theories need inspiration from approaches outside the discipline or at its fringe. This kind of inter- or even transdisciplinary resonance is happening particularly at the points where social/political ecology, normative political theory and post-colonial studies meet IR’s ‘theoryscape’. Their cross-pollination might offer possibilities for moving beyond a Holocene understanding of the international system and would contribute to a theory of survival in the Anthropocene. Key Points 1. The Anthropocene as a condition of human/nature entanglement problematizes Holocene IR understandings of agency that centre the human subject and promote anthropocentrism. 2. Established IR concepts such as state sovereignty, the territorial principle and related forms of governance are inappropriate to cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene. In response, dissident approaches expand, reframe or reject Holocene IR’s central categories. 3. A more-than-human perspective introduces a significantly different view of the international system, as anthropocentrism becomes decentred, while inter-species relations and inter-species agency gain meaning. 4. Queerfeminist and new materialist perspectives question IR’s heteronormative nature and the worldviews that derive from a supposedly male sub-

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jectivity. This refers especially to nature-society relations and the dichotomy between culture and wilderness or civilization and anarchy. 5. Decolonial perspectives emphasize the colonial history of certain worldviews both in IR and in the mainstream Anthropocene discourse. They highlight indigenous agency and resistance, and centre questions and practices of resilience and survival, as well as climate reparations. Key Questions 1. What are common features of more-than-human, queerfeminist and decolonial approaches to the Anthropocene? How do they differ? Can you identify contradictions? 2. How do more-than-human approaches expand our worldview? How does this translate to a different understanding of international politics? 3. How do queer approaches change or challenge actors’ roles and political agency? 4. What kind of political initiatives do you think characterize a decolonial approach to the Anthropocene?

Further Reading Alaimo, S. 2017. Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves. In Grusin, R. (ed.) Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 89–120. Burke, A., Fishel, S. and Dalby, S. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–533. Cudworth E. and Hobden, S. 2011. Posthuman International Relations. London: Zed Books. Davis, H. and Todd, Z. 2017. On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.  ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4): 761–780. Whyte, K., Caldwell, C. and Schaefer, M. 2018. Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability Are Not Just for “All Humanity”. In Sze, J.  (ed.) Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power. New  York: New  York University Press, 149–179. Young, O. A. 2016. International Relations in the Anthropocene. In Booth, K. and Erskine, T.  (eds) International Relations Theory Today. London: Polity Press, 231–239.

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References Alaimo, S. 2017. Your Shell on Acid: Material Immersion, Anthropocene Dissolves. In Grusin, R. (ed.) Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 89–120. Appadurai, A. 2006. The Right to Research. Globalisation, Societies and Education 4(2): 167–177. Armiero, M. and De Angelis, M. 2018. Anthropocene: Victims, Narrators, and Revolutionaries. South Atlantic Quarterly 116(2): 345–362. Azzarello, R. 2016. Queer Environmentality. London: Routledge. Biermann, F., Abbot, K., Andresen, S., Bäckstrand, K., Bernstein, S., Betsill, M. M., … Zondervan, R. 2012. Transforming Governance and Institutions for Global Sustainability: Key Insights from the Earth System Governance Project. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 4: 51–60. Braidotti, R. 2017. Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism. In Grusin, R.  (ed.) Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 21–48. Bullard, R. 2001. Environmental Justice in the 21st Century: Race Still Matters. Phylon 49(3/4): 151–171. Burke, A., Fishel, S. and Dalby, S. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–533. Chandler, D., Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2017. Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Liberal Cosmopolitan IR: A Response to Burke et al.’s “Planet Politics”. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46(2): 190–208. Conway, P. 2019. On the Way to Planet Politics: From Disciplinary Demise to Cosmopolitical Coordination. International Relations 34(2): 157–179. Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2011. Posthuman International Relations. London: Zed Books. Dalby, S. 2013. Biopolitics and Climate Security in the Anthropocene. Geoforum 49: 184–192. Davis, H. and Todd, Z. 2017. On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.  ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4): 761–780. DeLoughrey, E. 2015. Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worlding in the Anthropocene. In DeLoughrey, E., Didur,  J.  and Carrigan, A.  (eds) Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. New  York: Routledge, 352–372. Enloe, C. 1990. Bananas, Beaches and Bases. Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fishel, S., Burke, A., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S. and Levine, D. 2017. Defending Planet Politics. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46(2): 209–219. Freyberg-Inan, A. 2004. What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and its Judgment of Human Nature. New York: State University of New York Press.

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Grusin, R. 2017. Introduction. Anthropocene Feminism: An Experiment in Collaborative Theorizing. In Grusin, R. (ed.) Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, vii–xix. Hamilton, S. 2016. The Measure of All Things? The Anthropocene as a Global Biopolitics of Carbon. European Journal of International Relations 24(1): 33–57. Hanusch, F. and Biermann, F. 2019. Deep-time Organizations: Learning Institutional Longevity from History. The Anthropocene Review 7(1): 19–41. Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. London: Duke University Press. Harrington, C. 2016. The Ends of the World: International Relations and the Anthropocene. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 478–498. Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Laughland, O. and Lartey, J. 2019. First Slavery, then a Chemical Plant and Cancer Deaths: One Town’s Brutal History. The Guardian, 6 May. https://www.theguardian.com/us-­n ews/2019/may/06/cancertown-­l ouisiana-­r eserve-­h istory-­ slavery [accessed 17 February 2021]. Ledwaba, L. 2020. Bidding Farewell to the Gods as Village makes Way for Mine. Daily Maverick, 24 January. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-­01-­24-­bidding-­ farewell-­to-­the-­gods-­as-­village-­makes-­way-­for-­mine/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Lewis, S.  L. and Maslin, M.  A. 2015. Defining the Anthropocene.  Nature 519: 171–180. McNeill, J. R. and Engelke, P. 2016. The Great Acceleration. An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Harvard: Belknap Press. Mitchell, A. 2015. Decolonising the Anthropocene. Worldly IR, 17 March. https:// worldlyir.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/decolonising-­the-­Anthropocene/  [accessed 17 February 2021]. Mitchell, A. 2017. Is IR Going Extinct? European Journal of International Relations 23(1): 3–25. Moore, J. W. 2017. The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3): 594–630. Müller, F. 2017. Produktive Wälder: Diffusionsmuster klimapolitischer Verantwortung am Beispiel von REDD+-Projekten. Politische Vierteljahresschrift 2017: 335–358. Müller, F. 2020. Can the Subaltern Protect Forests? REDD+ Compliance, Depoliticization and Indigenous Subjectivities. Journal of Political Ecology 27(1): 419–435. Müller, F. and Claar, S. 2021. Auctioning a ‘Just Energy Transition’? South Africa’s Renewable Energy Procurement Programme and its Implications for Transition Strategies. Review of African Political Economy, forthcoming. Quijano, A. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from the South 1(3): 533–580. Rockström, J., Steffen, W. and Noone, K. 2009. Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society 14(2): 32.

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Sandilands, C. 2016. Queer Ecology. In Adamson, J., Gleason, W. A. and Pellow, D. N. (eds) Keywords for Environmental Studies. New York: NYU Press, 169–171. Scranton, R. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Light Books. Steffen, W., Persson, A. and Deutsch, L. 2011. The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship. AMBIO 40: 739–761. Stengers, I. 2015. In Catastrophic Times. Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press. Temper, L., del Bene, D. and Martinez-Alier, J. 2015. Mapping the Frontiers and Front Lines of Global Environmental Justice: The EJAtlas.  Journal of Political Ecology 22: 255–278. Tickner, A. 1988. Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(3): 429–444. Vince, G. 2014. Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. London: Vintage Books. Weber, C. 2014. Why is There No Queer International Theory? European Journal of International Relations 21(1): 27–51. Wendt, A. 1992. Anarchy is what States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics. International Organization 46(2): 391–425. Whyte, K. 2017a. Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes 55(1–2): 153–162. Whyte, K. 2017b. The Roles for Indigenous Peoples in Anthropocene Dialogues: Some Critical Notes and a Question.  https://inhabitingtheAnthropocene. com/2017/01/25/the-­roles-­for-­indigenous-­peoples-­in-­Anthropocene-­dialogues-­ some-­critical-­notes-­and-­a-­question/ [accessed 17 February]. Whyte, K., Caldwell, Ch. and Schaefer, M. 2018. Indigenous Lessons about Sustainability Are Not Just for “All Humanity”. In Sze, J.  (ed) Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power. New  York: New  York University Press, 149–179. Young, O. A. 2016. International Relations in the Anthropocene. In Booth, K. and Erskine, T.  (eds) International Relations Theory Today. London: Polity Press, 231–239. Yusoff, K. 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

15 Disrupting the Universality of the Anthropocene with Perspectives from the Asia Pacific Dahlia Simangan

Introduction Discussions about the changing Earth system are not always applicable to all inhabitants of this planet. 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 (Malm and Horborg 2014). Furthermore, the unsustainable conditions in the Anthropocene may amplify present injustices and inequalities between and within societies. Meanwhile, those living according to the natural rhythms and cycles of the Earth have enhanced intuition and skills in the face of environmental changes (Clark 2011). The Anthropocene, therefore, is manifested in a myriad of experiences. Other chapters in this textbook problematise the anthropocentrism and Western-centrism of the Anthropocene discourse (e.g. see Chaps. 5, 14, and 24). This dominant discourse tends to homogenise scientific inquiry and marginalise other perspectives in the Anthropocene (Inoue and Moreira 2016; Lövbrand et al. 2015; Marquardt 2019; Simangan 2020a). This chapter adds

D. Simangan (*) Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS), Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_15

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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 (Simangan 2020a). The following sections draw on the Asia-Pacific experience to pluralise the discussion about the causes, consequences, and solutions to the challenges in the Anthropocene. We will trace the contribution of the Asia-Pacific region to the precursors of the Anthropocene in the context of colonisation and industrialisation. Some of the socio-ecological consequences of colonisation and intra-south inequalities, for the capacity of the region to adapt and respond to the challenges in the Anthropocene, will then be identified, shedding light on the differentiated impact of global environmental change. Finally, some of the ecologically aligned values and practices found in the region that could inform the way we live in the Anthropocene will be highlighted.

Fig. 15.1  Cumulative CO2 emissions by world region

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 ecolonising the Asia-Pacific Contribution D to the Anthropocene Scientists refer to the Industrial Revolution as one of the transition points from the Holocene to the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Unprecedented energy consumption during this period has left a lasting global environmental footprint. The steam engine, for instance, enabled efficient manufacturing and prompted urbanisation. These activities resulted in drastic increases in carbon emissions and accelerated environmental degradation. Western Europe, the seat of the Industrial Revolution, was the primary emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) up until the 1950s. Only from the period of post-World War II reconstruction did the other regions start recording significant emissions. This historical record of CO2 emissions indicates a Eurocentric Anthropocene (see Box 15.1).

Box 15.1  The Asia Pacific’s Contribution to Global CO2 Emissions Asia-Pacific countries, such as China, India, and Japan, also used the steam engine. However, CO2 emissions of the Asia-Pacific region, collectively, remained negligible compared to most of Europe until the second half of the twentieth century. Note: “Asia & Pacific (other)” refers to Asia and Oceania minus China and India. “Americas (other)” refers to North, Central and South America and the Caribbean minus the USA. “Europe (other)” is Western and Eastern Europe minus the EU-28. In 2017, the Asia-Pacific region contributed 48% of global CO2 emissions (Fig.  15.2). China has contributed the most to the region’s economic activities since opening its economy in 1979. India and Japan have also contributed significantly to the region’s economic growth based on nominal gross domestic product (GDP). The region’s annual growth rate has remained consistently high since 1991 except for the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis. Newly industrialised and industrialising economies in the region that have started emitting harmful substances into the environment still have a long way to go when it comes to implementing environmental protection measures. It is also important to note that the region is home to around 60% of the global population. When we look at CO2 emissions per capita, China and India trail behind most of the major industrialised economies in the world (Fig. 15.3). Furthermore, a part of their overall emissions can be attributed to “carbon leakage” or the greenhouse gas (GHG) outsourcing of carbon- and energy-intensive production and industries to developing countries (Malik and Lan 2016; Yan and Yang 2010). Carbon-intensive goods produced by developing/emerging economies are exported to consumers in developed countries (Peters et  al. 2012). Despite policies to cut national/regional emissions, global trade enables the shifting of emissions from developed to emerging economies.

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Fig. 15.2  Annual share of global CO2 emissions, 2017

Fig. 15.3  CO2 emissions per capita

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CO2 emissions from centuries ago are still manifest today. Historical emissions are tied with past activities that involved colonisation of people who, at present, are also the most vulnerable to environmental issues. Europeans colonised much of the Asia-Pacific. Territories that were not official European protectorates or colonies (i.e. China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Thailand, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bhutan) still experienced other forms of subjugation. The British Empire seized land from Nepal and Bhutan and controlled the foreign affairs of Afghanistan. Surplus production from resource exploitation of colonies drove colonial enterprises, transforming global ecosystems even before the Industrial Revolution (Lightfoot et al. 2013). On this account, the structures of colonialism enabled the advent of the Anthropocene. Colonialism objectified nature by subjugating human agency first. The objectives of colonial expansion—whether on the basis of capitalism, imperialism, or religious fundamentalism—prompted unsustainable means of resource extraction and disrupted indigenous ways of living in nature. For instance, the coffee plantations in some parts of British India led to deforestation, disrupting the sustainable livelihoods of communities living off the forests (Saravanan 2004). In Vietnam, the French rationalised forest exploitation through colonial knowledge production and codified regulations that controlled the settlement of the local population, vilified local practices, and alienated the Vietnamese from their forests (McElwee 2016). The Dutch also disseminated a selective and simplified scientific discourse to eliminate customary practices of forest use and justify their control and exploitation of Indonesian forests (Galudra and Sirait 2009). Despite profiting from their environmentally destructive practices, the colonisers marginalised the vast majority of the colonised population from development. Colonialism colonised humans and nature. Therefore, in the context of the Anthropocene, the postcolonial subaltern should consist not only of the voiceless human subjects of hegemony (Spivak 1988) but also of the voiceless nonhuman elements of nature (see Chaps. 13, 22, and 24). However, the present inequalities brought about by historical injustice make it difficult to ignore the influence of the West and the human-centric worldview on the crisis of modernity. Identifying the role of human societies in the changing Earth system requires a recognition of the plurality of human experiences, including the history of violence and inequalities (Chakrabarty 2012). To animate the Earth, we first need to decolonise and emancipate the human victims of historical injustice. More recently, some postcolonial countries in the Asia Pacific have drawn international attention for their environmentally harmful practices. Indonesia, for one, records the highest deforestation rate in the region and one of the

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highest in the world (Global Forest Watch 2019). Deforestation destroys and degrades natural habitats, leading to biodiversity loss (Tilman et al. 2017). It is also the second-largest source of anthropogenic GHG emissions, after fossil fuel combustion, but is projected to decline due to decreasing deforestation and increasing afforestation (IPCC 2014b). While slowing down the deforestation rate contributes to climate change mitigation, the reduction of fossil fuel combustion remains the most crucial action for lowering anthropogenic GHG emissions (van der Werf et al. 2009). Examining the consumption side of deforestation tells a different story. Indonesian forests supply agricultural and forestry exports to China, Europe, and other developed countries (Pendrill et al. 2019). Palm oil exports, specifically, account for 23% of deforestation in Indonesia (Austin et al. 2019). For many developed countries, especially in Europe, “deforestation emissions embodied in imports rival or exceed emissions from domestic agriculture” (Pendrill et al. 2019, 1). Meanwhile, Indonesia’s forests are essential to local livelihoods, especially among small-scale subsistence farmers (Austin et  al. 2019). Unfortunately, even in the pursuit of a green economy and indigenous welfare, capitalising on Indonesian forests generates exclusionary forms of production that are not always externally imposed but also organically forged within indigenous communities (Astuti and McGregor 2016; Li 2014). In many tropical countries, like Indonesia, “forest resources support rural households, especially in areas prone to high poverty” (FAO 2018). Notwithstanding the exclusionary tendencies of forest use for capitalist-driven types of development, forests provide livelihoods for many local communities. Meanwhile, some developed countries meet their domestic demand by importing carbon- and energy-intensive products from less-developed countries and, consequently, outsourcing their carbon emissions (see “carbon leakage” in Box 15.1). These inequalities in the current global economy replicate colonial practices and perpetuate historical injustice.

Differentiated Vulnerabilities in the Asia Pacific Historical injustice further widened the development gap between the colonial powers and colonised societies and shaped the Asia-Pacific experience in the Anthropocene. It also introduced environmental issues that many developing and postcolonial countries are unable to resolve. It can be argued that the current climate crisis, for instance, renders inquiry into historical contributions futile. However, a historical inquiry can explain the dilemmas developing economies face when addressing environmental issues. It is unjust not

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to situate the differentiated vulnerabilities in the region within the underlying global structures that paved the way for the Anthropocene. Even with the region’s continued economic growth, many Asia-Pacific countries are still vulnerable to the negative effects of the Anthropocene. Environmental disasters from 1970 to 2016 affected 2.24 billion people in the region and destroyed $400 billion worth of properties (UNESCAP 2016). In 2017, five of the ten countries most at risk of the negative impact of climate change were in the Asia Pacific: Sri Lanka, Nepal, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Thailand (Eckstein et al. 2019). With both leading GHG emitters and the most vulnerable located in the region, the Asia Pacific experiences the greatest pressure to reduce its emissions while meeting immediate economic and welfare imperatives. The following quote encapsulates the unfair situation most developing countries find themselves in over the need to balance economic development and environmental considerations: Developing countries … have a strong and understandable sense of injustice. They see rich countries having first relied on fossil fuels for their development, and thus being largely responsible for the existing stocks of GHGs, then telling them to find another, and possibly more costly, route to development. They feel least responsible for the position we are in, yet they will be hit earliest and hardest. (Stern 2008, 25)

The Asia Pacific remains relatively poorer than most regions despite its increasing regional GDP growth rate and decreasing global poverty (World Bank 2018). Climate change has a disproportionate impact on the poorest populations, especially those living in rural areas where extreme weather conditions increasingly undermine agricultural livelihoods. Climate change exacerbates the vulnerability of the poor, who have fewer resources to adapt to environmental changes and to protect their lives and livelihoods from natural disasters (Cord et  al. 2008). Furthermore, weak government institutions, insufficient public services, and the corruption prevalent in many countries in the region intensify poor populations’ exposure to environmental risks. Corruption drains the necessary support for implementing climate-related initiatives and providing assistance to climate-affected industries and communities (e.g. Pelicice 2019). Political and business elites, for instance, are misappropriating forest revenues from country-level implementations of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), instead of distributing them adequately, fairly, and transparently (Standing 2012). REDD+ is a mechanism proposed by the Coalition for Rainforest Nations led by Papua New Guinea and adopted by the UN Framework

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Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The corrupt may capture funding and policy agendas meant to help the climate change adaptability of vulnerable populations. In Thailand, elite interests hijack initiatives for managing climate and flood risks and infiltrate planning processes to sideline the social context and governance issues related to vulnerability (Lebel et al. 2011). In Vanuatu, community-based projects for climate change adaptation that offer financial or economic gains get co-opted and cause social tensions (Buggy and McNamara 2015). The economic inequalities within the region reflect the plurality of human experience in the Anthropocene (see Box 15.2). China is the top GHG emitter globally, and its “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) plan could intensify existing environmental degradation and overexploitation of resources in countries already affected by desertification, soil degradation, and drought (Ascensão et al. 2018; Qin 2016). Launched in 2013, the “One Belt, One Road” or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is China’s massive infrastructure plan to connect with regions in Asia, Africa, and Europe through land and maritime networks to facilitate regional trade, economic growth, and integration. Box 15.2  The Pacific Islands in Climate Change Negotiations The climate-development nexus requires climate negotiations to consider the inequalities of the global economy and the politico-economic contexts of developing and geographically vulnerable countries. Unfortunately, despite attempts to achieve “common but differentiated responsibilities”, climate negotiations still fall short of effectively harmonising varied environmental experiences and differing national priorities. For instance, the Pacific Islands contributed less than 1% to global emissions in 2013, yet they are the most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Low-lying areas and small islands face the highest risk of flooding (IPCC 2014a). Often, they have insufficient flood control mechanisms to protect their coastal populations (Nicholls et al. 1999). The discussions surrounding the 2015 climate change negotiations in Paris magnified the disproportionate impact of climate change. Pacific Islands called for a 1.5 °C limit in the rise in global temperatures, while coal-producing Australia and New Zealand rallied for the 2.0 °C target (Borrevik 2019). These negotiations reflect the varied, and sometimes competing, narratives and differentiated vulnerabilities in the region despite the ultimately totalising impact of the Anthropocene. As the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, said, “the 2 degrees target will only save economies (…) 1.5 degrees or below [will] save our people” (Borrevik 2019, 231). Small island states participate proactively in climate change negotiations and debates, raising awareness about the existential threat of climate change. The former president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, brought the image of sinking islands to international attention, circulating images and discourses of vulnerability and appealing for climate justice (Klepp 2014). A postcolonial sensibility towards cli(continued)

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Box 15.2 (continued) mate change adaptation and migration brings to the fore the agency of the Pacific Islanders in disrupting conventional notions of territoriality and mobility (Klepp and Herbeck 2016; see also Suliman 2016). Some Pacific Islanders reject their portrayal as victims. In the words of the late Koreti Mavaega Tiumalu, former organiser of 350 Pacific, a youth-led network of climate activists from the Pacific Islands: “We come from a people who have lived sustainability and in harmony with nature, with our environment, for centuries. So to be labelled as passive victims, or to have some of our islands be seen as the possible first climate refugees, is really not well received in the Pacific.” “Our key message is … ‘We’re not drowning, we’re fighting’” (Butler 2014).

Amidst rapid economic development in some parts of the region, rising sea levels and natural disasters due to climate change are already forcing millions of people out of their homes and destroying livelihoods (IFRC 2018). Bangladesh is predicted to lose 11% of its land to a 50-cm sea level rise, displacing an estimated 15 million people, while India continues the construction of border fences in anticipation of higher influxes of climate migrants (EJF 2018). The warming climate is melting Himalayan glaciers faster than they can be replenished, increasing flood risks and decreasing freshwater supplies in Nepal, which is already facing various socio-economic challenges (Dangi et al. 2018). Nepal is a landlocked country between rivals China and India. The development of its water infrastructure mainly relies on investments from Beijing and Delhi, and the tense geopolitics in the region creates uncertainty over the future of Nepal’s water security (Biggs et al. 2013). Economic development fuelled by unsustainable production and consumption comes, indeed, with environmental costs. The rapid industrialisation of some Asia-Pacific countries has engendered environmental issues of both regional and global concern. For this reason, the concept of the Capitalocene or the “age of capital” could be a more appropriate description for problems resulting from the commodification and exploitation of nature for capital accumulation (Moore 2016). This means that human societies that have earlier participated in capital accumulation are more responsible for the Anthropocene. At present, the underdeveloped economies in the region (e.g. Bangladesh, Kiribati, Laos, and Nepal) fall behind countries with emerging and more developed economies (e.g. Australia, China, India, and Japan). The contradictions and inequalities within the region “render it a unique spatiality positioned between the globality and locality of the Anthropocene” (Simangan 2020b, 4).

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Ecologically Aligned Living in the Asia Pacific With increasing consideration of non-Western understandings of the being of nature (i.e. the ontology of nature), this section highlights some of the ecologically aligned ideas and practices found in the Asia Pacific. A postcolonial analysis exposes the socio-ecological implications of colonialism. “By linking the Anthropocene with colonization, it draws attention to the violence at its core, and calls for the consideration of Indigenous philosophies and processes of Indigenous self-governance as a necessary political corrective, alongside the self-determination of other communities and societies” (Davis and Todd 2017, 763). Therefore, a postcolonial analysis also highlights the agency, values, and practices of those who were historically subjugated and marginalised, and emphasises their potential in informing strategies for living in the Anthropocene. Anthropocentrism, however, has justified the subjugation and exploitation of nature, which has been historically imagined as female and, as in society, something that needs to be controlled (Merchant 1980). The aesthetic framing of a sacrosanct nature as something separate and “over there” has further reified human control over nature (Morton 2007). Anthropocentrism is also espoused in the modernist understanding that the Earth is inanimate and distant from human experiences (Latour 2014). To break from this anthropocentric worldview, we first need to recognise our alienation from nature. Such recognition allows us to locate other nature ontologies and ways of understanding the human-nature relationship. It also helps us shift our views of environmental issues from natural perversions to systemic problems. The Anthropocene presents an opportunity for humanity to work towards emancipation from ontological distortions. Emancipation also necessitates a recognition of the role of historical processes in creating an order that reinforces exploitation, alienation, and exclusion (Shapcott 2008). Emancipation from the outcomes of hierarchies and inequalities produced by capitalist production, in particular, paves the way for a solidarist international society, and eventually to a cosmopolitan society of free individuals with the agency and means to create or support conditions for optimal moral and political life (Shapcott 2008). It is now a challenge for International Relations scholars engaging with the Anthropocene discourse to update the critiques of colonialism and capitalism and make them more relevant to the Anthropocene. International Relations theories of the Anthropocene need to encompass both the objectives of problem-­solving and critique (Cox 1981), combining practical policy efforts to curb the threats in the Anthropocene with questioning, or even radically

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transforming, the political and economic frameworks that gave rise to this epoch. A problem-solving approach in the Anthropocene that is rooted in critical theory will develop new political and economic configurations that will modify conventional conceptualisations of sovereignty, autonomy, and citizenship. In particular, the planetary scale of the environmental threats in the Anthropocene demands a reconfiguration of the international system (see Chap. 2). This does not mean that the current model of individual nation-­ states independently protecting their citizens should be abandoned; instead, protecting those who are usually considered outsiders is given equal importance to improving relations among insiders (Linklater 1990). In practice, an “ethical foreign policy” in the Anthropocene entails not harming non-citizens (including nonhumans) and not benefitting from such harm (Linklater 2002). Governance institutions, particularly those at the global or international level, should therefore be open to the possibility of radical transformation (see Chap. 16). They also need humility in acknowledging that “the minimisation of world risks depends on a local understanding of how local practices are inserted into, and bear upon, larger Earth systems processes and vice versa” (Eckersley 2017, 996). There is a tendency for global action, which is often negotiated at high-level diplomatic tables and sometimes over several years, to be detached from everyday people. The disengagement of global discourses from everyday experiences could reinforce universalising accounts of vulnerability, overshadowing the agency of vulnerable people (Dryzek and Pickering 2019). For these reasons, it is important for global initiatives to be flexible and relevant to local, everyday contexts so as not to compete with more urgent economic needs of the population. For example, global-level funding programmes for improving community-level adaptability and resilience have to be informed of governance issues, such as corruption and political patronage, and streamlined with national-level good governance initiatives and community-­level capacity-building. “Glocalising” action in the Anthropocene can bridge the gaps between universalism and particularism. The Anthropocene demands a departure from human-nature dualism—a modernist worldview embedded in human societies and governance institutions (Chandler 2019). In contrast, local or indigenous beliefs and practices are more independent of contemporary political ideologies (that are not short of climate change deniers) and free of modernist hubris. Aside from economic abatement measures, ecologically aligned beliefs and practices could offer insights on how to recalibrate the understanding of humanity’s true place within nature. Animist beliefs are deeply rooted in many societies in the Asia Pacific. They inform Hindu and Buddhist philosophies and are practised alongside

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Christianity and Islam (Houben 2003; Macdonald 2004). The animist belief in folk or traditional religion, more prevalent in the Asia Pacific than in any other region (Pew Research Center 2012), preserves indigenous ways of living in nature. This worldview sits in contrast to the modernist understanding of a division between human societies and the rest of the physical world. Animating nonhuman objects means turning them into subjects, recognising their agency, and therefore treating them as equals. Animism is one of the ways in which humans can relate to nature by ascribing nonhumans an essence similar to humans to create and maintain communication and continuity between them (Descola 2013). Indigenous ways of life in the animist traditions in the Asia-Pacific region embody human–nonhuman coexistence (see Box 15.3). They view nature as comprising of and shared by all beings. Meanwhile, the most polluted air and water in the world can be found in the cities and rivers of India. However, Hindu priests and spiritual leaders assign agency to the Ganges River and believe that its eventual decline in the physical world will not stop it from flowing in the subterranean and the metaphysical realms (Sachdeva 2016). The causes of some environmental issues, like those in India, are negligent industrial production and irresponsible political decisions rather than religious practices (Alley 2000). While there is no established causality between religion and ecological practices, the introduction of modern practices and infrastructure has disrupted the inherent environmental sustainability of indigenous livelihoods.

Box 15.3  Examples of Ecologically Aligned Values and Practices in the Asia Pacific 1. The Chewong people of the Malaysian rainforest see all beings and things with ruwai or consciousness, rationality, intentionality, and emotionality (Howell 2016). 2. The muyong practices of indigenous communities in the Cordillera Mountains of the Philippines promote sustainable forest management and biodiversity protection (Camacho et al. 2016). 3. The traditional landowners in Australia have used their land beyond hunting and gathering but managed it in a complex yet systematic and sustainable way (Gammage 2011). 4. The satoyama landscape in Japan has traditionally been a site of diverse ecosystem services, fostering a harmonious relationship between people and nature (Takeuchi 2010). 5. Local communities across the Pacific are combining traditional knowledge and practices with science and technology to bolster climate change adaptation and resilience (McLeod et al. 2019).

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A note of caution must be raised, however, when sourcing indigenous knowledge and practices. Incorporating them into measures that aim to address the challenges of the Anthropocene runs the risk of objectifying and instrumentalising indigenous agency (Chandler and Reid 2019). Exposing indigenous communities to intervention, even well-intentioned, might lead to unintentional ecological disruption “such as dispossession, deforestation, and landscape transformation” (Rubis and Theriault 2019, 16). Overcoming human-nature dualism does not need more of the same anthropocentric intervention into nature. Instead, the Anthropocene demands the independent flourishing of indigenous values and practices surrounding human-nature entanglements. Ecologically sound ontologies could inform global yet locally contextualised efforts to manage, adapt, and respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene, not through more modernist and anthropocentric intervention but through more consenting collaboration. As Schubert (1993, 252) has hoped, “if the humility to listen to the ‘underdeveloped’ can be found, valuable lessons for the West can be learned as well”. What works in the Asia-Pacific region will not necessarily be effective in other contexts. The Asian philosophy of nature or Asian eco-spirituality, for instance, may not be relevant to other regions despite its importance in building resilience regarding environmental impacts among some communities in the Asia Pacific (Hudson 2014). Therefore, it should not be interpreted as another solution or doctrine to be peddled as a better alternative to Western worldviews. Instead, it enables us to demystify human mastery and critique the anthropocentric values and practices that have brought about this new geological epoch. Furthermore, the problem-solving component of this critique should be more than a recognition of the multitude of experiences in the Anthropocene. It also involves the updating of collective knowledge and action in a way responsive to the challenges at present using indigenous ontologies and practices without instrumentalising, objectifying or, worse, decimating indigenous agency. Revitalising the action and knowledge appropriate for the Anthropocene has the ultimate objective of emancipation.

Conclusion The Asia Pacific is a site of paradox in the Anthropocene. It consists of fast-­ growing economies that are also top contributors to GHG emissions, such as of China and India, as well as less-developed economies already experiencing the immediate impacts of climate change, such as of Bangladesh and Nepal. Poor populations in small and developing islands are more vulnerable to

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environmental disasters than those living in the developed economies of Japan and Singapore. The region is also characterised by hierarchies and inequalities carried out in the political, social, and economic spheres of the countries within it. A critical lens magnifies these microcosms within the Asia Pacific’s place in nature and, more broadly, in the Anthropocene discourse. Regions, including the countries and social groups within them, have different histories, vulnerabilities, and agencies. How we respond in the Anthropocene will either deepen or close the trenches of these differences and inequalities. The first step towards empowering and emancipating the agency of vulnerable regions and marginalised groups (e.g. women, youth, indigenous communities, and refugees) is recognition of the multitude of experiences in the Anthropocene. It is with this recognition that global strategies can effectively address the unique requirements of each region and group while collectively managing, adapting, and responding to global environmental changes. Acknowledgement  This chapter is derived in part from “Situating the Asia Pacific in the Age of the Anthropocene”. Australian Journal of International Affairs 73(6), 2019, copyright Australian Institute of International Affairs, available online: https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10357718.2019.1657794.

Key Points 1. Political, economic, and cultural hegemonies born out of colonialism and industrialisation shape the experiences of inequalities and vulnerability in the Anthropocene. 2. The colonisation of Asia-Pacific countries stunted or delayed their capacity for climate change adaptability and resilience. 3. The Asia-Pacific region experiences the greatest pressure to reduce its emissions while ensuring that immediate economic and welfare needs are met. 4. Ecologically sound values and practices, such as those found in the Asia Pacific, could inform global yet locally contextualised efforts to manage, adapt, and respond to the challenges in the Anthropocene. 5. The Asia Pacific is a site of hierarchies and inequalities—a testament to the multitude of experiences in the Anthropocene.

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Key Questions 1. How did European colonisation shape the Asia-Pacific experience in the Anthropocene? 2. Why is the Asia Pacific a regional site for the multitude of experiences in the Anthropocene? 3. What can be done to prevent the instrumentalisation and decimation of indigenous agency? 4. Is a regional category sufficient to disrupt the universalising tendencies of the Anthropocene discourse?

Further Reading Berkes, F. 2018. Sacred Ecology 4th ed. New York and Oxon: Routledge. Elliott, L. 2004. The Global Politics of the Environment 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press. Lepori, M. 2015. There Is No Anthropocene: Climate Change, Species-Talk, and Political Economy. Telos 2015(172): 103–124. Plumwood, V. 2002. Decolonising Relationships with Nature. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 2: 7–30. Simangan, D. 2019. Situating the Asia Pacific in the Age of the Anthropocene. Australian Journal of International Affairs 73(6): 564–584.

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16 Challenges to Democracy in the Anthropocene Ayşem Mert

Introduction The Anthropocene has many definitions (see Chaps. 5 and 17). Regardless of their differences, these definitions point to simultaneously occurring, radical, disruptive changes in the previously stable conditions of the Earth’s geo-bio-­ chemical cycles. These changes are already observed to some degree, but scientific models predict that their intensity and frequency will increase in the next few decades. Another common point in these definitions is a recognition that the current global environmental governance (GEG) architecture, that is, the institutions devised to address environmental problems, have failed to tackle some of the most critical issues that will endanger most species inhabiting the Earth. Climate change has been the most notably debated of these issues, but we increasingly notice the latent and indirect effects of other, equally important global problems such as biodiversity, loss of habitat affecting our daily lives with the coronavirus pandemic in 2019/2020. Finally, many of these definitions converge on the idea that technological innovation alone is not and will not be adequate (neither in terms of scale nor in terms of speed) to undo the damage to Earth’s ecosystems, to restore ecological

A. Mert (*) Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_16

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balance, or to ensure the adaptation of most species and communities to the conditions of the Anthropocene. In order to live in a world of continuous ecosystemic change and catastrophes resulting from “pathological path-dependencies such as capitalist markets, excessive consumerism and fossil-fueled transport sectors” (Lövbrand 2019, 1305), contemporary lifestyles, ways of thinking, socio-economic practices, and political institutions will require reconsideration and transformation. This entails moving beyond Holocene institutions, modes of thought, or policy options—a transformation that is riddled with political contestation and struggle (Dryzek and Pickering 2019). As societies experience ongoing 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 (Pickering et al. fc. 2021). For students of international relations (IR), this means reconsidering conceptions of power, justice, and democracy, the last one of which is the subject of this chapter. To do this, the next section discusses the earlier IR debates on democracy, followed by two sections on what the challenges to democracy are and how democracy can be reimagined in the context of the Anthropocene.

Democracy in Global Governance and IR In IR, it is often assumed that people are represented by their governments, and the relation between states is considered an anarchy (see Chaps. 2 and 14). While the nature and the details of this anarchy have been debated since the 1990s (Wendt 1999a, b), democracy in world politics or even democracy between nation-states has not been focal concerns for the discipline until recently. In fact, most IR textbooks prior to 1989 do not even contain the word “democracy” (Archibugi and Held 2011, 433). This is largely because of the long-lasting influence of the two world wars and the Cold War in the formation of the discipline. However, as citizens, our understanding of international relations as well as democracy has changed drastically in the aftermath of the Cold War. With financial globalization, capital, goods, and, to a lesser extent, individuals and the labour force could move more freely than it was possible before. This has transformed how borders are conceived, the way cultures influence one another, and how much power and influence corporate actors were allowed to execute. Today, nation-states are no longer the main locus of politics. Large-scale transformations (e.g. the digital revolution and

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the ecological and financial crises) influence most societies. Various social, ethical, and economic challenges are regarded as global issues that require global and transnational policy responses. The socio-economic and political aspects of this change have been investigated particularly by emerging areas of transnational and global governance research, but they also influenced IR in general, introducing various new concepts and perspectives from political philosophy and democratic theory. The IR debates on democracy, Jonathan Kuyper (2016) notes, focus either on justice and equity (i.e. distribution of burdens and benefits by international institutions) or on democratic legitimacy beyond the nation-state (i.e. if and how it is possible to justify transnational rule-making and which actors are entitled to participate in making decisions, formulating global laws, regulations, and processes). At the theoretical level, the debates are lively. We can point to three main trends in IR literature regarding global democracy: the cosmopolitan (Held 2004a, b), deliberative (Dryzek 2011; Dryzek and Niemeyer 2010), and radical democratic (Mouffe 2000b, 2005) models. On the one hand, these models originate from debates in political philosophy. Each model addresses the classical contentions between liberal/individualist versus communitarian, representative versus participatory, and procedural versus deliberative ideal types of democracy differently. On the other hand, these models are linked to novel debates in global governance and the global civil society, as they ask questions about authority and legitimacy in world politics and investigate issues beyond peace, security, and economy. At the empirical level, however, the studies of democracy tend to be more limited. The focus is primarily on international organizations (the extent to which decision-making processes within international organizations are, or can be made, democratic) or on the influence of international politics on domestic democracies (Ribeiro-Hoffmann 2017). A recurrent academic debate about democracy beyond the nation-state discusses the extent to which state-centred democratic concepts are applicable to non-electoral, non-territorial modes of governance. In response to the increasingly hybrid, polycentric, and transnational nature of the global system, scholars reinterpret democratic concepts for global and transnational governance institutions (Nanz and Steffek 2004; Tallberg et  al. 2018; Wagenaar 2016), particularly in environmental governance (Bäckstrand 2006; Dingwerth 2007; Mert 2019b; Stevenson and Dryzek 2014). In fact, democracy and democratization have been central subjects of inquiry for global environmental governance scholars for at least three reasons. The first reason is historical. The emergence of participation as a modern democratic principle is closely linked with the rise of contemporary environmental values (Bernstein

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2001; Inglehart 1995; cf. Hays 2000: 22–27). Environmental activism and citizens’ demands for conservation have been one of the drivers of democratization in international organizations since the 1992 Rio ‘Earth’ Summit. In a 2004 article, Tony Hill, by then the coordinator of the United Nations Non-­ Governmental Liaison Service (UN NGLS), wrote that the first major change in UN–civil society relations was the result of the unforeseen civil society participation in Rio. Notably, Hill was not only referring to issues of environment and development but also referring to a general change in the quality and scope of participation that civil society began to enjoy within the UN in the aftermath of the summit. Secondly, global and hybrid governance mechanisms have been prevalent in global and transnational environmental policy making since the 2002 Johannesburg Summit. The democratic credentials of these novel governance mechanisms have been under scrutiny (see Bäckstrand 2012; Biermann et al. 2007; Mert 2015), and governance researchers were deeply divided about their legitimacy. Finally, environmental policy that is made at the global level needs to be implemented at lower levels and appropriated to local conditions. Since the early 2000s, it has been noted that there is a ‘democratic deficit’ in global governance, and the inequalities resulting from this deficit cause governance failures in coping with global crises (Bäckstrand 2006; Haas 2004; cf. Mouffe 2000a, b). Some prominent examples of such failures are the global climate regime, which is too slow for the needs of the most vulnerable to be addressed, and the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that aimed to boost developing economies through trade but ultimately crumbled in democratizing its decision-making. When the democratic legitimacy of global decisions is not ensured through participation and inclusion of a large majority of stakeholders, it is difficult to reach consensus about how to tackle large-­ scale policy problems. Even when international agreements are reached, they are often not properly implemented, which results in the so-called implementation deficit (Haas 2004). Environmental governance has been impacted both by democratic and by implementation deficits. In other words, the majority of the people influenced by large-scale ecological crises were not engaged in the decision-making processes. Moreover, the measures and policies accepted through international negotiations and agreements were not effectively implemented in local contexts. The dilemma between legitimacy and effectiveness of global environmental policies has been at the centre of GEG research from the start, placing democratization of global decision-­ making in the spotlight. Current debates about democratizing global governance institutions focus on accountability, transparency, and inclusion (stakeholder participation).

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Governance scholars, stakeholders, and policy practitioners assume that representation is impossible at a global scale and encourage these three principles as second-order democratizing principles and criteria. Transparency is the provision of relevant information to all stakeholders (and often the global public) and implies public insight in the work of governance institutions and processes. Without it, the public cannot be informed about democratic measures and qualities of institutions and processes and thus cannot hold decision-­ makers accountable. Accountability means that actions and decisions taken by public officials are subject to oversight and that they aim to achieve their stated objectives, protect or produce public goods, or contribute to better governance. Inclusion is about the participation of all parties affected by a policy decision to the making of that decision. Inclusion ensures that the decisions made are supported by all stakeholders, engendering legitimacy, while also contributing to the effectiveness and implementation of the policies at local levels. However, the GEG literature notes two significant factors that limit the effectiveness of these second-order democratic principles at an international level. First, accountability, transparency, and inclusion are applied as voluntary, non-binding principles at the global and transnational levels. The United Nations encourages voluntary reporting procedures to fulfil these criteria, but there is no oversight or disciplining mechanism in place. While these concepts originated in and are desirable at state-level democracies, when applied as non-binding ground rules, they fail to address the democratic deficit at higher levels where there is no shadow of hierarchy or the potential threat of government intervention (Héritier and Eckert 2008; Mert 2009). Secondly, the intense academic and corporate interest in transparency and accountability indicates that some of these measures have been institutionalized within the dominant system of rules. On paper, power imbalances between the global South and the global North can be hidden with the inclusion of a single, like-minded, or relatively less powerful Southern actor. It is more difficult to ensure the inclusion and participation of the most vulnerable groups, less represented demands, and the rights of non-national minorities. Transparency measures can be (and often are) put in place towards disclosing information with no behavioural change on the side of the governance institutions and the corporations, and accountability at the global level means accountability to a limited number of actors, often experts and the international development elite (Hart and Negri 2004). In other words, seemingly accountable, transparent, inclusive processes might not be strengthening the democratic quality of processes and institutions. They can even end up legitimizing and maintaining existing power imbalances, rather than democratizing these institutions.

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In sum, GEG/IR scholarship often assumes that states have a high threshold of democracy, while at larger scales “the threshold of acceptability should not be as high as a well-ordered society” (Keohane 2011, 100). Scholars tend to apply nation-level democratic principles to the international level mainly because states used to be main agents in international society in the previous centuries. This nation-level bias structures and limits the democratic imaginary, not only at transnational and global levels but also at the planetary level, as we enter into the Anthropocene. For instance, in a recent debate Robert Keohane (2016, 938) argued that “no global government could harness the emotional support of nationalism.” Without the necessary infrastructure for democracy at the global level, the best possibility would be maintaining some key democratic features, such as deliberation within civil society, accountability of elites to publics, and principled protection of minority rights. In an engaging debate focusing particularly on climate change, Kuyper and Dryzek (2016) problematized such a nominal understanding of democracy and provided a list of ways in which democratization could be deepened (see Box 16.1).

Box 16.1  Moves that Can Increase the Degree of Democracy in the System Source: Kuyper and Dryzek (2016) • the strengthening of accountability mechanisms, which can be seen as components of, rather than alternatives to, global democracy; • the proliferation of monitory mechanisms; • contemplation of ways to promote the deliberative aspects of international negotiations; • attention to the deliberative qualities of transnational governance networks, and the exclusions those networks often feature; • expansion of the range of discourses that are represented in decision-­making processes. So, for example, if transnational social movements succeed in getting international economic institutions to address questions of social justice in their decisions, that is a democratizing move—in which light it matters little that activists or organizations are not themselves formally accountable to anyone; • sortition initiatives that create a voice for ordinary citizens in governance. While the most relevant global experiment (World Wide Views) currently falls short of face-to-face deliberation of citizens from different countries, transnational citizen assemblies look a lot more feasible than elected bodies.

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The list can be extended to address other issues of importance and relevance. Some of the issues that must be raised in contemporary governance include the protection of whistle-blowers, the limitations of voluntary reporting as accountability mechanisms, emergent inspection panels (such as that of the World Bank), sectoral transparency initiatives (e.g. Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative), and the efficiency and accountability of changes made in standardization and labelling practices. Questions about increasing the visibility and say of the underrepresented and amplifying the voices of the subaltern and the marginalized are also critical. Some of these questions are raised in the debates on democratic legitimacy in global governance institutions (Bäckstrand and Söderbaum 2018; Macdonald and Macdonald 2017; Uhlin 2019).

Challenges for Democracy in the Anthropocene There is no inherent reason for democracy in the Anthropocene to be based on nation-state principles. At the national level, today’s liberal democracies have mostly institutionalized into short electoral cycles and institutions that are checked by transparency and accountability measures. These, Robyn Eckersley (2017, 991) points out, are not suitable for managing long-term periods of high risk: Elected representatives are prone to ignore their responsibility for trans-­ boundary or trans-temporal harm produced by their decisions by hiding behind their exclusive political responsibility to existing citizens who authorize their political authority, in the same way that the directors of corporations are able to hide behind their responsibility to their shareholders.

Electoral representation at the global level, that is, drawing the vote of each individual into a single decision about how the world should be governed, is neither desirable nor necessarily democratic. Our knowledge of the world is based on our experience of it. To generalize life-and-death decisions on the basis of such limited experience is at best problematic. However, discursive representation in the public domain and international fora can be a significantly democratic practice, since “the Anthropocene is not anthropocentric in the narrow sense of treating the world as a storehouse of resources for human interests, or even in the somewhat broader sense of assuming that the only perspectives that should count politics are human perspectives” (Purdy 2015: 50). Deliberative democracy scholars have argued for a long time now that

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ruling over ourselves does not necessarily entail electing representatives— “democracy can entail the representation of discourses as well as persons of groups” (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008, 481). Furthermore, as borders and geographies are changing with climate change, the continuity of nation-state principles cannot simply be assumed. This is not the first time that our perceptions borders and legitimacy within those borders are changing. History has shown that both are changeable, with implications on political systems. In its historical development as a regime, democracy has been fundamentally transformed once before, when it was being applied to a new political scale. During the American and French revolutions, the principles of an ancient, small-scale regime were reinterpreted and significantly transformed to suit the needs of larger nation-states, with an extensive demos. To do this, representation, which was previously a monarchic tradition, was grafted into the democratic imaginary. This was unthinkable until then: for Aristotle, elections belonged to the logic of oligarchy; for Montesquieu and Rousseau, they were practices of aristocracy. Yet, elections began to serve the purpose of deciding who gets the office, generating representative councils, and becoming a symbol of accountability in political systems. Today, every democratic nation-state employs representation in its practice of democratic rule. This was the first scalar revolution in the history of democracy. Contemporary representative democracies have advanced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marked not only by the steam engine, the industrial revolution, and the emergence of an industrial working class (Malm 2016) but also by an unforeseen amount of fossil fuels being used to run economies (Mitchell 2011) and the influence of coal and oil lobbies on national governments. How can we, then, reimagine the demos for the Anthropocene? Let us begin with reconsidering the biases originating from nation-state democratic imaginaries we are accustomed to. If the Anthropocene is to be imagined as a planetary condition, everyone in the world constitutes the demos. However, this demos and its articulations, capabilities, limitations, and so on vary across multiple societies. The underlying universalism runs the risk of glossing over class, gender, and ethnic dimensions, and past injustices. This assumption has been challenged by critical scholars, who seek to understand the concept of the Anthropocene “as a socially and culturally bounded object with many possible meanings and political trajectories” (Lövbrand et al. 2015, 212). In IR, the universalistic assumption of a global demos is often regarded as a problem: for instance, Sofia Näsström (2010, 349) questions the possibility of democratizing global governance institutions, when “there is not yet a

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people or demos on the global level to undertake this task,” for this would entail “speak[ing] for the people by constructing a theory without the people.” This is, however, a contested argument for at least three reasons: first, as Robert Dahl (1989, 3) notes, advocates of democracy have always presupposed that ‘a people’ already exists, as a fact, a creation of history; even when the accuracy of this argument is questionable. Secondly, there have been numerous examples of extraordinarily diverse and large populations organizing around democratic regimes, such as the USA, Brazil, and India. Thirdly, from a normative viewpoint, defining demos always concerns bias and exclusion. If there is any way of describing ‘a people’ without exclusion, this would include all of the planet’s population, which the Anthropocene makes possible. Although the habitual questions and solutions of democratic theory are less pertinent at the global level, a loosely connected but largely unorganized demos already exists for the purposes of a discourse on the democratization of planetary governance. This demos takes action, too: Think, for instance, about the climate marches that take place in hundreds of cities across the globe or the protestors gathering around the intergovernmental negotiations on climate change, various military alliances, global trade, and finance summits. Such transnational social movements have been around since the early 1990s, especially the Rio ‘Earth’ Summit, and they indicate the enhanced quality of solidarity (and empathy) across borders, compared to the national or classbased solidarity formed in earlier times. Yet, challenges remain: scholars argue that reimagining the demos for the Anthropocene requires the inclusion of the future generations as well as non-­ human agents and ecosystems (see, for instance, Chakrabarty 2009; Dryzek and Pickering 2019). Moreover, humans have transformed the geo-bio-­ chemical systems of the planet to such a degree that these are no longer stable cycles and it is no longer possible to find a steady state to return to or objective reference points to guide collective action. In the Anthropocene, democracy requires to be reinterpreted once again. A second scalar revolution is to fundamentally transform the practice and conception of democracy for the planet. The Anthropocene threatens and potentially invigorates the practice of democratic governance at once. It forces us to think innovatively about democracy. Neither elections and representations, nor global level principles of accountability, transparency, and inclusion can be the solution to the challenges of a more-than-human demos (cf. Purdy 2015, 49–50). A good first step in reimagining democracy for the Anthropocene is therefore to deconstruct current traditions and learn from peripheral and marginalized knowledge-­bases and the non-human environment (Box 16.2).

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Box 16.2  Asking New Questions: Whither Democracy in a Time of Endings? The disasters we are experiencing and anticipating in the times of ecological and climate crises bring with them feelings of loss, trauma, grief, and fear; they result in dystopian imageries and alarmist political demands. The 2018 wildfires in Sweden and the 2019 brushfires in the USA and Australia revealed that rich countries and neighbourhoods are equally susceptible to disasters. Furthermore, there are deep inequalities within these communities and countries, as one can see in their disaster readiness and response. Both the global North and the global South are influenced by ecological disasters; think, for instance, of the 2017 South Asian floods, the repeating heatwaves in the Middle East, and the tropical cyclones of early 2020. The concerns, worries, fears, and griefs are further multiplied by the coronavirus pandemic which affected almost everyone on the planet, albeit very differently in different countries, socio-economic classes, and so on. Different communities respond differently to the loss and grief that results from crises. What needs to be done is to scrutinize the existing institutions and the various conflicting, contested ideals that are inherent to their practices in addressing ecological disasters. The university, party politics, and even awards (from the Nobel Peace Prize to the Nordic Council’s 2019 Environment Prize famously rejected by Greta Thunberg) respond to disasters around us in various modernistic ways. We need to ask questions starting with: Which ideals are in fact relevant in the Anthropocene? What cannot be taken with us because it is too heavy, too obstructive? Alternatively, how can we acknowledge the loss and seek ways of addressing absence? To reach out in the dark what might not be hopeful and useful, but necessary. What are meaningful resistance practices in response to the modernist capitalist framings of disasters ranging from disaster capitalism to the financialization of loss and grief? What kind of politics can be pursued in the face of potential injustices that are concealed in the existing narratives of climate disasters? Finally, employing Dougald Hine’s (fc. 2021) list of required actions in the face of end of times, how do we • salvage the good that we have a chance of taking with us? • mourn the good that we do not get to take with us—and tell its stories, so that the stories can come with us, because those stories may turn out to be seeds? • notice those things that were never as good as we told each other they were—and the chance that we are being given to leave these things behind? • look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story, the things that have been marked as obsolete or anachronistic that may turn out to make a difference?

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Another critical challenge the Anthropocene poses to contemporary imaginaries of democracy is that of scale. The scale of ecological crises today is increasingly recognized as planetary (e.g. Biermann et al. 2012; Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015), whereas there is no stable political system in place to address these challenges at the corresponding scale of governance. The severity of environmental problems and the lack of an immediate body to tackle these challenges trigger imaginaries that seek and promise swift solutions to the impending instability. As a result, technocratic and authoritarian imaginaries are often highlighted as potential solutions to the ecological crises (see Purdy 2015 for a discussion) in the absence of a global democratic imaginary for the Anthropocene. Furthermore, contemporary governing structures have emerged in the steady conditions of the Holocene, where decision-making could take a long time (Galaz 2019). If they are to protect citizens and the public good, prepare for potential calamities, and help re-/build resilient communities in the times of the Anthropocene, these structures, institutions, and practices will have to change drastically. The greatest threat to democracy will be the conditions under which most societies will live in the Anthropocene and how they will respond to these circumstances. Extreme climatic change and the impossibility of predicting the conditions of the near future will bring with them feelings of deep uncertainty and insecurity. These feelings often translate into othering, polarization, and a desire for faster and more decisive action, often associated with authoritarianism. This is because a situation where order itself becomes impossible represents much more than the “contingency found in all empirical reality: it is the very definition of the state of nature” (Laclau 1990, 70). In such cases, establishing order becomes urgent and important, whereas the content of that order is less significant. Ensuring survival takes precedence over the democratic quality of the decisions made. By the time most of humanity experiences the ecological crisis as radical disorder, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to argue for democratization. It is critical to demand deeply democratic procedures to be put in place and radically democratic regimes to be established at all levels before this happens. It is not yet clear how disruptive the coronavirus pandemic and the policy responses to it will be on our socio-economic systems. It is already clear, however, that both lives and livelihoods are at stake, and increasingly, the food, agriculture, economic, and national health systems show signs of break down. Learning from democratic environmental policy institutions dating as early as the thirteenth-century Dutch polders and water boards (waterschappen) is of critical importance to find new, effective, and democratic institutions and practices for the Anthropocene.

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Reimagining Democracy for the Anthropocene What kind of a democracy, then, could anticipate, mitigate, and adapt to the transformations invoked by the Anthropocene, if democracy must be reinterpreted and reimagined? It is possible to juxtapose some of the conditions emerging from the earlier discussion with some of the already existing tools at the disposal of social sciences, humanities, and legal studies. This would help co-construct a new democratic imaginary for the coming era. The first instrument of critical value is deconstruction, which can be used to scrutinize existing practices of democracy and delineate democratic principles and institutions that respond to the uncertain conditions of the Anthropocene. This requires questioning growth-oriented paradigms including sustainable development and the liberal compromise that seemingly reconciles social, economic, and ecological demands. It follows that governance institutions that have failed in fulfilling their policy functions or that no longer address them are phased out (exnovated) and replaced by novel practices and institutions. Even after obsolete institutions are phased out, new institutions should only be endorsed if they have a clear purpose and a time limit to fulfil their policy goals. This would reduce the number of counterproductive institutions, provide more space and resources for convivial practices, and promulgate innovative democratic governance practices (for a more radical approach, see Illich 1971). Secondly, living in the Anthropocene requires institutions that not only can anticipate changes in ecological states but also notice and accept errors in past policy decisions (Mert 2019b), learn from past failures, and change course in view of these findings (Dryzek and Pickering 2019). This institutional self-scrutiny is called reflexivity and must be a central part of the democratic processes in the Anthropocene. New institutions of the Anthropocene should critically analyse the results of past decisions and policies from the viewpoint of socio-ecological change and must be able to reform themselves continuously. This is difficult, however, since institutions tend to perpetuate themselves, produce their own gatekeepers, and develop strategies to maintain control (Illich 1971). Overcoming this requires deliberation, an ongoing public debate on how to address the socio-ecological problems (Dryzek and Pickering 2019). Furthermore, it requires a new understanding of democratic accountability and political success. Today’s representative democracies hold public officials accountable only in the next election cycle. The unpredictability of anthropocenic change demands that politicians notice and swiftly change direction when a policy fails to address a crisis. Accepting the

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imperfection of policy, backtracking, and adapting it to new conditions in open public deliberation can take place with a new framing and novel practices of policy-making and evaluation. Some of these practices are present in adaptive governance experiments, whereas others, such as new conceptions of a healthy policy cycle or a successful politician, will have to be invented. A third relevant tool emerges in the efforts to democratize scientific knowledge production: recently, we have seen an erosion in the public trust in techno-scientific enterprise, to a large extent because of the scientific elites’ failure to recognize the lay publics’ “capacity for independent, different collective meaning-making, and corresponding knowledge rooted in different social needs, visions and priorities” (Wynne 2007, 101). It is of crucial significance to negotiate, co-construct, and bridge the divide between the episteme of local communities, indigenous peoples, techno-scientific knowledge hubs, and the reflexive contributions of humanities, fine arts, and social sciences. Transdisciplinary knowledge co-production with stakeholders and reflexive knowledge dissemination that pays clear attention to the limitations of research is a necessary step for democratizing knowledge in the Anthropocene (also see Eckersley 2017). Finally, we should consider democratic experimentation as a path to invent ways to include non-human actants that cannot represent themselves. For instance, the non-human environment increasingly has been given rights and legal persona in the last decade (e.g. Whanganui and Ganges rivers, Pachamama). Non-human entities, for example, multi-national corporations, have been treated as legal persons for a long time. Providing parts of non-­ human nature with similar legal rights potentially counterbalances some of these issues. Participation of underrepresented groups in global environmental governance is replete with problems such as instrumentalization and green-­washing. However, there are also new practices that involve transfer of decision-making power to the affected citizens. These practices can and should be transferred to other levels of governance. The goal of democratic transfer, however, is neither problem-solving by designing the most effective policy options, nor is it rebranding the traditional representative institutional model with a façade of bottom-up, civic innovation. As Henk Wagenaar (2016, 114) aptly puts it, democratic transfer entails designing institutions that “incorporate the deliberative, non-monetized practices of collective problem solving that have emerged in civil society” (also see Avritzer 2002). New, radical, emergent practices in the margins of contemporary democratic imaginary should be reconsidered and evaluated carefully and reflexively before being taken up at a planetary scale. It can also be fruitful to return

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to the earlier principles and practices of direct democracy and innovatively rethink ways to bring back deliberation, meaningful participation, and possibly sortition. If some of these can be revived and tried at different platforms, a repertoire of democratic experiments would develop, which can then be employed by the less powerful, the less represented, and/or the more vulnerable. However, it is important to note that those already affected by climate change have a different kind of agency than traditional stakeholders. Climate refugees who lost their livelihoods and populations of low-lying small islands who increasingly are/have been deprived of the places they live, know, and co-produce have agency that originates in their loss and sentiments of “planetary justice” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019).

Conclusion It is not certain whether democratic practices and institutions will be a part of the Anthropocene governance architecture. The possibility of scaling democracy up for the purposes of governance in the Anthropocene involves understanding competing imaginaries on how governance should take place in the Anthropocene. Only some of these narratives imagine democratic practices to be central to political systems of the Anthropocene. To understand the Anthropocene as a new scale would also require us to rethink existing democratic practices and an opportunity to reconstruct novel democratic imaginaries. Exercise 1: An investigation of democratic scale in the context of the Anthropocene What state-level democratic practices can you identify in global governance today? (See Mert 2019b) If you were to imagine a democracy in the Anthropocene that is divorced from the preconceived notions of nation-state democratic experiences of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what would it look like? What kind of citizens and agents would emerge and interact with the governance architecture, and at what scale? What kind of a democratic imaginary would be possible? If we understand the Anthropocene as a new scale, what kind of democracy could address its tensions?

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Exercise 2: A proverbial to-do list for thinking about democracy in the Anthropocene How to salvage the good which can be saved…  •  Make a list of the most desirable elements of current democratic politics.  • Think about your political life and discuss what other democratic elements would be desirable for your meaningful participation to decisions about your environment. How to mourn the good which cannot be saved…   • Consider the already existing information about the socio-ecological transformations the world, and your community, will experience in the next few decades. What democratic practices can be useful to adapt to the emergent realities? Which democratic practices are obsolete or no longer possible and useful?   •  Which institutions have already fulfilled their goals and should be phased out?   • Which ones are no longer likely to fulfil their goals and should be phased out? Discuss how the disappearing dimensions of democratic politics can be mourned, remembered, and given a place in the future imaginaries. How to walk away from things which were never as good as we told each other they were…   • Identify what counterproductive democratic practices are present in your political life.   • Discuss how they can be exnovated or phased out. How to look for the dropped threads from earlier in the story…   • Think of examples from the histories of your community, city, culture, and so on. Are there democratic practices that are promising, worth bringing back, or at least discussing in the context of the Anthropocene?

Key Points 1. Instability, uncertainty, and complexity of the Anthropocene challenge democratic governance in many ways. 2. Historically, democracy has been reinvented and reimagined in various ways to fit the necessities of new kinds of societal organizations. It can be reinvented again for contemporary societies that need to change in order to address the challenges of the Anthropocene. 3. Non-human nature and future generations are central to reconsidering our ideas of humanity, agency, self, and other. 4. Through deconstruction, through democratic and institutional innovation/exnovation, and by building reflexive global and international institutions, many of the democratic challenges in the Anthropocene can be addressed.

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Key Questions 1 . Can a democratic global governance be achieved in the Anthropocene? 2. Why is IR’s state-centrism problematic for democratizing governance institutions in the context of the Anthropocene? 3. How can non-human species and future generations be included in democratic considerations in the context of the Anthropocene? 4. What are the biggest threats to democracy in the Anthropocene? 5. How can scientific information about socio-ecological change in the Anthropocene be produced more democratically?

Further Reading Bai, X., van der Leeuw, S. O. Brien, K. et al. 2016. Plausible and Desirable Futures in the Anthropocene: A New Research Agenda. Global Environmental Change 39: 351–362. Biermann, F. 2014. Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Brondizio, E.  S. et  al. 2016. Re-conceptualizing the Anthropocene: A Call for Collaboration. Global Environmental Change 39: 318–327. Niemeyer, S. 2014. A Defense of (Deliberative) Democracy in the Anthropocene. Ethical Perspectives 21(1): 15–45. Scholte, J.  A. 2002. Civil Society and Democracy in Global Governance. Global Governance 8(3): 281–304.

References Archibugi, D., and Held, D. 2011. Cosmopolitan Democracy: Paths and Agents. Ethics & International Affairs 25(4): 433–461. Avritzer, L. 2002. Democracy and the Public Space in Latin America. Princeton University Press. Bäckstrand, K. 2006. Democratizing Global Environmental Governance? Stakeholder Democracy After the World Summit on Sustainable Development. European Journal of International Relations 12(4): 467–498. Bäckstrand, K. 2012. Are Partnerships for Sustainable Development Democratic and Legitimate? In P. H. Pattberg, Biermann, F., Chan, S. and Mert, A. (eds) Public-­ Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Emergence, Influence and Legitimacy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 165–181.

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Bäckstrand, K., and Söderbaum, F. 2018. Legitimation and Delegitimation in Global Governance: Discursive, Institutional, Behavioral. In J.  Tallberg, Bäckstrand, K. and Scholte, J. A. (eds) Legitimacy in global governance: Sources, processes, and consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 101–118. Bernstein, S. 2001. The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism. New  York: Columbia University Press. Biermann, F., Pattberg, P. H., Chan, M., and Mert, A. 2007. Partnerships for sustainable development. An appraisal framework. Global Governance Working Paper 31. The Global Governance Project. Biermann, F., Abbot, K., Andresen, St., Bäckstrand, K., Bernstein, St., Betsill, M., Bulkeley, H. et al. 2012. Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth System Governance. Science 335(6074): 1306–1307. Chakrabarty, D. 2009. The climate of history: Four theses. Critical inquiry 35(2): 197–222. Dahl, R. A. 1989. Democracy and Its Critics. Yale University Press. Dingwerth, K. 2007. The New Transnationalism: Transnational Governance and Democratic Legitimacy. Luxemburg: Springer. Dryzek, J.  S. 2011. Global Democratization: Soup, Society or System?  Ethics and International Affairs 25(2): 211–234. Dryzek, J. S. and Niemeyer, S. 2008. Discursive Representation. American Political Science Review 102: 481–493. Dryzek, J.  S. and Niemeyer, S. 2010. Foundations and Frontiers of Deliberative Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dryzek, J. S. and Pickering, J. 2019. The Politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckersley, R. 2017. Geopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene. Political Studies 65(4): 983–999. Galaz, V. 2019. Time and Politics in the Anthropocene: Too Fast, too Slow. In F. Biermann, and Bäckstrand, K. (eds) Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 109–128. Haas, P. M. 2004. Addressing the Gobal Governance Deficit. Global Environmental Politics 4(4): 1–15. Hart, M. and Negri, A. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. NY: Penguin Books. Hays, S. P. 2000. A History of Environmental Politics Since 1945. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Held, D. 2004a. Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Held, D. 2004b. Democratic Accountability and Political Effectiveness from a Cosmopolitan Perspective. Government and Opposition 39(2): 364–391. Héritier, A. and Eckert, S. 2008. New Modes of Governance in the Shadow of Hierarchy: Self-regulation by Industry in Europe. Journal of Public Policy 28(1): 113–138.

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Nanz, P. and Steffek, J. 2004. Global Governance, Participation and the Public Sphere. Government and Opposition 39(2): 314–335. Näsström, S. 2010. Democracy Counts: Problems of Equality in Transnational Democracy. In C.  Jonsson and Tallberg, J. (eds)  Transnational Actors in Global Governance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 197–217. Pickering, J., Hickmann, T., Bäckstrand, K. Kalfigianni, A., Bloomfield, M., Mert, A., Lo, A.Y. and Ransan-Cooper, H. forthcoming 2021. Democratic Transformations in Earth System Governance. Earth System Governance. Purdy, J. 2015. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ribeiro-Hoffmann, A. 2017. Democracy in World Politics. Retrieved from: https:// www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-­9 780199743292/ obo-­9780199743292-­0058.xml [accessed 14 February 2021]. Rockström, J., et  al. 2009. A Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Nature 461: 472–475. Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S.  E. et  al. 2015. Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet. Science 347(6223): 1259855. Stevenson, H. and Dryzek, J.S. 2012. The Legitimacy of Multilateral Climate Governance: A Deliberative Democratic Approach. Critical Policy Studies 6(1): 1–18. Stevenson, H. and Dryzek, J.  S. 2014. Democratizing Global Climate Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tallberg, J. Bäckstrand, K., and Scholte, J. A. (eds) 2018. Legitimacy in global governance: Sources, processes, and consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uhlin, A. 2019. Legitimacy Struggles in Global Governance: Legitimation and Delegitimation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. SAGE Open 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019870203. Wagenaar, H. 2016. Democratic Transfer: Everyday Neoliberalism, Hegemony and the Prospects for Democratic Renewal. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Wendt, A. 1999a. Anarchy is what States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Politics. International Organization 462(2): 391–425. Wendt, A. 1999b. Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wynne, B. 2007. Public Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mistake. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 1(1): 99–110.

17 Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene: Challenges, Approaches and Critical Perspectives Basil Bornemann

Introduction According to leading voices in academia, the rise of the Anthropocene implies fundamental changes in virtually all spheres of society. In view of “the profound and possibly irreversible transformations of the earth’s climate, oceans, terrestrial systems, and species,” write Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand in the introduction to their prominently featured anthology Anthropocene Encounters, we may not be able to “just carry on with politics as usual,” but might be prompted to adapt our ways of dealing with the world, but also our thinking about nature, the environment, society, politics and governance, to the realities and challenges of the new era (Biermann and Lövbrand 2019, 2). In line with these transformations in politics and governance, the advent of the Anthropocene puts into question existing forms of knowing and doing environmental governance (see Schlosberg 2016; Pattberg and Zelli 2016). This may seem counterintuitive at first sight, since environmental governance is essentially about solving those environmental problems that make us now talk about the Anthropocene. However, being embedded in institutions and ideas of the Holocene, existing forms and practices of environmental governance (at different levels) are said to have allowed, if not contributed to, the birth of the Anthropocene and can therefore no longer be considered an

B. Bornemann (*) Sustainability Research Group, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_17

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adequate response to the new reality it implies (Dryzek and Pickering 2019; Davies 2016). With this chapter, I aim to shed more light on these calls for a renewal of environmental governance in the Anthropocene. I will do so by pointing to basic assumptions as well as key arguments and understandings promoted in the discussion about an Anthropocene-fitting environmental governance. To this end, I reconstruct how the Anthropocene is said to challenge existing forms of Holocene environmental governance (see also Box 17.1). Subsequently, an overview of the various goals and means of Anthropocene governance is given, and two particularly prominent approaches, “Earth System Governance” (see Box 17.2) and “Ecological Reflexivity” (see Box 17.3), are presented in more detail. Based on a critical perspective, I point to two avenues for developing the concept.

Anthropocene Challenges to Environmental Governance Environmental governance in a broad sense involves “all kinds of measure deliberately taken to prevent, reduce and/or mitigate harmful effects on the environment” (Driessen et al. 2012, 144). Diverse in form, almost ubiquitous in its diffusion and dynamic over time, environmental governance encompasses various arrangements, involving multiple actors and practices at different levels—from inter- and transnational organizations and regimes to national policies and laws and local decision-making processes (Lemos and Agrawal 2006)—that are oriented towards steering, shaping and coordinating human access to, use of and impacts on the environment (Challies and Newig 2019). Environmental governance has always been undergoing changes, for example, in terms of basic goals and strategies of governance—from state-centred approaches to hierarchical control to forms of market-based coordination or networks involving all kinds of actors from different sectors (Durant et  al. 2017). However, the advent of the Anthropocene is seen as a significant ontological shift that fundamentally challenges the ways we know and do environmental governance, which have emerged out of and proven to be more or less functional in the Holocene (see Box 17.1).

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Box 17.1  Holocene Governance “Holocene governance” is a concept that refers to a certain governance constellation characteristic for the era of the Holocene, that is, the era in Earth history that precedes the Anthropocene. The underlying premise is that the Holocene marks an era of relative ecological stability that allowed the creation of political and economic institutions that “could generally take for granted the presence of the non-human world and the ecological systems in which human societies are embedded” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 24). Typical Holocene institutions are the sovereign nation state, the capitalist economy or international organizations. These institutions are considered quite successful in dealing with local resource scarcity and ecological challenges (Ostrom 1990), as well as in managing several (global) challenges, such as global health, war or global communication. However, these institutions are also complicit in destabilizing the Holocene Earth system and transforming it into the more dynamic and uncertain Anthropocene. Holocene governance has brought about the social and economic practices that are now bringing the Holocene to an end. For example, states typically prioritize economic growth (which serves their own reproduction) over ecological concerns and sovereignty (which is part of their fundamental identity) over global collective action. Especially beyond the local level, Holocene governance eventually proved adept at ignoring ecological feedbacks from a changing Earth system (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 24). In addition to being poorly equipped to respond to understanding the challenges of the Anthropocene, Holocene governance is also reluctant to accommodate to these challenges due to a problematic path dependency: “Solidified by their successes in restricting violent conflicts, securing economic growth, and achieving a measure of social justice, as well as enabling an expanding sphere of human rights and democracy,” Holocene institutions tend to reproduce themselves, including their pathological effects, and obstruct the development of alternatives (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 33).

Aware of the risk of simplification, I identify four types of Anthropocene challenges to environmental governance. They relate to spatial, temporal, substantive and social meaning dimensions that underlie all social phenomena (Luhmann 1997, 1136).

Challenges in Spatial Terms Existing ways of knowing and doing environmental governance have been largely based on a notion of territorially defined environmental problems to be addressed in spatially fitting governance arrangements (Young 2003). While environmental governance has been particularly successful in dealing with local environmental problems (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 24; Ostrom 1990), the transboundary nature of many environmental problems, such as

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air or water pollution, has become a raison d’être for the rise of environmental governance beyond the nation state (Durant et al. 2017). In addition to local, regional and national problems, environmental governance in the last 30 years has increasingly focused on international environmental problems (Biermann and Pattberg 2008). However, the growing importance of global problems and their treatment in global governance arrangements can be interpreted as indication of a qualitative shift into a new “Anthropocenic” constellation marked by truly “planetary problems” (Young 2017, 3). The Anthropocene, we are told, is not limited to certain places, but is inevitable and literally everywhere (Dryzek and Pickering 2019). Connecting and permeating all places and spaces (Hamilton 2015), there is no outside of the Anthropocene on planet Earth (Davies 2016). All problems are manifestations of the Anthropocene and are entangled in its planetary framework, demarcated and defined by “planetary boundaries” (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015). In terms of governance, this planetary character of the Anthropocene further undermines the governing capacities of national governments, but also raises the question of whether the United Nations system of global and multi-­ level governance is still appropriate (Biermann and Lövbrand 2019, 10; Biermann 2014b). In order to cope with the new planetary dimension of the Anthropocene, an equally planetary orientation in governance must be considered: new planetary knowledge about the “planetary machinery” is called for and promoted (Lövbrand et al. 2009), and new approaches to “planetary stewardship” (Steffen et al. 2011) capable of responding to the spatially pervasive Anthropocene are needed.

Challenges in Temporal Terms Environmental governance is based on the notion that environmental problems can basically be solved, if not eliminated. While this assumed temporality has already been challenged by the observation of increasingly persistent problems (Schuitmaker 2012), it becomes fundamentally problematic in the Anthropocene. Being total in time (Davies 2016), the Anthropocene represents a “chronic condition, a constant presence” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 11). This implies that any future, and hence any future problems, are exposed to this new environmental reality (Schlosberg 2016, 195), which is, somewhat paradoxically, marked by a considerable dynamism, including instability and potential irreversible state shifts (Dryzek 2016a, 541). This new

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temporality that merges “deep time” with “ultra-speed” (Galaz 2019) is a challenge to environmental governance. Traditionally, environmental governance is based on scientific expertise, which draws on knowledge and norms acquired by analysing past events (Schlosberg 2016, 196). In the Anthropocene, this model of managing the past by restoring or preserving it has arguably come to an end (Schlosberg 2016, 197). Not only does the fundamental uncertainty of the Anthropocene challenge the notion of governance based on present and past evidence. Also, past or present environments can no longer function as convincing reference points for orienting problem-solving. In a newly climate-changed space, “[n]othing is like it was, and it will only be more so in the future” (Schlosberg 2016, 196). This temporal rationale implies anticipation and prevention of potentially catastrophic shifts through, for instance, by applying foresight methods (Dryzek 2016b; see also Box 17.3). Furthermore, working with a dynamic and unstable Earth system requires transformation processes of governance as such, namely the overcoming Holocene path dependencies that tend to fix the future on the basis of what was supposedly successful in the past (Dryzek 2016a, 535; see also Box 17.1). This new temporality sheds light on the temporal inconsistencies between the existing governance procedures of the Holocene on the one hand and the deep geological time horizons and ultra-­ speed of techno-digital algorithms on the other hand (Galaz 2019)—and calls for new forms of time-oriented governance that integrate and shape various temporal parameters of social change, such as duration, speed and dynamics (Bornemann and Strassheim 2019).

Challenges in Substantive Terms The Anthropocene furthermore challenges the substantive basis and objective scope of environmental governance. Traditionally, environmental governance is concerned with the regulation of adverse human impacts on specific sectors, such as air, water and soil. In the context of a highly differentiated policy and governance system, the focus is on narrowly defined environmental problems, which are often analysed and framed on the basis of highly specialized scientific and administrative expertise (Paehlke and Torgerson 1990). Even if reflective opening and integrative counter-movements can be observed for some years now in the policy system, manifesting themselves through cross-­ cutting policy strategies (Bornemann 2016), the practice of sectoral environmental problem-solving and regulation still dominates. This constantly

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reproduces a thematically and institutionally fragmented landscape of environmental governance, which is also reflected in (and stabilized by) a thematically fragmented field of environmental governance research (Dauvergne and Clapp 2016). Given its inescapable and ubiquitous presence, the Anthropocene is a challenge to the sectoralized knowing and doing of environmental governance. In the Anthropocene, writes Simon Dalby, “it is not any single environmental concern that matters,” but “the cumulative totality of these concerns, which are beginning to interact in all sorts of unpredictable synergies” (Dalby 2014, 4). Given the ever more interrelated nature of geological, physical, biological and social subsystems forming an integrated Earth system (Castree 2019), the sectoralized perspective and approach to governance becomes dysfunctional. In the Anthropocene, the challenge of governance no longer refers to the design and implementation of governing arrangements that are capable of dealing with specific manifestations of ecological degradation. Rather, it extends to an integrative endeavour of addressing all kinds of interrelated (nexus) problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, food security, water scarcity, resource conflicts, forced migration and so on—that together make up for the multiple crises of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al. 2011). Given that in the Anthropocene “the environment as a simple category of concern” is to be transcended (Dalby 2014, 4), it is even said that environmental governance as such becomes obsolete and dissolves into a more comprehensive frame of Anthropocene governance (Dryzek and Pickering 2019).

Challenges in Social Terms The debate on environmental governance, especially since its expansion beyond the boundaries of the state, has long recognized that environmental problems affect a large number of actors and that these actors should therefore be involved in their solution (see Chap. 16). These social interdependencies are reinforced and even increased by the Anthropocene condition, as, for example, local communities jointly produce global environmental changes or influence each other through increasingly tele-coupled systems (Liu et  al. 2018). In addition to the intensification of social relations, the Anthropocene is also associated with a categorical shift in the understanding of the social itself. In the Holocene, the social and the natural are considered as separate spheres. Nature is conceived as an external, stable, yet passive backdrop for social interactions, such as governance and politics (Biermann and Lövbrand 2019, 2). This notion becomes inadequate in the Anthropocene when human

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influences have started to drive the entire Earth system, overcoming the separation between human and nature (Dryzek 2016a, 535). Under these conditions, nature is always already social and, vice versa, the social is naturalized (Wapner 2014). Attempts at governing the environment do no longer target a stable and objective nature, but constellations of “social natures”: natures that are constantly made and interpreted in social interactions (Castree 2019). Given their complexity, ambiguity and contestedness, the shaping of social natures requires new forms of inclusive governance that consider the interpretations and concerns by a wide variety of actors as the basis of governing attempts (Lövbrand et al. 2015; Biermann et al. 2016). The deep interdependence of nature and the social in the Anthropocene also leads to a rethinking of the social power bases of (environmental) governance. Arguing that existing forms of human power are inadequate in times “when social natures are brutally rebounding on humanity with uncontrollable power” (Burke and Fishel 2019, 88), Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel plead for a new understanding of “thing-system power.” Here, power functions in assemblages “across entangled domains of institutions, ecologies and things that are connected to more than human intention and influence” (Burke and Fishel 2019, 88). In practical terms, this suggests new forms of assemblage-like “cosmopolitics” at multiple scales and locales, in which practices of governance are connected with activism, resistance and subversion, aimed at making politics receptive to the marginalized voices of humans, non-­ humans and things (Burke and Fishel 2019; Delanty and Mota 2017).

Approaches to Anthropocene Governance While the broader debate on the Anthropocene reveals several fundamental challenges to existing concepts and practices of environmental governance, not all of these challenges are substantially and equally reflected in the more specific discourse on Anthropocene governance (Delanty and Mota 2017). Many contributions to this discourse merely use the Anthropocene as a new label for existing governance approaches without seriously considering its fundamental challenges and implications (Dryzek and Pickering 2019; Bornemann 2019). In the following, various contributions that substantially deal with the question of how to govern in the face of the Anthropocene are mapped along two fundamental governance dimensions—goals and means of governance.

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Goals of Anthropocene Governance Notwithstanding an overall agreement that the Anthropocene represents a new constellation that needs to be dealt with in terms of governance, existing ideas and conceptions of Anthropocene governance show significant differences regarding the basic direction of attempts at governing in the Anthropocene. Some contributions regard governance in the Anthropocene as directed towards “maintaining the Holocene state” (Rockström et al. 2009). The logic here is one of reversing the Anthropocene and restoring the “safe operating space” demarcated by “planetary boundaries” that allowed civilizations to rise, develop and thrive (see Chap. 3). While this approach seems to be based on the idea that Anthropocene governance is about governing the Anthropocene away, larger parts of the discourse doubt that this will be possible and opt for different ends. Certainly, the most widespread position is one of viewing the Anthropocene as a potential crisis for humanity that needs to be managed in a way that its most significant negative effects are being controlled, mitigated and prevented (Hamilton 2015; Steffen et al. 2011, 2015). Here the ultimate goal is one of controlling the “Bad Anthropocene” and turning it to something less catastrophic (Dalby 2016). This position of mitigation is contrasted by a decidedly optimistic one, mainly promoted by the ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute, which sees the Anthropocene as a new opportunity for humanity to shape the Earth system for the better based on human creativity and innovation (for a discussion of the “Good Anthropocene,” see Eckersley 2017; Dalby 2016; Schlosberg 2016). The insight associated with the advent of the Anthropocene, that humans are a new geological force, is understood not only as a proof of the possibility but also as an imperative to shape the planet, if not humanity itself, with the help of technologies such as geo or genetic engineering (Schlosberg 2016, 201). Finally, while these two positions derive orientations for governance from different normative interpretations of the Anthropocene (“a risk” to be avoided vs. an “opportunity” to be seized), another group of conceptions is less decided and explicit regarding the direction of governance. Here the Anthropocene is regarded as imminent and unavoidable, and, indeed, something that requires a different approach to governance (Dryzek and Pickering 2019; Dryzek 2016b). While still referring to a crisis-like transition, these approaches aim at navigating the Anthropocene rather than mitigating the bad or embracing the good Anthropocene. This involves addressing the fundamentally changing conditions of the Anthropocene in a functionally more appropriate way (Dryzek and Pickering 2019; see also Box 17.3). According to Jeremy Davies, the thrust of governance appropriate for navigating the transition to the

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Anthropocene should be “to live within the crisis, and to struggle to influence its course by working for the survival of complex, pluralistic ecosystems” (Davies 2016, 194).

Means of Anthropocene Governance Apart from this range of goal orientations, the discourse on governance in the Anthropocene brings into play a variety of governance means for the realization of these goals. Starting from a three-dimensional notion of governance (Lange et al. 2013), existing approaches seem to stress either material (policy), structural (polity) or procedural (politics) strategies. First, there are approaches featuring (material) technology and policy. Among these are proposals of very concrete technological options based on the notion of an Earth system that can be described by a number of global-scale parameters that provide promising levers for a technology-oriented “planetary management” (see Lövbrand et al. 2009; Stirling 2015). The geoengineering technologies proposed by Paul Crutzen and other early Anthropocene thinkers are paradigmatic cases of this governance by technology approach (see Chap. 6). Other strategies are less technology-oriented, but follow a similar rationalistic logic of targeted problem fixing. Tickell (2011), for example, discusses “societal responses to the Anthropocene.” Leaving no doubts that his suggestions are without alternatives, he promotes a set of policies, with which the Anthropocene is to be governed. These policies include measures for, among others, population control, overcoming the predominant “consumerist” economy, the development of new ways of energy generation, the management of climate change as well as adaptation to climate destabilization, nature conservation and, finally, the development of the necessary institutional conditions for dealing with global problems in an increasingly interdependent world. These institutional conditions are the focus of a second group of Anthropocene governance approaches. They are concerned with “architectures,” that is, the design of institutional models that are (more) adequate to deal with the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Certainly, the most prominent example of such an “institutional blueprint” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 48) is the “Earth System Governance” approach (Biermann 2014a, b; see also Box 17.2). It promotes the development of a global governance structure that is capable of dealing with the dysfunctional fragmentation of existing governance systems and allows for the coordination of transformation processes at different levels and in different sectors with regard to maintaining a “safe operating space” for humanity (Biermann 2014a). In contrast to this vision of a truly global governance architecture, other institutionalist

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approaches focus more on the design of regional and local governance arrangements. The basic logic of several design approaches that can be found around the Resilience Alliance is to create and maintain socio-ecological resilience through institutional arrangements that are themselves characterized by resilience in that they unite a variety of institutions and actors in a pluralistic and nested governance structure (Berkes 2017). Box 17.2  Earth System Governance Initially promoted as a social science complement to “Earth System Analysis,” Earth System Governance (ESG) has recently been reinterpreted as an explicit governance response to the Anthropocene (Biermann 2014a, b). ESG is concerned with the “societal steering of human activities with regard to the long-term stability of geobiophysical systems” (Biermann 2014b, 59). Based on an understanding of the Earth as an “integrated, interdependent system transformed by the interplay of human and non-human agency” (Biermann 2014b, 59), ESG claims to promote a new scientifically founded, analytical and prescriptive understanding of governance in the Anthropocene. In analytical respects, ESG develops a specific diagnosis of the challenges of existing global environmental governance in light of the Anthropocene—such as the intensified interdependencies between human societies and an increase in functional interdependencies, for example, between different social sectors and the political regulatory areas associated with them. As a prescriptive approach, ESG aims to systematically improve existing governance arrangements. The options brought into play range from incremental policy changes at the regional and local level, from improving private governance mechanisms to greater involvement of civil society actors and from technological solutions to fundamental changes in lifestyles and behaviour. A core theme is the strengthening of the UN’s environmental governance institutions and the integration of the environment into an (already well-functioning) economic governance system (see Dryzek 2016a, 537). Accordingly, ESG is concerned with developing existing environmental governance in the direction of “stronger and more coordinated institutions of global governance, linked to a reinvigorated United Nations system” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 49). Critics argue that ESG relies on a managerial rationality (Lövbrand et al. 2009). Furthermore, strengthening of global environmental governance institutions creates the same kind of path dependencies that have proven to be dysfunctional before; static institutional approaches are not a proper response to the always uncertain and disruptive dynamics of the Anthropocene (Dryzek and Pickering 2019).

A third group of approaches focuses on setting up processes and functions, rather than on structures or policies. The challenges of the Anthropocene, the argument goes, are so unprecedented and uncertain that attempts at designing technologies, policies or institutions will not do the job as they may create the same kind of path dependencies that made us stumble in the Anthropocene

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and prevent the creation of alternative forms of more adept governance forms (Dryzek and Pickering 2019; Dryzek 2016b; Davies 2016). At stake is more a way of reflecting and reshaping existing governance functions in light of the Anthropocene. Schlosberg, for example, argues for a “politics of sight for the Anthropocene” that allows for receptivity, that is, the ability to include signals from the non-human world in political decision-making; listening to the remote, that is, vulnerable human and non-human populations left out of political conversations (Schlosberg 2016, 203). This “politics of sight” manifests, for example, in the use of visualization, both artistic and scientific, that make us aware of our embeddedness and immersion in environmental systems “in the everyday” (Schlosberg 2016, 204). In a similar way, John Dryzek argues for an approach of contextual empirical learning that builds on a concept of “ecological reflexivity” as the first virtue for political institutions in the Anthropocene (Dryzek 2016a; Dryzek and Pickering 2019, see Box 17.3). Box 17.3  Ecological Reflexivity Ecological Reflexivity (ER) is an approach to governance in the Anthropocene that has been promoted mainly by John Dryzek (2016a, b) and Dryzek and Pickering (2019) as an alternative to existing approaches of Anthropocene governance, such as Earth System Governance (see Box 17.2). Such approaches would, according to Dryzek, be based on the same kind of institutionalist thinking and dysfunctional path dependencies that are characteristic of Holocene governance. Rather than engaging in institutional design, ER is supposed to “start from where we are now and think in terms of processes of institutional change and available opportunities for overcoming pathological path dependency and enhancing reflexivity” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 51). As “a property of whole systems of governance,” reflexivity is defined as “the capacity of structures, systems and sets of ideas to question their own core commitments, and if necessary change themselves in response” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 34). Yet, the reality of the Anthropocene requires a form of ecological reflexivity, characterized, on the one hand, by “the incorporation into human institutions of better ways to listen to ecological systems that have a different kind of voice” and, on the other hand, by “an ability to rethink what core values such as justice, sustainability, and democracy mean in the context of an active and unstable Earth system” (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 39). Three interlinked components joining in an ongoing, iterative process are constitutive of ER (Dryzek and Pickering 2019, 36). Recognition involves listening for changes in social-ecological systems by means of monitoring impacts on social-ecological systems and anticipating future conditions and impacts. Reflection is concerned with learning from and rethinking core values in the light of past experience, and the feedback from social-­ ecological systems; reflection is also about the envisioning possible futures. Finally, response refers to the re-articulation of core aims, values and discourses as well as the reconfiguration of functions and practices.

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Problematizing and Developing Anthropocene Governance While large parts of the academic and political debate presuppose the Anthropocene as an unquestionable fact, there is also widespread criticism of the concept and its political implications (see Chaps. 5, 13 and 15). I will focus here on two general points of criticism that relate to the discourse on the Anthropocene governance as such. One is more functional in nature and relates to the conceptualization of governance, while the second is concerned with the normative justification of the goals of Anthropocene governance. First, there seems to be a tendency in existing approaches to promote an understanding of governance as management and control (Lövbrand et  al. 2009). This is reflected in policy- and polity-oriented approaches based on an idea of governance as order (Bornemann 2019). One does not even need to invoke the new uncertainties and complexities of the Anthropocene to realize that such a governance concept is problematic and somewhat ahistorical. Governance as control is already prone to failure and disappointment under Holocene conditions (Mayntz 1993). In this light, the approaches to Anthropocene governance that are based on a more procedural and reflexive understanding of governance seem prima facie more appropriate for orienting the knowing and doing of governance in the Anthropocene. Their logic of renouncing clearly defined models and architectures of governance not only reflects the conceptual transition from “steering” to “shaping” in governance thinking (Haus 2010) but also does justice to the dynamics and uncertainties of the Anthropocene. However, as we know from approaches to reflexive governance, attempts to develop reflexivity are embedded in complex governance contexts that intertwine institutions, policies and processes at different levels (Voss and Bornemann 2011). Therefore, any processual approach that focuses on the development of reflexivity will also have to take into account the structures and policies in which it is always already embedded. In analytical terms, this requires an integrated governance perspective that takes into account the interplay of polity-, policy- and politics-related governance elements (Lange et al. 2013). My second criticism relates to the normative justification of governance goals. Underlying the different existing approaches of Anthropocene governance is the notion that we are facing an epochal transition from quite well-­ known and stable Holocene conditions into a new, fundamentally different constellation that is marked by unprecedented instabilities and uncertainty, and therefore requires new governance responses. This motif of “required

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responses” is problematic from a normative point of view as it comes with the potential of veiling the values and norms underlying both the diagnosis of requirements and the call for a (certain) response underneath a veil of functionalism (Wissenburg 2016). At least, the call for required responses leaves unanswered the question who requires what, why and to what end. From a critical point of view, it needs to be maintained that these questions cannot be merely answered by pointing to the new reality of the Anthropocene. Deriving what ought to be done from what is the case remains a naturalistic fallacy, that is, a problematic crossing of the categorical distinction between facts and norms, disrespecting the notion that value judgements are to be based on different grounds than facts (Crist 2013; Castree 2019). Moreover, the reference to “required responses” runs the risk of obscuring, or introducing through the back door, norms that are entangled with the diagnosis of the Anthropocene and the scientific perspectives that are involved in that diagnosis (Lövbrand et al. 2009). Taking a geological epoch as a starting point for deriving what should be done in terms of governance risks paving the way towards a regime of geologist governance, based on natural science goals and norms (Castree 2019). On the whole, approaches to Anthropocene governance appear to be normatively atrophied in the sense that the general goal orientations they promote are hardly based on explicit and convincingly justified values and norms, but rather refer back to the functional imperative of a new reality. In view of its society-shaping implications, it is not sufficient to conceive Anthropocene governance on the basis of such a crypto-normative basis. To address this underdeveloped normativity, there should be more serious attempts at normatively justifying approaches of Anthropocene governance (Bornemann et al. 2019). In fact, there are a growing number of contributions seeking to clarify the normative foundations and implications of the Anthropocene. While some authors seek to reinterpret existing ethical foundations of humanity in the light of the Anthropocene (Dryzek and Pickering 2019), others regard the Anthropocene shift so fundamental that existing norms and values are to be questioned on a more fundamental level (Chakrabarty 2009; Hamilton 2015). Among these are also voices that question the idea of sustainability, which has provided a normative vision for environmental governance over the past 20 years or so (Davies 2016; Knight 2015). As sustainability has failed in the Holocene, the argument goes, it will certainly not serve as an appropriate normative basis for orienting governance in the Anthropocene. Yet, while there is certainly much (justified) criticism on the potential sustainable development to provide orientation for environmental governance

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(Park et al. 2008), I contend that parts of it build on a misconceived understanding of the idea. In fact, I see several good reasons to consider sustainability as a particularly promising candidate to overcome the normativity gap in Anthropocene governance thinking. Firstly, sustainability draws on a plurality of norms and values that have emerged over centuries of human development (Caradonna 2016), recently condensed in the global Agenda 2030. To step back behind the normativity expressed in this global agenda—despite all its weaknesses and deficits— would hardly be desirable, especially as long as there are no more convincing alternatives with similar legitimacy potential on the table (Stirling 2015). Secondly, sustainability provides a normativity that is sound and rich, and, at the same time contestable and interpretable. It combines a complex concept of interspatial and intertemporal justice with a notion of ecological boundaries and with an open process of deliberation. Such a notion of sustainability does not promote ongoing economic growth, but development towards a model of a society that realizes justice under the conditions of ecological integrity. The deliberation component ensures that the interpretations of both justice and boundaries remain open and adaptable to contexts. Thirdly, given its comprehensive integrative orientation, sustainability appears to be a suitable normative basis for reflecting and addressing the comprehensive, universal and integrative Anthropocene reality. More specifically, and in reference to the four challenges described earlier, sustainability could provide the Anthropocene governance discourse with a normative basis for considering the planetary scope and various temporalities, and include all kinds of social actors and sectors beyond environmental governance. Thus, sustainability could also be a normative vector to further lead the Anthropocene governance discourse out of its own ecological niche—and orient the way towards an Anthropocene-fitting sustainability governance (Dryzek 2016a, 542).

Conclusion This chapter explored how the Anthropocene has given rise to a debate about the appropriateness of environmental governance. It was argued that the Anthropocene is perceived as a fourfold challenge to existing understandings and practices of environmental governance. Environmental governance that seeks to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene must be theoretically reconsidered and practically transformed in spatial, temporal, material and social terms. When looking into the emerging debate on Anthropocene governance, it turned out that existing approaches do not respond to these challenges in a

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uniform, comprehensive and differentiated manner. Rather, a multifaceted landscape of approaches to Anthropocene governance has emerged. Approaches differ not only in their basic goal orientation (ranging from a return to the Holocene to navigating the Anthropocene) but also in terms of the governance means advocated (from governance through technology to institutional design and the reflexive shaping of processes). Taking a critical view, I argued that existing approaches of Anthropocene governance rest on rather one-sided governance understandings. An analytically illuminated understanding of Anthropocene governance will have to incorporate and relate multiple governance dimensions. I further argued that the existing discourse on Anthropocene governance also proves problematic from a normative perspective. Veiling behind a motive of “required responses,” the discourse lacks an explicit clarification and justification of its normative foundations and implications. In order to close this gap, I argued for a normative justification of Anthropocene governance in terms of sustainability, as this idea combines a clear normative core of justice with the consideration of ecological boundaries in an open deliberative manner. Further developing these considerations, future work should elaborate how sustainability-related norms—international and intergenerational justice, the protection of ecological integrity and societal deliberation—tie in with scientific Anthropocene diagnoses and translate into real world contexts “on the ground” to form analytically sound, normatively justified, theoretically reflected, empirically illuminated and practically useful approaches to sustainability governance in the Anthropocene (Bornemann et al. 2019). Key Points 1. The Anthropocene is viewed as a fundamental challenge to existing ideas and practices of Holocene environmental governance. In particular, it calls for a reconsideration of the temporal, spatial, substantial and social foundations of environmental governance. 2. Around the notion of the Anthropocene, a multifaceted governance discourse has developed. It comprises a variety of approaches that differ in terms of their goal orientations and governance means. 3. Approaches to Anthropocene governance are often based on a narrow understanding of governance and unspecified norms. 4. The analysis and practice of Anthropocene governance may benefit from an analytical sharpening of its underlying governance concept and a clarification of its normative basis.

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Key Questions 1. Which four challenges does the Anthropocene pose to existing forms of Holocene environmental governance? 2. Why is Holocene environmental governance considered to be no longer an adequate approach to governance in the Anthropocene? 3. What are basic goals and means of existing approaches to Anthropocene governance? 4. What are differences and commonalities between “Ecosystem Reflexivity” and “Earth System Governance”—and how do these approaches reflect the four Anthropocene challenges? 5. What would an approach to governance in the Anthropocene look like that responds to the four challenges in a comprehensive manner?

Further Reading Biermann, F. 2014. Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bornemann, B. 2019. The Anthropocene and Governance: Critical Reflections on Conceptual Relations. In T.  Hickmann, Partzsch, L., Pattberg, P. and Weiland S. (eds) The Anthropocene Debate and Political Science. London: Routledge, 48–66. Dryzek, J.  S. and Pickering, J. 2019. The Politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Lövbrand, E., Stripple, J. and Wiman, B. 2009. Earth System Governmentality. Global Environmental Change 19(1): 7–13. Schlosberg, D. 2016. Environmental Management in the Anthropocene. In T.  Gabrielson, Hall, C., Meyer, J.  M., and Schlosberg, D. (eds)  The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 193–208.

References Berkes, F. 2017. Environmental Governance for the Anthropocene? Social-Ecological Systems, Resilience, and Collaborative Learning. Sustainability 9(7): 1232. Biermann, F. 2014a. Earth System Governance. World Politics in the Anthropocene. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Biermann, F. 2014b. The Anthropocene: A Governance Perspective. The Anthropocene Review 1(1): 57–61. Biermann, F. and Lövbrand, E. 2019. Encountering the “Anthropocene”: Setting the Scene. In F.  Biermann and Lövbrand, E. (eds)  Anthropocene Encounters: New

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Directions in Green Political Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–22. Biermann, F. and Pattberg, P. 2008. Global Environmental Governance: Taking Stock, Moving Forward. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33(1): 277–294. Biermann, F. et al. 2016. Down to Earth: Contextualizing the Anthropocene. Global Environmental Change 39: 341–350. Bornemann, B. 2016. Integrative Political Strategies—Conceptualizing and Analyzing a New Type of Policy Field. European Policy Analysis 2(1): 168–195. Bornemann, B. 2019. The Anthropocene and Governance: Critical Reflections on Conceptual Relations. In T. Hickmann et al. (eds.) The Anthropocene Debate and Political Science. London: Routledge, 48–66. Bornemann, B., Lange, P. and Burger, P. 2019. Toward Systematic Understandings of Sustainability Governance. A Conceptual Meta-Framework. In P. Hamman (ed.) Sustainability Governance and Hierarchy. London: Routledge, 60–78. Bornemann, B. and Strassheim, H. 2019. Governing Time for Sustainability: Analyzing the Temporal Implications of Sustainability Governance. Sustainability Science 14(4): 1001–1013. Burke, A. and Fishel, S. 2019. Power, World Politics, and Thing-Systems in the Anthropocene. In F. Biermann and Lövbrand, E. (eds) Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 87–108. Caradonna, J.  L. 2016. Sustainability: A history. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press. Castree, N. 2019. The “Anthropocene” in Global Change Science: Expertise, the Earth, and the Future of Humanity. In F.  Biermann and Lövbrand, E. (eds)  Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 25–49. Chakrabarty, D. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35(2): 197–222.  Challies, E. and Newig, J. 2019. What Is ‘Environmental Governance’? A Working Definition. Available from: https://sustainability-­governance.net/2019/06/14/ what-­is-­environmental-­governance-­a-­working-­definition/. Crist, E. 2013. On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature. Environmental Humanities 3(1): 129–147. Dalby, S. 2014. Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene. Global Policy 5(1): 1–9. Dalby, S. 2016. Framing the Anthropocene: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Anthropocene Review 3(1): 33–51. Dauvergne, P. and Clapp, J. 2016. Researching Global Environmental Politics in the 21st Century. Global Environmental Politics 16(1): 1–12. Davies, J. 2016. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Oakland: University of California Press. Delanty, G. and Mota, A. 2017. Governing the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance, Knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory 20(1): 9–38.

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18 Experimental Government in the Anthropocene Stephanie Wakefield

Introduction 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. Then, it shows that some of the most profound governmental transformations are being forged more concretely at the scale of the city as planners, designers, and governments seek to move away from modern, engineering’s one-size-fits-all control approach and instead devise a bricolage of ad hoc, locally situated risk-absorbing human and ecological infrastructures. Cities are seen as both drivers of climate change and especially promising sites for building resilience to it due to their ability to respond quickly via situated experiments that incorporate diverse publics and nature. Rather than preventing the Anthropocene, sought with urban resilience are governmental technologies able to attenuate its effects while maintaining the regimes which produce them. In place of past forms of government and infrastructure, which sought to block out nature, volatility,

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or risk, resilience is a paradigm that understands instability as inevitable and views the world as a system of coupled social-ecological-technical systems that must develop their capacity for administering, absorbing, or withstanding turbulence (Folke 2016; Holling 1973; Walker et al. 2004). This chapter concludes by discussing the resilience assemblage stitched together across these two tendencies and the interlinked, eco-technical-cybernetic vision of life forwarded therein.

The Anthropocene Problem The ways in which liberal regimes maintain control over and administer cities and populations are undergoing significant change in the Anthropocene. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, industrial liberal technologies sought to order humans and nature into productive flows for commerce and profit without regard for the nonhuman world (Braun and Castree 2001; Gandy 2003; Smith 1990). In the twenty-first century, however, this modern governance framework is seen as the cause of climate change, environmental degradation, and network fragility among other Anthropocene crises (Rosol et al. 2017). Efforts to maintain order amidst the increasing omnipresence of catastrophic risks have led to a search for new technologies of government. As with liberal government past, government in and of the Anthropocene is intended to secure a specific form of life: that of the liberal subject (Dillon and Reid 2009; Wakefield 2018). But equally, Anthropocene governmental modalities must now secure not only biological species life, as in past biopolitics, but also the very biophysical (Dalby 2013) and infrastructural conditions of that life itself (Wakefield 2020a). In the search for new ways to secure the environmental, infrastructural, and social lifelines of liberal society amidst the crises the latter generates, governance is being recalibrated. Resilience has emerged in the Anthropocene as the dominant governmental methodology and discourse under which a host of technologies and designs are being stitched together in hopes of managing urban and global systems in their “safe operating space” (Braun 2014; Derickson 2018; Wakefield and Braun 2014; Watts 2013). Developed in the 1970s by ecologist C.S. Holling as a mode of managing the adaptive ecosystems described in his research, resilience is defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Holling 1973, 1). In contrast to what are now seen as outdated modern modes of management that sought to maintain a single stability state via top-down techniques of control and regulation, resilience is heralded as a flexible, post-modern form of management that

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seeks to create and define safe operating spaces able to absorb and manage, rather than eliminate, disturbance. Seen as a scientifically verified new worldview, resilience management has risen to the top governmental agendas, from global institutions like the United Nations to city government and designers. With modern government seen as outdated and implicated in present and future disasters, resiliency experiments are celebrated by planners, designers, municipal and funding bodies alike as humanity’s salvation and best hope of managing the systems of modern life amidst the complex “new normal” of climate change, rising seas, as well as the growing geopolitical turbulence and tipping points now seen as ubiquitous and natural (Rodin 2014). Resilience practitioners see the traditional toolkit of international relations—based on modern post-war territorial power configurations and anthropocentric, human/nature binaries, and equilibrium views—as outdated and seek to recalibrate them for Anthropocene contexts. While national security and critical infrastructure protection programs have largely adopted resilience approaches, in terms of governing the Anthropocene, the perceived failure of national action on climate change has led to a shift toward other arenas and frameworks as many now argue for experimentation in new forms and scales of governance. Whereas traditional post-war institutions are viewed as too focused on human geopolitical affairs, unwilling or inadequate to face the complex, entangled problems of the Anthropocene, resilience governance is seen as requiring experimentation at other scales. The governmental embrace of experimentation is derived from resilience methodology. As resilience ecologists see it, endogenous and exogenous disruptive events such as fires, floods, or droughts test systems out of stability states and into a zone of uncertainty in which institutions must respond (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Governance responses may take the form of avoidance or of efforts to maintain stable parameters and approaches. What resilience practitioners recommend instead is a period of experimentation which embraces the period of uncertainty and uses it as an opportunity to test out new management approaches (Zellmer and Gunderson 2009). Rather than deny the reality of these events, attempt to use past management forms to administer them, urban resilience experiments seek to remodulate urban infrastructure amidst or in anticipation of (Anderson 2010) such events, in order to anticipate, buffer, and absorb their force. This approach begins from an acknowledgment that there is a buffer zone within which regimes can exist while still maintaining their state or identity, and experiments seek to find those thresholds while testing out new ways to maintain systems. At least two tendencies within the experimental resiliency approach can be identified.

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Promethean Administration—Earth Systems Governance The first resilience tendency is earth systems governance (Biermann 2014). Focusing on planetary scale global governance structures, this approach seeks to go beyond the traditional scale of the nation-state because “a global problem demands a global approach that analyses and addresses the scope of the entire world” (Hsiang and Mendis 2016, 605; Chap. 17). This tendency is often characterized as a kind of Prometheanism, with human impact on the earth’s hydrological, biological, and atmospheric systems seen as in need of steering away from present destructive trajectories and toward a “Good Anthropocene” (Neyrat 2019). Here the anticipation of future risks provides the impetus for new modes of governance in the present (Anderson 2010). This approach can be seen in the efforts of former-Stockholm Resilience Centre executive director Johan Rockström and host of earth and social scientists to identify and govern the “planetary boundaries” (including climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and ocean acidification) of the planet’s safe operating space (Rockström et al. 2009). In response to what they perceive as a world on the brink, Rockström and an international team of scientists have proposed the identification of the Holocene’s key earth processes and management of “a planetary boundary—a fence—within which we have a safe operating space for humanity” (Galaz 2014; Rockström 2010). Along with international attempts to reduce carbon emissions or keep global warming below 2 °C (Steffen et al. 2018), for Rockström and colleagues, the ultimate goal is global institutional collaboration to manage thresholds and govern “anthropogenic perturbations” in order to maintain the safe operating space that undergirds “our way of life … and how we have organized society, technology, and economies around them” (Rockström et al. 2009, 2). Other proposals in this vein include design theorist Benjamin Bratton’s (2019) calls for embracing and intelligently designing the automated technological algorithmic human-technology entanglements of the “stack” (planetary algorithms, automation, surveillance, etc.) into a new whole earth infrastructural network to guide and shape the Anthropocene’s risks and limits. For Bratton, planning and design are key to governing the Anthropocene but have been understood too much in terms of human agency and not enough in terms of co-constitutive eco-cybernetic entanglement where human agency is not always present. In terms of the latter, he points toward the use of automated decision-making systems and Human Exclusion Zones, such as factories run by robots or parts of Earth set aside for rewilding. Needed in the twenty-first century, he argues, is an automated climate mitigating planetary governance structure to reroute the currently irrational “stack” toward the

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useful ends of surveillance and management of carbon flows, conservation, and production. Like many “smart” city projects which make use of myriad ubiquitous computing technologies to sense, collect, and manage environmental data (Gabrys 2014), such proposals seek a much more integrated approach at a planetary scale. Just as climate change is understood in terms of measurements and data regarding temperature, emissions, or precipitation, here the hope is the properly managed administration and calibration of this data (on sensing earth, see Gabrys 2016). In the process, human debate and decision-making can be edited out as a host of key processes and infrastructures are automated.

 own to Earth—Situated and Messy D Urban Experimentation But the recalibration of government for the Anthropocene can be seen far more clearly at the city scale. While earth systems governance projects are primarily speculative—existing mostly in texts, designs, and opinion pieces, mediums are important in their own right not least in terms of shaping imaginaries—in the wake of recent hurricanes city planners, politicians and designers have begun rethinking governance in concrete ways (Braun 2014; Wakefield and Braun 2014). Cities are now seen as critical sites, viewed as both drivers of the Anthropocene (via urbanization, ecosystem degradation, and greenhouse gas emission) and the best hope for governing its effects (Braun 2014; Davis 2010; Ruddick 2015). With the failure of national and international accords and climate action, and in the wake of recent hurricanes and flood events, cities have rebranded as climate change leaders and rapid first responders: both “front lines” where uncertain futures are unfolding and laboratories in which experimental practices and technologies of governance are being tested out (Bulkeley et  al. 2019; Evans 2016; Karvonen and van Heur 2014; Rosenzweig and Solecki 2014). Whereas earth governance proposals envision various versions of a coherent “Climate Leviathan” (Wainwright and Mann 2018), within cities there is instead a turn toward ad hoc, situated development of techniques of resilience. Urban resilience is part of a second tendency in Anthropocene governance which argues that rather than continuing the hubristic, modern logic of resilience described above (Neyrat 2019), living in the Anthropocene requires coming back “down to earth” (Latour 2018) and developing local, situated, context-specific arrangements within “lively” but “messy” more-than-human entanglements (Haraway 2016; Tsing 2016). Urban laboratories are seen as offering opportunities in this regard for quickly testing local, situated

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resiliency solutions within and in response to local crises, environments, histories, and metabolisms. In contrast to the often more technocratic Earth system governance proposals, urban resilience experiments emphasize social issues and are seen as holding the potential to decrease social inequality— itself often listed by entities such as the Rockefeller Foundation as a barrier to resilience—via community involvement and participatory design. One might think here of the many fab-labs, makerspaces, or innovation hubs that have become common in cities in recent years, open or membership spaces where urban residents are invited to experiment with their own creative design. In a similar spirit, resilience calls for a kind of situated experimentation (Castán Broto and Bulkeley 2013; Edwards and Bulkeley 2018; Evans 2011; Stengers 2015) in which the lab is not a pristine or sterile space—the modern laboratory—nor a single dedicated space, but rather the urban environment itself. Here experimentation called for to address climate change risk draws on post1960s workplace management techniques, such as open, horizontal modes of organization which encourage innovative and creative (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) as well as inclusive participatory citizen science approaches. Across diverse projects, one thing is emphasized: resilience government must take a different tack than techniques past. Here the dominant view is that past understandings of the city and practices of governing are outdated and urban security dependent on overcoming them. Late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century engineer-led planning—with its massive concrete and steel structures, promises of eliminating disorder, taming human and nonhuman life, and transformation of cities into orderly machines (Braun and Castree 2001; Gandy 2003; Mitchell 1991; Scott 1998; Smith 1990)—is now seen as an impediment to overcome. In the Anthropocene, this model is relentlessly critiqued for its siloed or one-size-fits-all panacea master plans implemented without regard for nature. The Anthropocene is interpreted as introducing a “new normal” in which modern urban governance based on a human/nature separation and modern ideas of mastery and control no longer suffices (Evans 2016). This model, scientists, designers, and politicians agree, is an impediment to cities’ ability to respond to new climate change risks as well as a source of risk itself. Brittle and non-dynamic, modern urban governance hubristic efforts to control nature are now said to come from a world passing away. Instead of treating cities like blank landscapes and nature like a resource, designers and planners now argue that cities must be viewed as complex, integrated social-ecological-technical systems (Derickson 2018). In this context, instead of a single “command and control” solution to nature’s incursions— massive sea gates around coastal cities, for example—resilience proponents now call for a mixture of diverse, modular, and interlaced systems-based designs working at multiple sites and scales to reconnect urban fragments

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(Elliott-Ortega 2015). Instead of separating the urban from nature, planners now seek ways to bring nature back into cities, as part of a shift away from seeing the latter as exclusively human places and instead as coupled social-­ ecological systems. Cities are highlighted as particularly promising sites in this regard due to the close spatial proximity and interconnection of residents, infrastructures, and natures. This is not entirely new. Urban resilience in many ways parallels and draws upon critiques that have existed in urban planning since the 1960s. We might think of Christopher Alexander’s (1965) critique of “artificial cities” designed like trees with separated systems and attendant proposal that the natural urban structure is instead a complex semilattice of overlapping, changing living systems. Likewise, Ian McHarg (1969) called for urban architecture to “abandon the simplicity of separation and give unity its due. Let us abandon the self-mutilation which has been our way and give expression to the potential harmony of man-nature” by designing with nature. As Elliott-Ortega (2015) highlights, there are likewise parallels between Rittel and Webber’s (1973, 67) critique of engineering-based urban planning’s inability to solve “wicked problems” and post-Sandy appraisals of technocratic engineering. And many such as Jane Jacobs (1961) criticized planner Robert Moses in his own time, arguing against top-down, one-size-fits-all design and seeing cities as made of siloed components, and advocating seeing and designing cities as dynamic self-organizing “webs” of human and nonhumans. However, whereas past urban planning critics often advocated these entangled human-environment systems approaches as a means to improved life quality and a more harmonious urban, Anthropocene promotion of complex system thinking is explicitly couched in a framework of inevitable risk, vulnerability, and crisis. Urban resilience is grounded on and elaborates itself against this field of crisis and vulnerability. Entangled urban systems are now seen as vulnerable to environmental risk, with rising seas and flooding threatening lives and disruption to urban infrastructures, such as transportation systems, financial institutions, and energy networks. But interconnected urban systems are also highlighted because using complex systems approaches are seen as necessary to manage those threats. Hard walls to block out water, for example, are seen as problematic less because they degrade urban life but because they represent a failed management strategy. Emphasis is placed on the need to abandon views of human-natural urban systems as linear and built within a stable world, and instead see both as complex, nonlinear, and unpredictable across space and time. Instead of seeking equilibrium, urban resiliency proponents argue for embracing a new normal of disequilibrium and chronic disturbance. Here Urban resilience diverges from sustainable or smart Anthropocene governance initiatives geared toward smartness or sustainability. Making a “Greener,

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Greater New York,” “the first environmentally sustainable twenty-first-century city” (NYC 2007); “smart” city initiatives to orchestrate citizen, government, and environmental sensors into self-­regulating, efficient, intelligent urban systems (Gabrys 2014); or planetary management approaches described above: each forward utopian visions of “getting it right” by perfecting humanity’s past errors and achieving a harmoniously managed city or planet. But urban resilience proponents see such efforts as an impossible quest and promote resilience as a more realistic. Such a perspective is ubiquitous in Anthropocene thinking. As anthropologist Anna Tsing argues, instead of the old ideas of hope or a “happy ending” (2016, 21), in the Anthropocene we must learn to “live in capitalist ruins” or as theorist Lauren Berlant puts it, “the wreck of the old good life fantasy” (2016, 398). Instead of making the city smart or sustainable, this approach instead seeks to experiment with resilience in a more true world of omnipresent risk and instability (Box 18.1 and Image 18.1). Box 18.1  Living Infrastructure After Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, the city became a climate resilience laboratory in which designers, planners, and government began to critically rethink government and experiment with resiliency infrastructures. New  York City quickly became the poster child for urban resilience, with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Rockefeller Foundation’s Rebuild by Design (RBD) competition (Adams 2014; Collier et al. 2016), and was the first test run of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) strategy, which was subsequently exported globally to cities including Lagos, Kyoto, and New Orleans. Rather than reproducing hubristic, twentieth-century technologies to master nature and separate the city from it, politicians and designers sought new social-ecological-technical systems infrastructures able to field and absorb natural disasters and flooding, rather than prevent them. A paradigmatic example of this resiliency approach can be seen in New York State’s (NYS’) $60 million joint experiment with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and SCAPE Landscape Architecture to build two miles of artificial oyster reefs along the shore of Staten Island. While New York was once home to a large oyster industry based in the mass production and consumption of oysters, the oysters with which NYS is concerned are being viewed as something novel: a “living, growing” critical infrastructure to govern storm surge, rising seas, and flooding along New York’s coasts. One among six winning designs in HUD’s RBD competition, “Living Breakwaters,” as the project is named, is widely heralded as a cutting-edge infrastructure for the climate change “new normal” now faced by coastal cities (NYSGOSR 2019). By mobilizing oysters’ natural life processes (i.e., attaching themselves to each other and developing reefs that adapt to changing sea levels), the goal is to manage, not prevent, hurricanes, storm surges, and flooding. For these capacities, oysters are viewed as paradigmatic of the resiliency infrastructures needed for the Anthropocene’s new needs, an approach able to work with nature rather than fighting against it, and a model for other coastal cities (Buckminster Fuller Institute 2019; SCAPE 2019; Wakefield 2019; Wakefield and Braun 2019).

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Image 18.1  Living Breakwaters on the southern shore of Staten Island, New York, as imagined in the original proposal for the Rebuild by Design competition. (Image by SCAPE for the New York State Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery. Reused here with kind permission)

Redefining Infrastructure To build resilience, planners and designers are treating cities as laboratories for experimentation with new, unorthodox technologies able to respond to the above critiques of modern government and field and absorb crisis events, rendering liberal institutions and infrastructures able to “ride out” (“bounce back” or “forward” from) Anthropocene risks. Following resilience’s experimental methodology, universities and think tanks, architects, and city commissions are transforming cities or parts of cities—blocks, sidewalks, neighborhoods, and communities—into design test runs. Technology, design, and infrastructure are central to this experimentation. Alongside traditional types of critical infrastructure which have been the focus on city and national security agendas since at least September 11, 2001 (Collier and Lakoff 2008; DHS 2007; Walker and Cooper 2011), to address the perceived problems of modern urban governance—based on a separation of city/nature and ideas of control and mastery—infrastructure is being redefined. Responding to the need to recalibrate modern urban governance and infrastructure, cities have begun promoting self-organizing and data-sharing human communities as “social” or “human” infrastructural systems to a supplement to brittle, obdurate technical infrastructures (FEMA 2011; NYC 2013a; Wakefield 2020b).

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Here the adaptive capacities of individuals long celebrated by neoliberalism (Chandler and Reid 2016) are themselves being redefined by cities and academics as infrastructure. This is because prepared and connected neighbors add to a city’s ability to “bounce back” while isolated and helpless citizens subtract from it. To build up their social infrastructure, municipal institutions are encouraging urban dwellers to see themselves as integral to urban security efforts via a host of emergency preparedness initiatives including community needs assessments, scenario workshops, and community emergency response trainings (Dubois and Krasny 2016; Wakefield 2020b). Alongside human capacities, those of nature are also forwarded as emblematic of the recalibrated resilience approach, with waterways and animal life enrolled alongside other proposed resilient infrastructures to buffer future extreme events. Instead of hard walls separating cities from nature, the use of nature and animals as “ecological” or “living” infrastructures is seen as more suited to the resiliency approach (Wakefield  2020a). Here ecological infrastructure, a concept prominent in biological conservation (Cardoso da Silva and Wheeler 2017; UNESCO 1984) and landscape ecology (Forman and Godron 1986) since the 1980s, is being drawn into the framework of urban risk governance. From designed wetlands to the experimental construction of oyster reefs, the idea that natural processes provide valuable capacities or services that can be harnessed infrastructurally to govern environmental problems is quickly becoming a standard in urban resiliency planning. In this way, modern government’s now-problematic city/nature binary and ideas of mastery and control are being addressed through the redefinition of human and environmental capacities as infrastructure. In the process older urban planning critiques from the 1960s are being joined with Anthropocene parameters—environmental and infrastructural risk—resulting in a reimagined framework. While rejected discursively, fundamental elements of modernist city planning such as its audacious scope and technical expertise of engineers are also maintained and articulated with critical approaches (entangled networks, bringing nature in, landscape design, etc.). The result is a novel urban government approach. While based in the rejection of modern urban planning’s hubristic dreams of mastery, this approach forwards its own hubristic dream of mastery, once more envisioning the planned management of whole cities—albeit this time as a volatile social-ecological-technical system managed via situated, self-organizing, systems-based techniques—and calling for infrastructural experimentation toward this end. In the urban envisioned, no longer are the human, environment, or technical seen as separate, insert realms to be mastered or controlled by governance techniques coming from outside. Instead, humans, nature, and technology are understood to function

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immanently as “lively” (Amin 2014) risk management technologies themselves, cybernetically interlinked, and co-constitutive of the urban as well as its management. Envisioned is a self-healing city composed of interlocking technical, ecological, and social infrastructures to maintain business as usual amidst Anthropocene crises (Box 18.2).

Box 18.2  Miami Beach Built as real estate speculation and known for its art deco fantasy image, the City of Miami Beach is seen as “ground zero” for sea level rise amongst US cities. One of the lowest-lying coastal metropolitan areas in the US, built on porous limestone, Miami Beach is already experiencing effects of sea level rise, with sunny day flooding saltwater coming up through the city’s sewer system and sidewalks even on non-rainy days six times per year (Spanger-Siegfried et al. 2014; SFRCCC 2015; Wdowinski et al. 2016). Flooding is projected to increase to 80 times per year by 2030 (Union of Concerned Scientists [UCS] 2016), and 380 times a year across a much-expanded territory by 2045 (SFRCCC 2015; Union of Concerned Scientists [UCS] 2016). In response, the City of Miami Beach has labeled itself a living laboratory for urban resilience (Stein 2016) and is the site of a $600 million, ten-year experimental climate infrastructure program called “Miami Beach Rising Above” (Urban Land Institute [ULI] 2018). Via no-bid emergency contracts, doubled stormwater fees, and drastically multiplied sea-rise projections, the City has fast-tracked a suite of infrastructure projects including a fleet of industrial pumps, widespread street elevations, and new seawalls (ULI 2018) to secure Miami Beach for the next 30–50  years of sea rise, coastal flooding, and King Tides. The Rising Above plan is seen as an experiment with the city celebrated by government and planners as leader in innovative climate change technologies. In contrast to adaptive management of cities as complex, integrated social-­ ecological systems (Evans 2011; 2016)—as in New York’s use of oysters as living infrastructure, other co-production-based projects involving multiple stakeholders (Evans 2016), or designs based on social-ecological principles and flows (Karvonen and van Heur 2014)—Miami Beach’s experimental governance is a large-scale “grey” City-led infrastructure project using cement and large machines. Portrayal of Miami Beach’s efforts as experimental instead has more to do with factors such as the speed and scope of implementation, as well as the fact that the program is understood as testing new solutions within unprecedented conditions. At present, the City is elevating 105 miles (169 km) of streets (Ruggeri 2017), with the eventual goal being to raise the entire city gradually over time (Malone 2015)—a scope and approach which has not been tried before. Taken together this way in which the City is understood as testing new, untried solutions at a large scale within unprecedented conditions is the most fundamental way in which its resiliency program is viewed as an experiment. City officials are clear about the priorities behind their mobilization of resilience. The main and explicitly stated goal of Miami Beach’s resilience infrastructures is to maintain the city’s real estate market (Smiley et al. 2018), tourism, and insurer and investor confidence.

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Conclusion—Resilience Dispositif The Anthropocene is a moment of reconsideration and recalibration for government. Emerging resilience approaches respond to the Anthropocene’s challenges by criticizing modern models and experimenting both speculatively and concretely with new technologies based in complex human–nonhuman systems thinking. While Promethean earth systems governance approaches and the more “down to Earth” forms of situated urban experimentation both aim to overcome impediments of modern government via new scales and types of design, they also differ from one another in important regards. Promethean earth systems governance seeks to carry forward the hubris of modern governance albeit by steering and working with nonhumans toward more positive outcomes. In contrast, the “down to Earth” situated urban experimentation methodology responds to many criticisms of this Anthropocene Prometheanism, including those forwarded by leading critical thinkers (Haraway 2016; Latour 2018; Morton 2016; Tsing 2016), with a more grounded approach based in context-specific, complex human–nonhuman systems design, drawing new and old techniques together into a novel cybernetic network. In contrast to Promethean earth systems governance, this approach mirrors normative visions forwarded by critical theorists of life in the Anthropocene as a matter of giving up modern hubris and anthropocentrism and returning to the complex, messy world of entangled human–nonhuman systems. But this difference in nature and scale need not be seen as contradictory. Instead, these experimental techniques are being stitched together into a cybernetic resilience dispositif made up of both local, “earthbound” sites such as resilient urban experiments to attenuate risk as well as planetary governmental initiatives to shape the Anthropocene’s contours. This dispositif reproblematizes, transforms, repurposes, and redirects past technologies of governance (Braun 2014; Collier 2008), while supplementing—not replacing—them with heterogenous new practices of anticipating, mitigating, and attenuating the risks industrial liberal regimes produce. In this drawing together of urban and earth systems governance, resilience approaches forward a novel vision of a governed Anthropocene. Rather than twentieth-century depictions of stability or progress, resilience government portrays the city and globe as perpetually vulnerable to environmental crisis and tipping points, from which humans and nonhumans alike require militarized defenses: critical ecological and technological infrastructures to secure humans and automated surveillance to manage earth systems. With crisis as a

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constitutive backdrop and ground, instead of producing liberal subjects, this resilience assemblage works toward the production and management of distributed, integrated flows and networks. While some technologies in this network seek to prevent the crossing of thresholds and tipping points, others especially those at the urban level work to attenuate the effects of these crossings. In both cases what is sought is the continuation of existing social and economic structures amidst the naturalization of environmental collapse as a shared, inevitable global condition. Key Points  1. Governing the Anthropocene is seen to require recalibration of modern frameworks based in nature/human binaries and nation-state scales. 2. Resilience experiments operate at planetary and urban scales to maintain social and ecological safe operating spaces. 3. Cities are now viewed as both drivers of the Anthropocene (via urbanization, ecosystem degradation, and greenhouse gas emission) and the best hope for governing its effects. 4. Earth systems governance and local urban resilience infrastructures are not separate but form a cybernetic dispositive to govern the Anthropocene. Key Questions 1. How is the Anthropocene understood to challenge modern governance frameworks? 2. What is the relationship between experimentation, government, and the Anthropocene? 3. Describe two examples—perhaps from the city where you live or your hometown—of experimental Anthropocene government—speculative or actual—and how they respond to critiques of modern government. 4. In what ways is Anthropocene government conservative despite its experimental nature? 5. What are other ways of thinking the questions and problems of the Anthropocene, beyond the recalibration of life as crisis managing infrastructure?

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Further Reading Amin, A. 2014. Lively Infrastructure. Theory. Culture & Society 31(7/8): 137–161. Braun, B. 2014. A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(1): 49–64. Collier, S. and Lakoff, A. 2008. The Vulnerability of Vital Systems: How ‘Critical Infrastructure’ Became a Security Problem. In M. Dunn and Kristensen, K. (eds) Securing the Homeland: Critical Infrastructure, Risk and (In)security. London: Routledge, 17–39. Holling, C. S. 1973. Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4(1): 1–23. Neyrat, F. 2019. The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. New  York: Fordham University Press. Wakefield, S. and Braun, B. 2014. Governing the Resilient City. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(1): 4–11.

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Part IV Methods and Approaches: Beyond the Human/Nature Divide

Introduction How do we approach the Anthropocene condition? Given that the Anthropocene is us and we are the Anthropocene, it is quite clear that meaningful research on the Anthropocene condition requires approaches that actively engage with the kind of social change and transformation that we find ourselves in. In this vein, social science research on the Anthropocene has to develop methodologies that move beyond a mere measuring, monitoring and classifying, and overcome the role of the researcher as a neutral, invisible and disengaged observer. If we share the assumption that the Anthropocene is here to stay, we need to develop research methodologies that are precisely interested in exploring the Anthropocene condition by means of different perspectives, different forms of inquiry and different temporalities. This calls for alternative approaches that extend the classical role of the researcher towards one that is ‘situated’ and engages in the co-production of transdisciplinary knowledge. Science-technology studies and new materialism have created alternative viewpoints which reshape the relationality of the social world and allow for a radical shift in perspective. In the Anthropocene this refers, for instance, to alternative ontologies, which take ‘the weather’, ‘the ocean’, ‘mining’ or ‘waste’ as viewpoints from which Anthropocene entanglements can be understood in a different way, moving beyond anthropocentric boundaries. The contributions of this section take into account these calls for different methodologies and approaches. They suggest alternative ontologies, epistemologies, temporalities and research ethics.

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The first contribution, Anna Leander’s chapter ‘Collaging as a Method for IR in the Anthropocene’ recalls International Relations’ (IR’s) troubled relationship with methodology, which is all too often reduced to an oversimplified and rationalist form of knowledge production. This holds true also when considering that IR silences the ways our own discipline is entangled with the Anthropocene. Indeed, war and peace, security and risk, borders and regions or diplomacy and transnational relations are entangled with the Anthropocene, but IR scarcely takes this into account. To overcome this, the chapter introduces the method of collaging as an approach that allows a multifaceted understanding of the Anthropocene by bridging radically heterogeneous imageries, materials and processes and situating our own observations in the process. In doing so, the chapter engages with feminist, design and science and technology studies scholarship as well as with artworks. The second chapter, ‘Knowing of Ontologies: Map-Making to “See” Worlds of Relations’ by Caitlin Ryan, explores the method of ‘community mapping’ as a way of collective knowledge production of nature-society relations and environmental change. Empirically, this piece concentrates on the different ways in which ‘land’ is conceptualized by agribusiness companies and farming communities in Sierra Leone. Community mapping allows a co-production of knowledge that takes into account the concepts of people living with the land. In this case, the author and her co-researchers created a ‘living’ map of relationalities, which displays relations between people, ancestors, crops, chickens, goats and stones (among others). Through acting out these relations, communities can ‘show’ other understandings of the nature of being. The value of a method like this in the Anthropocene is that it decentres dominant ways of knowing the world. In this sense, mapping is a radically different method, as it reveals the limitations to Western notions of spatio-temporality, and decentres the researcher, in order to give greater voice to those often labelled as ‘subaltern’. ‘Spatializing the Environmental Apocalypse’, the third chapter, by Suvi Alt concentrates on the Anthropocene’s temporalities. It reveals connections between the concept of ‘environmental apocalypse’ in International Relations and a particular modern, Western interpretation of the Christian eschatological tradition that conceives of the apocalypse in decidedly temporal terms but disregards its spatial dimension. Drawing on postcolonial theology, the chapter develops a more nuanced, pluralized and political understanding of international relations and environmental politics in the Anthropocene and demonstrates how ‘the end of the world’ is, in fact, variably distributed across geographical, social and material divides in the present. In doing so, the chapter reflects on the importance of spatializing the environmental apocalypse

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through case studies from the field of food production, specifically, the politics of seeds that centres on the replacement of indigenous seeds by commercial varieties, while at the same time concentrating seed varieties at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The fourth chapter, ‘The Weather Is Always a Method’, by Harshavardhan Bhat, concentrates on weather, not simply as an object of knowledge but as a material knowledge system in the making and unmaking of IR itself. Offering an alternative ontology, this piece visualizes the ways in which weathers as methods inform IR in the Anthropocene and vice versa. The first part, titled ‘Wind’, thinks with rice as a commodity of monsoonal spaces, bringing it into conversation with the spatio-temporalities of IR. The second part, titled ‘Bodies’, engages with Black Studies and critical feminist scholarship that examines the lives and afterlives of transatlantic slavery and how some of that scholarship, embedded within IR, thinks and works with the weather. The third section, titled ‘Aerosols Against Meteorology’, is an invitation for speculation with the knowledge systems in/of airborne matters that we have come to deeply know. Overall, weathering and worlding the Anthropocene means to expose it as a material of drastic history and transformative violence. ‘Thought Experiment as Method: Science-Fiction and International Relations in the Anthropocene’, the fifth chapter, authored by Isabella Hermann, moves on to futurist perspectives by exploring climate and post-/ near-apocalypse science-fiction (SF) narratives. Science-fiction’s thought experiments, Hermann argues, are an exceptionally apt approach for understanding Anthropocene distortions due to their entirely open futures, utopias and alternative projections that transcend the separation of human, nature and space. However, the majority of blockbuster SF movies seem to echo well-­ known tropes of destruction and apocalypse while lacking the openness and radical creativity science-fiction perspectives have been praised for. Moreover, the movies in question keep on normalizing the Cartesian mindset that nature naturally should be cultivated to serve humans interests. The final chapter, ‘Disrupting Anthropocentrism Through Relationality’, by Jarrad Reddekop and Tamara Trownsell considers how we might develop an alternative perspective from the dominant one of anthropocentrism. They argue that this perspective, or ontological assumption which separates and centres the human, has framed how, in IR, we are able to see, question and interpret the world. Anthropocentrism has thereby delimited the ways in which the other beings we interact with are able to be engaged as responding, and the ways our own energies continually lend co-creative force to ‘how the world is’. Indeed, our existential assumptions can become self-fulfilling prophecies as the relational entailments of these decisions accrue over time, and function as common sense largely immune from questioning. Ontology,

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in other words, is something both thought and lived/practised in embodied ways, delimiting the terms of our sensual and linguistic being with the cosmos. Drawing, in particular, upon Amerindian indigenous concepts and perspectives, the chapter disrupts our commonsensical anthropocentrism and considers how alternative, relational, assumptions can inform different possible ways of approaching, understanding and responding to the crises of the Anthropocene.

19 Collaging as a Method for IR in the Anthropocene Anna Leander

Introduction The image of methods as being mainly (or even exclusively) about statistical techniques is surprisingly tenacious in the discipline of international relations (IR). Notwithstanding the long tradition of qualitative and critical scholarship and the equally longstanding struggle of those working in this tradition to reclaim methods—epitomized at least for me by Hans Georg Gadamer’s imposing and magisterial Wahrheit und Methode (Gadamer 1990 [1960])—it remains common, even among critical scholars, to associate methods with measuring, counting or statistics. Unfortunately, critical scholarship that distances itself from the obsessions of counting often replaces it with some other cookbook like notion of methodology (Leander 2017). Such reductive understandings of methods are generally problematic. For an IR, be it critical or otherwise, that is (or should be) acknowledging its responsibility in the Anthropocene, its disciplining effects are debilitating. It transforms

A. Leander (*) Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland Pontifical Catholic University (PUC), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_19

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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. This chapter focuses on one specific alternative: the method of collaging. The core argument is that adopting collaging as a method makes it possible to situate IR scholarship fully in the Anthropocene. 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. The prefix re- highlights that it is doing so working with existing problematizations and designs rather than against them or starting anew. This chapter shows how collaging as a method achieves this, making a collage with feminist, design and science and technology studies scholarship as well as with artworks (by Rosana Paulino, Stefan à Wengen and Tatiana Bilbao). This chapter does not dwell at any length on the faults or limitations of alternative methods by which IR scholars might wish to engage the Anthropocene. There simply is no space, and it is more useful to highlight what can be gained through the approach of collage rather than engage in settling academic argument by gladiatorial combat.

Collaging the Anthropocene It is easy to find the Anthropocene “wanting in precision” as Braidotti puts it (2019, 82). A steadily expanding wealth of definitions and conceptions are vying for our exclusive attention. This is annoying for IR scholars who would like a clearly defined problem that they could contribute to solving using their specific form of disciplinary knowledge and the methodologies associated with it. However, one of the reasons the Anthropocene is so “wanting in precision” is that it has become an umbrella term capturing a wide range of approaches acknowledging the importance of facing Gaia and therefore of “re-naturalizing politics” (Latour 2017). The other chapters in this volume (including Chap. 1) discuss and introduce many of these varying images and their contexts, assumptions and stakes. The point here is simply that this plurality of understandings and the related proliferation of terms have important methodological implications for IR scholars who may want to (and perhaps

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should want to) contribute to the discussion about the Anthropocene. They have to let go of the idea that their contribution would be focussed on a neatly defined problem—the problem of the Anthropocene—and instead realize that what they will be contributing to is the process of describing and defining the Anthropocene. Worse still, what they will be contributing to is not an exercise of finding a singular description or definition for an equally singular problem but to a plurality of descriptions through which the Anthropocene is being delimited and defined from a great variety of disciplinary perspectives. One of the most striking aspects of these descriptions (in emphatic plural) defining the Anthropocene is the awareness that these processes cannot be mono-perspectival. Rather, scholars collaborate across materials, sources, forms and disciplines ranging from those in the natural sciences to the humanities and arts. For Latour, this is an opportunity to be seized. For the first time, the natural sciences are inviting the humanities to collaborate and inversely the humanities are eager to engage with the natural sciences. “Facts of the world unite!” rallies (Latour 2017). The drawing together of disparate disciplinary insights facilitates the making of images of the Anthropocene where each image is composed of pieces from very many perspectives and disciplines and the images themselves are connected, but only partially and imperfectly. An argument from geology or literary theory may form part of several images, but there is no guarantee that it will be part of all of them. Gone with the idea of a unified, singular Anthropocene is also the idea that “inter-disciplinarity” is desirable because it allows each discipline to bring its specific piece to the construction of an image in the singular. The proverbial elephant of inter-disciplinarity can no longer fill its pedagogical functions. Drawing on an Indian story about six blind men trying to describe an elephant, the story has become a favourite analogy, justifying inter- or multi-­ disciplinary scientific endeavours. The blind men all say different things about the elephant as they get hold of its different parts (the trunk, the leg, the body, the tusks etc.). While contradictory, each man is correct, and each contributes a piece to the picture of an elephant. However, in the Anthropocene, where the focus is upon plurality and relations rather than fixed entities, the elephant has ceased to be a singular elephant. In fact, it may not be useful to think of it as an elephant at all. “Trans-disciplinarity” is not of much avail when it comes to grappling with something plural and emerging. It operates as a form of mono-disciplinarity running across different fields. It may be, for example, a biological evolutionary approach, a Foucauldian approach or a quantum physics that transverses disciplinary boundaries. Transdisciplinarity rests on the idea that there might be one specific logic that connects across the foci of varying disciplines.

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However, this mono-disciplinarity will always be rather too unified and singular. It reproduces a single image of the Anthropocene. It just does so across disciplines. In the process, it ignores the plurality and multiplicity and hence the core of the current discussions surrounding the Anthropocene. With the Anthropocene, we are facing the “destruction of the idea of the globe” as a singular space and instead the emergence of “multiple worlds” or “pluriverses” (Latour 2017; Law 2015). The images of the Anthropocene coexist, even if they are contradictory and indeed incompatible as do waves and particles in Quantum Theory. These images of the Anthropocene are different realities, not relativistic imaginaries. The Anthropocene, IR scholars are groping to come to terms with, is something that looks much more like a series of collages, each composed of a set of heterogeneous and possibly only partially connected or totally disconnected pieces. It is perhaps a world picture of sorts. But that picture looks like a collage. While this image may be neither novel nor unique to the Anthropocene and has much in common with the image of the world advanced by a long tradition of materialist scholarship (e.g. Braidotti 2019, 85–88), the debate around the Anthropocene has crystallized awareness of this. Since the well-­ trodden paths of inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary methodology do not take us far when we grapple with this plurality and proliferation of difference, perhaps we should ponder other paths? If the emerging Anthropocene resembles a collage, why not think of our methodologies, by which we are co-producing it, as collaging? Why not think of what we are doing as matter of adding pieces and generating connections, being mindful of what we leave out and what remains disconnected? I prefer this term to most of the other terms that are emerging in the literature on critical methodology; this is because it seems to capture the kind of un-­ disciplined or anti-disciplinary methodology required to come to grips with the Anthropocene, and not only for IR scholars. Some of these other terms, including the critical cartographies of Braidotti’s (2005) or Latour’s compositions (2010), have connotations of the orderly and well organized. Cartographies help us simplify a messy terrain. Compositions draw attention to orderly forms. Others such as Strathern’s patchworks (2005) or Haraway’s string-figures (2013) refer to one specific materiality—patchworks are made of cloth and string-figures of yarn—and therefore de-­ emphasize the significance of heterogeneous material (cf. Leander 2019, 2020 for a more detailed perspective). Hence, even if these methodologies have much in common, I collaging most realistically and therefore also most helpfully captures what is involved methodologically when grappling with the Anthropocene. Before doing so, however, I would like to insist on two reasons why the more radical connotations of collaging, in terms of methodological

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openness and heterogeneity, are a helpful, perhaps necessary, check on the disciplining disciplinary processes hampering IR scholars from situating themselves within the Anthropocene. The first reason is that it encourages the modesty that is not only an absolutely essential scholarly virtue—as argued by scholars as diverse as Bourdieu (2000), Bobbio (2014) or Braidotti (2019)—but also a scholarly quality necessary in order to accept the radical methodological openness called for when grappling with our own place in co-producing the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene “is much less addressable by modernist constructions and assumptions; it is more contingent, plural and complex: thereby less amenable to the applications of ‘technological solutionism’ or ‘lessons learned’, which can be generalised and applied” (Chandler 2018, 3). Approaching the Anthropocene (from IR or elsewhere) goes hand in hand with the humbling realization that our own knowledge contributes, but one of the pieces of the Anthropocene which, even if very important and true, remains only ever partial. Methodologically such a realization implies or, more strongly, demands an acceptance of the methodological plurality underpinning these pieces, including when this plurality contradicts our own understandings of appropriate methodology. This approach obviously also requires an acceptance that the methodology underpinning work in other disciplines such as geology, archeology, philosophy or literary studies may have to be accepted even if it plainly contradicts our own methodological convictions. Even more challenging, it requires accepting that a plurality of contradictory and incompatible methodologies in our own field is called for (Stengers 2008). In other words, it requires giving up on methodology as the core tool for disciplinary disciplining, establishing belonging and hierarchies in the field of IR and instead seeing methodologies as opening new avenues and contesting the boundaries of disciplinary fields. The second reason for taking collaging as a methodology is that by drawing attention to multiplicity and heterogeneity, it also underscores the importance of disconnections and discontinuities, thereby offering a check on the disciplining effect of the IR discipline. Collaging serves as a reminder for IR scholars that also non-action and silence are forms of action with performative effects and that intentions and outcomes are two different things. In that sense, taken a step further, the collage methodology comes with the possibly disturbing realization that even if IR scholars do not intend their knowledge to contribute to the production of any of the possible images of the Anthropocene, they may still be doing precisely that. We live in the age of unintended consequences (Braidotti and Fuller 2019). Or, perhaps we have been in that age for longer than we like to admit (Box 19.1)?

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Box 19.1  Rosana Paulino As Rosana Paulino captures in her many explorations of the racialized, gendered, political subjectivities in contemporary Brazil, the sciences are deeply complicit and need to take responsibility by probing the truths and legacies they have produced. With her installation “Wall of Memory,” of which The Settlement is part she recalls the way the sciences have contributed to the digitally mediated, material, visual and sensory memory and present of racial relations entangled with slavery in Brazil (Fig. 19.1). This is not because the scientists involved necessarily intended this. It was the effect of what they did and probably did mostly without thinking they were doing it. The scientists who were involved in the classifications, measurements and documentation were concerned with science and truth not with how their work was making up the racialized, gendered subjectivities. Their work however was inscribed, lived on and was transformed in the socio-material relations of Brazil, and eventually picked up in Paulino’s work such as the “Wall of Memory.” As these scientists were complicit in the making of racial subjectivities, so IR scholars are complicit in co-producing the Anthropocene.

Fig. 19.1  Rosana Paulino, “Assentamento” [The Settlement]. Mixed media and video. Dimension variable. 2013, Artist collection. (Image taken at MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro)

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Insisting on discontinuities and disconnections, collaging helpfully directs attention to such complicities. IR silences the ways our own discipline is entangled with the Anthropocene and thereby is a form of complicity with the productions of the Anthropocene. War and peace, security and risk, borders and regions or diplomacy and transnational relations are reshuffled or entangled with the Anthropocene, but IR remains silent on the subject. Collaging enables us to direct attention to these disciplining effects generated by the discipline and indeed undercuts the active silencing of those interested in speaking about the disconnections and their significance on the grounds that their methodologies and approaches are unfitting. Instead, it underlines the need to turn IR’s silences and disconnections into a central object of investigation and is therefore an important part of ensuring that IR scholars and the discipline as a whole become more cognizant of our contribution to collaging the Anthropocene. In sum, the point Barad makes about Queer Feminist Theory (QFT) can readily be restated for IR (and that obviously includes critical IR): For all its entangled history with capitalism, colonialism, and the military-­industrial complex, IR [QFT in original] not only contains its own undoing—in a performative exploration/materialization of a subversive materialism—but in an important sense makes that very undoing its im/proper object of study. (Barad 2015, 413 original italics)

Working with collaging enables attending to such im/proper objects. It also, of course, awakens the spectre of a discipline in dissolution that has been a driving force for disciplining moves in IR since its inception as an academic discipline (Guzzini 1992). There are good reasons for this anxiety pertaining to institutional politics and resources, which it is suicidal to underestimate for all IR scholars. However, perhaps considering life in the IR discipline as being at one with this spectre of dissolution may be necessary at least if that life is to be one enabling and empowering IR scholars to co-produce descriptions of the Anthropocene.

Collaging to (Re-)problematize the Anthropocene It matters which images of the Anthropocene are produced and presented. Each image draws attention to a specific aspect of the Anthropocene. In so doing, it opens up a specific problematization that pulls in different kinds of expertise and makes the world actionable in specific ways. As Braidotti points

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out, “what is at stake in the discussions about the Anthropocene is the issue of how power is constructed and distributed today” (Braidotti 2019, 82). It is therefore only logical that the Anthropocene has spurred a wide-ranging variety of Anthropomemes (ibid.)1 such as the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, the Anthrobscene, the Plastic-scene and beyond. These Anthropomemes are struggles over how to conceptualize the Anthropocene and attempts to alter the way it is being problematized. Each Anthropomeme resonates with sensibilities concerning marginalized or naturalized out of existence by the other prevailing understandings of the Anthropocene. So too does each more or less explicit definition of the Anthropocene. Braidotti herself, for example, shares with Chakrabarty (2016) and many others a concern with the performative effects of problematizations focused mainly or even exclusively on the preoccupations of dominant interests. Scholarship geared to the Anthropocene is marred by a “distinct bias towards the anxieties of dominant cultures, ethnic groups and classes” (Braidotti 2019, 82). For IR scholars, thinking about how to approach the Anthropocene methodologically, collaging is a way of retaining a sensitivity to this deeply political process of multiple problematizations and the tensions between them. It is also a way of remaining cognizant of the political possibilities of driving wedges into the cracks separating them to shift the images of the Anthropocene rather than attempting to adjudicate which of the multiple images is more correct or fitting. The plurality of problematizations and the tensions they generate become a political resource, to be drawn upon to understand politics and intervene. They can usefully direct attention to “the bias towards the anxieties of dominant cultures” Braidotti mentions and they can be mobilized to counter this bias. Thinking methodologically in terms of collages is important also for a second reason that goes beyond the way it opens up for thinking ideationally about what kinds of problems are constituted by the Anthropocene. It makes room for the material aspects of this constitution. As with compositional methods more generally, collaging draws attention to the heterogeneous materiality of politics (Latour 2010). It provides a way out of “the humanistic hubris,” the “human exceptionalism” inherent in assuming that humans are somehow independent and separate from their environment, including the way it is expressed in tools, infrastructures and bodies (respectively, Braidotti 2019, 3 and Chandler 2018, 19). Instead, working with collages, focusing on heterogeneity and discontinuities makes it easier to take fully into account the ways in which the human and the humanities are materially entangled. Also understanding, thinking and writing are fundamentally material processes.  She borrows the expression and idea from The Guardian journalist Macfarlane.

1

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Changes in our systems of recording—or what Kittler terms “discourse networks”—including the event of the typewriter, the radio and the gramophone alter how we think and write (Kittler 1990, 1999). We have become so deeply entangled with our digital environments that it may be important to begin asking if computers are becoming our “mothers” and how this digital entanglement is transforming “how we think,” read, teach, learn and work and of course how all of this matters for those excluded from the digital (Hayles 2005, 2012). When we grapple with problematizations of the Anthropocene, including its thematic exclusions and hierarchies, these material entanglements are and remain crucial. They are not only an obvious part of the subject matter of the Anthropocene and therefore something we need to attend to as an object of study and observation. As just suggested, material entanglement is also integral to our observation and thinking and hence to the (multiple) processes problematizing the Anthropocene. For example, when interested in problematizing climate change, we are not only working with a range of material shifts such as those in CO2 levels, but this work itself is undertaken in a materially entangled manner. The various technologies of measurement and observation through which we observe the shifts, the multiple indicators for comparing them, our visualizations of information are integral to our (multiple) problematizations of the issue. Collaging is useful as it is geared to cultivating this multiplicity of material entanglements that is involved in the multiple and contradictory problematizations of the Anthropocene, including those to which we as IR scholars contribute (including through our silences). Adopting collaging as a methodology allows scholars to understand and contribute to the (re-)problematizing of the Anthropocene as a materially entangled process. If followed through, the argument about material entanglements logically leads to a need for the materiality of the process of knowing to be accounted for. The implications are momentous. “In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is: matter is condensations of responses, of response-ability,” as Barad puts it (2017, 401 original italics). As Barad makes clear, taking full account of the material enables scholarship to grapple with knowing beyond language, with sense-making broadly defined, and with the place of affect and of the unthought. Scholars find themselves in a context where indeed the “Kantian problematic of the Sublime has become inescapable” (Grove and Chandler 2017, 80). The consequence is that in addition to focusing on the assembling of socio-material, relational networks scholars also have to focus on the aesthetic, affective and symbiotic processes in composing (Austin 2019, 253–255) (Box 19.2).

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Box 19.2  Stefan à Wengen Stefan à Wengen explores such processes. In the series The Mission (details in Fig. 19.2), for example, he does so attending specifically to the colonial process. The empty shed in ruins. Nature turned destructive. The absence of people, cultures and languages. By bringing together a range of unrelated elements, Wengen’s image recalls the desolation following in the wake of this Mission and of Civilizing Missions more generally. He does so, working through affect and the resonance of the collaging aesthetics. Linear readings of the colonial cannot and will not capture the uncanny resonance of this disjointed aesthetics. At the same time, the disjunctures, the unexpected sculpture and the colouring of the shed and of the sky recall that there is scope for intervention and for agency. The disjointed pieces of the collage might be assembled differently and generate other resonances, opening for other problematizations. Analogously, using collaging methods could helpfully provide IR scholars with ways into re-­ problematizing the Anthropocene in a manner which mobilizes the material and aesthetic effects of composing.

Fig. 19.2  Stefan à Wengen, “The Mission VIII”, 2007; 185 x 265 cm; Acrylic on Canvas; Private Collection, Courtesy: Beck & Eggeling, Düsseldorf

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Collaging as a methodology re-problematizes the Anthropocene by drawing attention not only to the politics of agendas but also to the heterogeneous materialities and the affective and aesthetic processes that are crucial in forming them. The consequence of this for how we conceive of critical scholarship is far reaching. The classical ideal of reflexivity as the core virtue of critical scholarly practice fades into the background. Kant’s solution “to barricade himself behind the fortifications of self-reflective consciousness—to withdraw from the world into the certitudes of the mind” (Grove and Chandler 2017, 81) will not bring us very far. Rather, we need to venture into a terrain of the materially entangled and the “unthought.” A place of resonance rather than reason. A “weird” place of recursively looping knowing involving material subjects (Braidotti 2019, 83). In this weird place, “what happens ‘sticks’ with us, like Styrofoam cups or plastic bags that stay in the environment and do not degrade in a human lifetime” (Chandler 2018, 8). In fact, “what happens” does more than stick to our skin or litter nature. The particles of Styrofoam and plastic bags move inside us with the food we eat and the water we drink. They stick with us from within. They become part of us. So does the Anthropocene more generally. Our merging with the Anthropocene annuls (critical) distance. The prospects of developing and pursuing conventional emancipatory projects anchored in reflexive re-problematizations therefore fade. Where politics is about resonance rather than reason, affect rather than thought and aesthetics rather than logic, reflexivity has a limited purchase. As Chandler posits, “the affirmative politics of the Anthropocene is thus an inversion of the critical focus upon finding hope or meaning in the world … There can be no basis for hope. It is precisely hope—the flight from the reality of the destruction wrought by modernity—that the Anthropocene is held to bring to an end” (2019, 701 italics in original). On the one hand, working with collaging as a methodology leads us to this place where there is no way around the material and affective and of an “affirmative politics” taking this fully into account. On the other hand, collaging also offers alternative forms of intervention that work with the material and aesthetic affective. In so doing, it offers a route away from the hopeless place of non-agency, where affirming destruction is the only option available to critical scholarship—a route that leads to rethinking intervention, emancipation and the space for critical scholarship in a manner allowing for forms of hope.

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Collaging to Re-design in the Anthropocene Grappling with the politics of the Anthropocene is challenging for a wide range of reasons, including those just discussed. The challenge, however, has done much more than generate hopelessness and paralysis for critical scholars and others. It has been a major source of political rethinking and activism as Hayles rightly remarks (2017, 34). Both academically and practically, it has galvanized reflection around what it means to act politically in a world where the pervasiveness of the material and aesthetic aspects of politics and agency are fully acknowledged, where “the Sublime has become inescapable” to reiterate Grove and Chandler’s formulation. Quite logically, in such a context, forms of political agency anchored in and working through the material aesthetic have grown in importance. Various forms of art have therefore come to figure centrally both as forms of observation and as ways of communicating knowledge across the social and natural sciences. The aesthetic, visual and narrative turns in IR are part of this trend. The Politics of Design/Politics as Design is an overarching heading under which these trends are discussed (Austin and Leander fc. 2021). This is no coincidence. Design, traditionally conceived, engages precisely with the aesthetic materiality of the world we inhabit and re-enact. It is also often associated with forms of political activism. The Forensic Architectures project, for example, has used design to rethink evidence, memory and present-day politics across a range of issues ranging from those surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestine to migration across the Mediterranean (Weizman 2017; Heller and Pezzani 2019). De-colonial scholars use it to imagine and enact transformative politics affirming a pluriverse of different worlds (Escobar 2018; Mignolo 2012). With regard to the Anthropocene specifically, Fry proposes that precisely because of its material aspects, working with design is necessary if we are to generate “sustainment” and interrupt the processes of “de-futuring” in a context where politics, indeed, is in the design and design therefore is politics (Fry 2010). A final reason IR scholars may wish to adopt collaging as methodology for approaching the Anthropocene is that it is a way of articulating the contribution of IR to this kind of critical scholarship, working through design, that also allows IR scholars to negotiate some of the most obvious pitfalls of designing. The hubris of associating design too closely with the designer in the singular is the most obvious such pitfall. It turns design into something done by  an intentional individual who devises grand schemes; the avant-garde activists rearranging politics in their own guise. Such images are problematic

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for any approach that purports to seriously give a place to the material agencies or self-organizing systems in the process of designing order (Austin 2019, 257). They are also politically nefarious. They necessarily gloss over differences and effectively quell all worlds but one. By assuming that “we are in this together,” they fail to acknowledge the multiplicity of that “we.” Collaging suggests an alternative to this focus on the designer. Collages are the antonym of the grand plan. Collaging cultivates a sensibility for the productive effects of textures and to the material expressions, diversity, frictions and contradictions they generate. It is a way of consciously striving to make space for multiple registers and logics. It is a way of ensuring that the noise of a singular understanding of progress does not make it impossible for us to hear the noise of other temporalities (Tsing 2015). As a master of the art of collage put the point more generally, the collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the accidentally or artificially provoked encounter of two or more foreign realities on a seemingly incongruous level—and the spark of poetry that leaps across the gap as these two realities are brought together. (Max Ernst cited in Berger 2008)

Collaging, in short, works through respect for the material, in a manner expressing emergent, unexpected “foreign realities” beyond logocentric schemata. The image of design associated with it is participatory and critical. It is a form of design ensuring that users are in focus and that they are actively involved. The design itself encourages critical engagement and the transformative developments this triggers (Andersen and Pold 2018, 161–163; Dunne and Raby 2013) (Box 19.3). Box 19.3  Tatiana Bilbao Tatiana Bilbao’s architectural designs express such a collaging vision of design geared specifically towards inclusion and keeping a space open for critical work. Bilbao’s overarching aim is to involve the socio-economically disenfranchised in composing their own sustainable homes. To this end, she provides modules that are combinable in ways and in sequences decided by the users. Furthermore, the users finalize the design of the modules themselves as they have a say in the choice of materials, colours and textures. Moreover, they are involved in deciding how the houses they construct will be connected to their surroundings. The ambition is to provide those who cannot afford to buy a house, with the possibility of constructing one over time and changing it to fit but also to shape the evolving socio-material environment and indeed to transform this environment in the process (Bilbao 2018). Not surprisingly, Bilbao often re-presents her own work in collage form (as in Fig. 19.3).

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Fig. 19.3  Tatiana Bilbao, “Ways of Life”, (image used for advertising the exhibition dedicated to Bilbao at the Louisiana Museum, Denmark [2017])

Finally, in addition to moving design thinking from the individual designer to the material and the multiple, adopting collaging as a methodology is helpful because it leaves scope and flexibility for negotiating the hurdles of working and intervening in complex and heterogeneous contexts. Working with collaging in other words is a way of accepting that hierarchies cannot necessarily be flattened or disbanded and that, therefore, working with the hierarchies, disturbing them, while “staying with the trouble,” may be necessary (Haraway 2016). We have to display a “willingness to work with, rather than against, the actors in the domain of application; one that is collaborative rather than imperious; modest rather than megalomaniac; and wishing to learn rather than itching to instruct” (Mol 2002, 164). Collaborationism becomes a crucial qualifier for such academic work (Leander 2020). This emphasis on working with, on collaborating, is bound to sound unappealing to many critical scholars. Working with implies losing control not only over processes but also over outcomes, particularly if the working with is motivated by the need to collaborate in a messy and complex, shifting world of material and affective politics. Gone is the confidence in the ability of critical scholarship to lead and direct. Worse still, working with displaces critical scholarship from the safety of the moral high grounds from which it could once upon a time judge the world while designing superior plans for it. Collaboration is ethically problematic not only in war times. Working with

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necessarily turns critical scholarship into something impure and dirty. When re-designing through collaging, an IR scholar, “like any other political actor, will get things wrong because, rather than in spite, of what they intended” (Hutchings 2018, 188) formulation. However, if the argument above is correct, these are the terms for intervening to re-design in the Anthropocene.

Conclusion Reflecting on what is required methodologically for IR scholars to engage the Anthropocene is humbling. This is true not only when reflecting on the requirements imposed by any ambition to re-design but also when reflecting on what it takes to re-problematize or even to simply represent the Anthropocene. Humility is called for to rethink the standing of our own methods, their ability to grasp complex material and aesthetic processes, and the critical interventions they might generate and guide. In this chapter, I have argued that collaging is a methodology that is imbued with the kind of humility called for. Collaging works with the ready-made and found in all its ugly or appealing variety. It makes space for the variability and variety of what might be involved. While therefore permeated by the powers-that-be, collaging necessarily remains open about how to understand and negotiate them. This modesty comes at the cost of scientific certitudes sealed by standardized methods, ensured by established disciplines and deeply entrenched authorities. This is and should be unsettling. It challenges the foundations of academic work and authority. In the present context, this is particularly disquieting as it is grist for the mill of an anti-expert/anti-knowledge populism eager to undermine the authority of science (of all and any kind). It may therefore be important to underline that the radical questioning through collaging, advocated for here, is helpful not only to IR scholars in search of a methodology for grappling with the Anthropocene. Critical scholarship, and associated methodologies, including collaging, may be crucial for defending the sciences more generally. It unsettles stultifying traditional institutional structures, that are both a core impediment to IR engagement with the Anthropocene and a core reason the populist critique of academic knowledge is so persuasive. Critical methodologies, including collaging, are heuristic devices that help us grasp the play of power, including sciences in an age of anti-knowledge populism. Although unsettling and potentially nerve-racking, methods such as collaging are therefore politically vital for IR scholars engaging the Anthropocene and beyond.

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Key Points  Collaging could help IR scholars reflecting on which methodologies to adopt when studying the Anthropocene. The main reasons outlined in this chapter are the following: 1. Representing the Anthropocene requires bridging radically heterogeneous materials and processes and situating our own observations in the process. Collaging is a methodological approach well suited for this because it is radically anti-disciplinary and imposes modesty and realism regarding our own place in co-producing the Anthropocene. 2. Collaging is helpful for problematizing the Anthropocene. By being attuned to the multiple, the discontinuous and the heterogeneous, it makes it possible to attend properly to the material and the affective/aesthetic aspects of problematization. 3. Since the politics of the Anthropocene is entangled with material, affective and aesthetic processes, critical interventions work with and through their design. Approaching design as a process of collaging distances it from the authoritarian designer and instead ensures that design can remain critical and participatory. Key Questions  1. When collaging, there is potentially an infinity of materials to draw on and likewise techniques for connecting them. How can we approach this plurality and choose which of these to work with? How do we handle the omissions, tensions and contradictions such inescapable choices implicate? 2. How does collaging help us make “theoretical contributions”? What form can these theoretical contributions take? 3. How should we communicate findings based on collages? What forms of writing and dissemination are best suited for this purpose? 4. By what kind of criteria can we evaluate work done with collaging?

Further Readings Austin, J.  L. 2019. Security Compositions. European Journal of International Security 4(3): 249–73. Easterling, K. 2012. We Will Be Making Active Form. Architectural Design 82(5): 58–63.

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References Andersen, C. U. and Pold, S. B. 2018. The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds. Boston: MIT Press. Austin, J. L. and Leander, A. 2021 forthcoming. Designing-with/in World Politics.  Austin, J.  L. 2019. Security Compositions. European Journal of International Security 4(3): 249–73. Barad, K. 2015. Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21(2–3): 387–422. Barad, K. 2017. Troubling Time/S and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable. New Formations 92: 56–86. Berger, B. 2008. Collage, Frottage, Grattage… Max Ernst’s Artistic Techniques. Retrieved from https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/max-­ ernst/collage-­frottage-­grattage/ [accessed 14 February 2021]. Bilbao, T. 2018. A House Is Not Just a House: Projects on Housing. New York: Columbia University Press. Bobbio, N. 2014. Elogio Della Mitezza E Altri Scritti. Il saggiatore. Bourdieu, P. 2000. Special Issue of Theory, Culture and Society on La Ruse De La Raison. Theory, Culture and Society 17 (1). Braidotti, R. 2005. A Critical Cartography of Feminist post-­Postmodernism. Australian Feminist Studies 20(47): 169–80. Braidotti, R. 2019. Posthuman Knowledge. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Braidotti, R., and Fuller, M. 2019. The Posthumanities in an Era of Unexpected Consequences. Theory, Culture & Society 36(6): 3–29. Chakrabarty, D. 2016. Whose Anthropocene? A Response. RCC Perspectives 2: 101–14. Chandler, D. 2018. Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking. London: Routledge. Chandler, D. 2019. The Death of Hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene. Globalizations 16(5): 695–706. Dunne, A. and Raby, F. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Boston: MIT Press. Escobar, A. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press. Fry, T. 2010. Design as Politics. Oxford: Berg.

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20 Knowing of Ontologies: Map-Making to ‘See’ Worlds of Relations Caitlin Ryan

Introduction 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. If, as Scott argues, ontology is “the investigation and theorization of diverse experiences and understandings of the nature of being itself ” (2013, 859), then a question follows: 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 to 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. The value of a method like this is that it decenters dominant ways of knowing the world. For studying International Relations (IR) in the

C. Ryan (*) International Relations and International Organization, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_20

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Anthropocene, this is essential for two reasons. Firstly, because as IR scholars we have a responsibility for understanding the relations of power implicated in the Anthropocene and, relatedly, because a method that decenters dominant ways of knowing also forces us to consider who is the subject of knowledge. When I look at a plot of community land in rural Sierra Leone, I cannot see the ancestors. I can see a diverse range of crops—cassava, upland rice, groundnuts, maize, sorghum, oil palm, mango trees, bennie seed, but I cannot see the ancestors who are helping these crops to flourish. I can see a stream, but not the river spirit that inhabits it. I can maybe even see a few sheep or goats, but I cannot see which of these sheep belongs to the ancestors. When I look at a plot of community land in Sierra Leone, I understand the growing season as linear time, not as a circular overlapping of past, present, and future. I may not be able to see the ancestors, but I can understand that this is a question of not being able to see them, rather than a matter of not believing what community members telling me about them. It is also okay that I cannot see them—I do not have a need for ‘proof ’ of their existence, nor do I have a need to ‘become’ like my interlocutors. What I do hope for is that someone is willing to talk to me about the ancestors so that I can better recognize the limits of my way of knowing, my own illiteracy. I started to think about this—the not seeing—as part of a wider project that examined large-scale agribusiness investment in Northern Sierra Leone. Before leaving for Sierra Leone, I had read a lot about how ‘land’ has a multitude of meanings, depending on who you talk to. It was not hard for me to accept that my knowledge of what land ‘is’ is limited, partial, situated in my own experience, and shaped not only by the fact that I am a white woman who comes from a settler colony but also by a Western way of thinking about the relations between time and space. I also had an assumption that investing companies equally had a limited, partial, and situated understanding of land. However, I was skeptical that those partaking in the decision-making processes, about where to invest or what to plant, had reflected upon the partiality and particularness of their knowledge. In fact, the ‘logic’ of plantation agriculture is that it is endlessly replicable, universal, and non-situated. So, I was curious—how did this ‘universal’ ontology of land relate to how local communities know land? This curiosity left me with a further puzzle—how could I get an idea about how communities know land? My first idea was one that ultimately reflects my illiteracy (and ultimately the limits of my own way of knowing). I thought, at first, that the answer was to get people to make maps of their community, on the ground, and to talk about them. I had to grapple with the wrongness

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of my thinking and adjust my ‘method’ to something that was much more conducive to expressing another way of knowing. This chapter is about the ‘method’ that we used to have conversations about ancestors and land, and how this matters for confronting the limits of ‘knowing’ in the Anthropocene, and suggests that what ‘knowing of ’ multiple ways of knowing might force us to confront is that, as Yusoff points out, there is no such thing as neutral way of knowing in the Anthropocene (Yusoff 2018). I start by confronting a broader (epistemological) problem and offering ways of thinking with that problem by drawing on ideas about the subject of knowledge, temporality, and extraction (Garuba 2013; Hunt 2014; Todd 2016; Yusoff 2018). Following this, I illustrate how the ‘method’ worked in communities in Sierra Leone. The final section explains why this matters for International Relations and the Anthropocene.

Knowing of Other Ways of Knowing A first challenge to knowing other ways of knowing comes from a question of temporality. This is clearly relevant to IR in the Anthropocene, which, after all, makes a claim of being in a particular epoch. There is a lot of debate about where to ‘place’ the start of the epoch in time as well as about why this matters (Davis and Todd 2017; Yusoff 2018). It is not the point to revisit these debates here. However, I do draw from them to make a point about the ‘problem’ of linear temporality and how knowing of other ways of knowing requires destabilizing the notion that time is always only linear. After this, I move to a question of who is the ‘subject’ of knowledge in knowing of other ways of knowing. Taken together, these two discussions help to point to some of the (epistemological) difficulties in knowing of other ways of knowing. Starting from an assumption that time is linear might feel like it can be taken for granted. After all, this forms one of the foundational elements of Western thought, as evidenced by the emphasis on progress or moving forward. This points to a ‘neat’ conceptualization of the relationships between the past, present, and future. The line of thinking within most Anthropocene debates follows a similar understanding of temporality—there was a previous epoch (Holocene) and through Man’s actions (variously defined and delimited), we are in this current epoch. So, if this is the fundamental assumption of temporality in Western thought, what happens if we admit that this is not the only way to understand temporality? Grasping this, and its implications, is a bit difficult. If you find this to be the case for yourself, you might then also ask why it is that the idea of linear time is so dominant to your way of

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knowing the world that you struggle to even comprehend that it might be otherwise. There are different ways to see this ‘problem’. One might be to say that there is no such problem at all—time is always only linear, it only moves in one direction, and there is only the present that is ‘present’ at this moment. Closure to other ways of knowing is regrettable, but there is not much that can be done about it. This problem can also be seen in ontological terms— that you might be able to acknowledge that your idea of time is in fact ontological, but that it is impossible to come to terms with the idea that there are alternatives. There is also an epistemological way to see this problem. That is to say, that you can acknowledge that this is fundamentally a question of ontology, and you can acknowledge that there must be alternatives (other ontologies) but that the impossibility lies with being able to know the world differently. This, I think, is the most productive way to see this problem—it acknowledges that ontologies cannot just be picked up off a rack and changed like a sweater. Instead, it sees the problem of temporality as a product of a particular ontological view, while admitting that there must be other particular ontological views, and therefore, the trouble is not with knowing that alternatives exist, but rather with being unable to know the world differently. This is more productive because it starts from seeing one’s own worldview as particular and limited, and one’s own ability to know the world as inherently limited. Here, we can come back to why this matters in the Anthropocene briefly, before returning to an epistemological muddling through of what it might mean to know of other ways of knowing. One might argue that part of what has contributed to ‘us’ getting to the Anthropocene has been a great deal of hubris—a failure to recognize the always limited ways we have of knowing, along with a stubborn insistence that the most important goal is progress. This has been at the expense of other ways of knowing and being in the world. Colonial expansion, the global slave trade, transnational capitalism, and ecological destruction—all of these are commonly built on ideas that there is only one way to know and act in the world and that a desire for progress is what defines what it is to be ‘human’. Knowing of other ways to know time is therefore essential to undermining the ontological claim that there is no alternative to the temporal line of past– present–future. This does not mean that you (or I) will be able to know of time otherwise, but rather, the acceptance of the limitations to our ways of knowing serves as a step in dismantling the way of knowing that made possible a truly planetary scale of devastation and violence.

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A second question follows from this—if we are able to know of other ways of knowing, then who is the subject of that knowledge and what do we do with it? This brings us to something that must be avoided in order for this knowing of to challenge rather than reproduce violence and marginalization. Where Indigenous ways of knowing have been represented, it is often through the assumption that ‘we’, the Western scholar/author/reader, are the subjects of knowledge. This reduces other ways of knowing to abstractions or stories, which ‘we’ convert to ‘knowledge’. Zoe Todd confronts us with an uncomfortable effect of the limitations we place on Indigenous knowledge when we view it as ‘stories’. “It is easier for Euro-Western people to tangle with a symbolic polar bear on a Greenpeace website or in a tweet than it is to acknowledge arctic Indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems and legal-political realities” (Todd 2016, 6). Here, it is also necessary to take a brief interlude to explain how I use the term ‘Indigenous’ in this chapter. I follow the example of Linda Tuhiwai Smith and use it to refer to a ‘network of peoples’ who “share experiences as peoples who have been subjected to colonization of their lands and cultures, and the denial of their sovereignty by a colonizing society that has come to dominate and determine the shape and quality of their lives, even after it has formally pulled out” (Tuhiwai Smith 2012, 7). The ‘inclusion’ of Indigenous histories alone is not enough: “While it may serve to change the imperialistic tendencies in Euro-Western knowledge production, Indigenous histories are still regarded as story and process—an abstracted tool of the West” (Watts 2013, 28). Further, there is a risk that treating Indigenous ways of knowing as ‘stories’ risks relegating Indigenous communities to the ‘historical past’ as relics of a ‘past’ way of being. As Narendran Kumarakulasingam and Mvuselelo Ngcoya point out, there is no epistemic division between historical and non-historical; rather, there is are always “transgressions between modern/traditional” (2016, 857). Local knowledge is dynamic. It is not a ‘storehouse’ and also not a discrete entity. Other ways of knowing are not stories that we can tell—for one, they are not stories, but realities (Watts 2013). Further, this implies that Indigenous ways of knowing are in need of interpretation and analysis and processing to move from being ‘local knowledge’ to ‘Knowledge’—this comes back to the question of who is the subject of knowledge and why this matters for IR in the Anthropocene. Continuing to assert that IR is the subject of knowledge in the Anthropocene and that Indigenous knowledge is an object that ‘we’ can know and make use of to ‘save’ ourselves reproduces the way of knowing that got ‘us’ to ‘here’.

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This matters deeply for the method I explain in the next section. The point of the method (and of explaining what Temne communities taught me) is not to claim that I can convert ‘local knowledge’ to ‘Knowledge’. Researchers need to be keenly aware of the power relations implicated in the extraction and processing of knowledge (Tilley 2017). It is not the case that ‘local knowledge’ needs to be converted or processed in this textbook chapter to be valid, nor can I claim any right to know Temne worldviews—I hope to only be able to claim to know of them. I hope that what this method may also do, is to make the ‘researcher’ think carefully about knowledge production ‘in the Anthropocene’. Namely, by calling into question who the subject of knowledge is, whose knowledge ‘counts’, and why these questions are essential to account for the extinctions already undergone by black and Indigenous peoples.

‘Mapping’ Ancestors It is first worthwhile to mention a few things about the research team that used this method and the place where we used it. Firstly, an explanation of the ‘we’—I was part of a research team comprised of two research brokers, Mafudia Kamara and Osman Gbassey Kamara, who have expertise in agricultural extension and a graduate student, Deborah Bakker, from my university. We spent 12 weeks in Port Loko district, Northern Sierra Leone, and visited 27 communities with land under lease to agribusiness investors, and 6 communities with no land under lease. Northern Sierra Leone has a long history of global connections—from the slave trade to iron ore extraction and now a boom in agribusiness. The majority of communities in Port Loko district are Temne-speaking, and most are farmers using a range of innovative low-input farming methods. ‘Mapping’ is not really a perfect term to describe the method we used in Northern Sierra Leone, but I use it as a term because it points (vaguely) to two things the method does—firstly, because of my own illiteracy of Temne ontologies, the ‘maps’ created for me render some elements of this way of knowing legible to me—much as a topographic map renders ‘legible’ how steep a trail up the side of a mountain might be. You cannot really know how you will experience the climb from the map, but you begin to get an idea. Secondly, if maps help make relations visible (the location of this in relation to that, the size of this in relation to that), then the maps that were made for me rendered visible some of the social relations between ancestors, farmers, crops, animals, streams, trees, land, and more.

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I will start by explaining what I got wrong with my first method of mapping and how the method evolved through conversations amongst the research team. I will then use an example from a ‘map’ to show how the revised method of mapping begins to make me a little less illiterate of Temne ways of knowing. The first form of mapping we used was adapted from Participatory Rural Appraisal, a technique for making development programming more participatory (Narayanasamy 2009). I originally designed the method to try to get representations of what communities ‘looked like’ by asking people to make ‘a map, on the ground, of what you have in your community’. I made this request early in community meetings, and people generally responded by sending one person into the center of the circle, with a stick or piece of charcoal, to ‘draw’ the community on the ground. In some communities, this was relatively participatory, and in others, it involved one man giving directions to the person in the middle about what to do, and everyone else looking on. We did get pictures of what the communities looked like, but they were forced renderings of dynamic, social spaces into flat representations. They were boring. More importantly, during the process of mapping, people looked bored, or annoyed. One of the research brokers, taking notes of the ‘side talk’ people engaged in during community meetings, noted down that someone said that we were making them (the community) look ‘like fools’ by asking them to do something like this. From that day, we stopped this method of ‘mapping’ and started having conversations, as a team, about what we could do instead. I thought I knew, from reading ethnographies of rural Sierra Leone, that Temne ontologies include a spatial and temporal overlap of worlds—the world we see overlaps with worlds of ancestors and of witches (Shaw 2002). It was these worlds I wanted to hear about, not the ‘flat’ world where someone draws a road on the ground. So, as a team, we started to talk about how we could use a method of mapping that would (1) not be a source of annoyance or aggravation or boredom for our interlocutors and (2) allow people to show us how they think about worlds, the social relations bound up in them, and how this relates to land as something that cannot be rendered into a flat space. The maps I asked communities to make involved such representations, demonstrations, and the bringing of objects, in response to asking questions about how people relate to one another, the land, and ancestral spirits through ritual practice, objects, and crops. What emerged were multi-dimensional representations of space, relations, and practices, where objects and non-­ human beings (chickens and goats) are explained in terms of the relations they create or sustain. At some point during our visit, we would approach a group of people who were sitting together, and explain that we were interested in what kinds of objects they could bring to explain how they maintained or

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created relationships with each other, their ancestors, or their land. We waited as people gathered objects (and often non-human beings) and then asked them to explain or narrate how the object was used, what it represented, or how it helped to produce or maintain relationships in the community. These maps were not flat spatial representations on the ground of what the community ‘had’ but rather, lively and multi-dimensional representations of, for example, how and where the ‘world of the ancestors’ speaks to ‘this world’ through ritual practice or how things like kola nuts (a cultural staple in many West African countries, prized for its effects as a central nervous system stimulant) send different messages and have different meanings in different social and ritual settings. The ‘flat’ spatiality of representing the village on the ground could not have captured the complexity of Temne realities (Ryan 2018). In several maps, the ancestors appeared through demonstrations of ritual practice, and namely through demonstrations of how ritual practice is used to ask the ancestors for good harvests. In these demonstrations, a third being comes into the maps—that of the medium between the asker and the ancestor. This was often, but not exclusively, a chicken. The person making the map would grab a chicken—usually whichever chicken was closest, but sometimes they would go through extra effort to make sure to pick out a white rooster— the correct kind of chicken for a medium. The person would then explain the process of bringing the chicken into conversation with the ancestors and the community. It happens like this: the person performing the practice asks the ancestors if they are willing to hear a request from the community and then offers a few grains of rice to the rooster. If the rooster eats the rice, the ancestor is willing to hear the request. If the rooster refuses to eat, then the community knows to wait a few days, and perhaps to gather a few more offerings for the ancestors, before asking again. Most other elements of the maps helped me to see how communities sustained relations between themselves or between themselves and potential in-­ laws or between themselves and relatives who come to visit from outside. It was the ritual practice elements of the map that helped me to learn of Temne ontologies. I say ‘learn of ’ because I want to emphasize that knowing of other ontologies requires that you first recognize yourself as illiterate. It is not a matter of recognizing another way of knowing as valid, but rather, recognizing that you lack the ability to understand. In moments where chickens were used to describe communication with the ancestors, all I could see was a chicken. It had not been my aim to be ‘convinced’ of Temne ways of knowing. Rather, I was hoping that someone would allow me to know of them, because this would help me to show that an investing company’s view of vast tracts of ‘unused’ land waiting for plantation investment clashed not only with

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communities’ mixed-crop fallow rotation system of agriculture but also with a much more fundamental understanding of what land is. For instance, if the world of ancestors is always already on the land, then land that appears unused only appears as unused to companies who cannot see the ancestors. For people who can see the ancestors, and for the ancestors themselves, the land is not ‘unused’. Within discussions of the Anthropocene in IR, this method might get more ‘recognition’ as valid than it would have 10–20 years ago. I am ‘able’ to write about this method, to refer to it as mapping, and to try to explain what it might tell ‘us’ (the field). I can contrast Temne ways of knowing to the ontology of plantation agribusiness, where land is defined in terms of productive value, yields, and means of generating wealth. IR scholarship that does point out the disconnect between people’s actual relationships to their land and what advocates for plantation agribusiness say about land and capital transformation is crucial (Gill 2016; Li 2018; Makki 2014). It is particularly crucial in the context of climate catastrophe, where those who have done the least to cause the catastrophe will be the first to suffer (Box 20.1).

Box 20.1  Can the River Speak? In his article ‘Can the river speak?’ Bikrum Gill points to the absurdity of maneuvers by governments and investing companies to designate land as ‘unused’. In 2008, an Indian agribusiness firm, Karuturi, invested in 300,000 hectares of land in the Baro-Akobo river basin in Ethiopia. Both the company and Ethiopian government claimed that local people were not using the land productively enough, and the company invested an enormous sum of money into building a series of flood barriers in the basin to make it ‘arable’. For two consecutive years, massive flooding caused enormous damage to the plantation. The company tried to make excuses for this failure, but never bothered to take seriously the knowledge of the farmers in the basin, who had successfully lived with the river and made use of the rich soil for generations. What looked like ‘underused’ land to the company and government became completely unusable once the company applied a logic of ‘man’s control over nature’. Gill eloquently argues that “while such knowledge production and mobilization has been critical to Karuturi’s construction of the Gambella land concession as a staging ground for its launch into global prominence in agro-food provisioning, it has also proved fatal to the project, as the epistemological inability to incorporate indigenous knowledge that accounts for extra-human agency left the company dramatically unaware of the particular socio-ecological dynamics of the Baro River ecosystem on whose floodplain the land concession was located” (2016, 700). Here the river speaks, not merely in the literal form of flooding the basin to make the land ‘unusable’ but in the form of signs that can be read to enable land to be usable in certain ways with a certain form of knowledge. Knowing differently enables people to live with, rather than in spite of, the river.

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There is a risk that a push to ‘feed the planet’ or to ‘develop biofuels as a solution to fossil fuels’ (Makki 2014) serves as the rationale to cover Temne landscapes in plantations. In doing so, there is the risk to the worlds that sit there already—both the worlds that farmers have created through generations of knowledge-transfer and the worlds of ancestors. Here, I do not intend to argue that the world of ancestors will itself go away, but that practices of tending to that world through ritual practice serve to remind people that it is there and that their knowledge of it is valid.

Mapping, Illiteracy, and the Anthropocene? Thinking seriously about this method of mapping, in the context of IR and the Anthropocene, leads me to question how Indigenous ways of knowing are sometimes ‘deployed’. In a discussion of urban white gardeners suddenly ‘desiring’ gardens with ‘indigenous’ plants, Kumarakulasingam and Ngcoya (2016) point to an important problem. In botanical gardens and ‘native plant’ sales, white South Africans make extremely narrow and ‘place-based’ classifications of ‘native’ plants, as part of a sudden popularity in using these plants in urban gardens, in part because of new ‘ecological considerations’ for planting gardens that do not use too much water. However, the authors point to the erasure that comes with this ‘desire’ for indigeneity. Firstly, it references indigeneity (of plants) without accounting for the sociality bound up in those plants. In other words, it desires the plants because of their assumed place-­ based ‘native-ness’ without an understanding of how black communities have related to these plants for generations. Secondly, it is blind to the purposeful violence and erasure of black communities during the colonization of South Africa and the widespread destruction of the landscapes for colonial extraction. These two lessons are important beyond the example of ‘native plant’ sales in South Africa as they offer a critical warning about how ‘indigeneity’ is brought into discussions of the Anthropocene. Firstly, it is critical that ‘bits’ of indigeneity are not brought in without an understanding of the relationality and sociality of practices. Harry Garuba (2013) makes this point clearly in relation to the ‘sudden’ interest in Animism—it is not acceptable to just pull out the ‘bits’ of Animism that seem interesting to ‘us’ without an understanding of the social relations that are always already tied up in it. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, ‘desiring’ selective ‘bits’ of indigeneity makes it possible to ignore the continuous and violent processes that have attempted to erase Indigenous peoples and their worlds. One cannot suddenly decide that it is good to ‘reintroduce’

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Indigenous plants to urban gardens without reproducing the violence that ripped those plants and the people using them from the landscape. Here is a key lesson that I have had to foreground in ‘my’ mapping method—Temne worldviews were an excuse for slave raiders and colonizers to deem Temne people as inhuman and/or as incapable of self-governance. Today, underlying assumptions about ‘backwards’ farming in Sierra Leone and ‘uneducated’ rural people are the excuse to capture large tracts of Temne farmland for plantation agriculture. My interest in Temne worldviews—in how farmers understand their interactions with the ancestors—cannot be blind to these ongoing histories, or it risks rendering Temne communities as ‘deviations’ from the modern worldview. As Zoe Todd teaches us, it is not acceptable to just ‘recognize’ Temne ways of knowing (Box 20.2): It is not enough to merely recognize non-Western or Indigenous ontologies. We must engage with the consequences and implications of their erasure and capture by Euro-American/White supremacist/colonial actors. And, we must reckon with the foundational violence of the forced imposition of the Life/ Nonlife binary upon myriad worlds, existences, assemblages, and peoples. Similarly, it is important to acknowledge the plural and simultaneous circumstances of Indigenous cosmologies, ontologies, worlds in this moment of late liberalism: constricted in the cramped space, yes, but also moving unapologetically through and beyond the violences of empire, white supremacy, capital, and patriarchy—literally expanding space itself in powerful forms of existence and manifestation. (Todd in Johnson et al. 2019, 6)

Box 20.2  Decolonizing Methodologies “From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and chose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (Tuhiwai Smith 2012, 1). Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2012) confronts us with uncomfortable and necessary questions about who is the subject of research with Indigenous peoples, what is the purpose of such research, and what right do non-Indigenous researchers have (or not have) to access Indigenous knowledge. She argues that while research can be a tool in struggles against injustice, it is can also be a tool of oppression, exploitation, and extraction. Indigenous communities have good reason to be wary of research, throughout colonial and postcolonial encounters; research has subjugated Indigenous communities. Research of or in Indigenous communities will reproduce colonizing violence if it does not put Indigenous peoples, their (continued)

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Box 20.2  (continued) knowledge, their capacities, and their needs at the center, and instead design research that is with and for communities. Tuhiwai Smith outlines what an Indigenous research agenda can look like. Namely, it should center self-determination and should include processes of healing, decolonization, transformation, and mobilization, which can “be incorporated into practices and methodologies” (2012, 120). While Tuhiwai Smith is most focused on facilitating Indigenous researchers to work with their own communities so as to begin to redress the exclusion of Indigenous scholars from academic positions, she is also writing for non-­Indigenous researchers who want to do research that decolonizes knowledge production and contributes to Indigenous self-determination.

A ‘method’ for doing research in the Anthropocene needs to help the researcher understand not only the pressing urgency of climate catastrophe, but just how it is ‘we’ got ‘here’ by negating the knowledge of others. This means that ‘we’ have no right to lean on ‘Indigenous’ ways of knowing to save ‘us’. Rather, a method used for ‘knowing of ’ other ways of knowing should serve the goal of understanding why and how Western modes of knowing got ‘us’ into this moment of climate catastrophe. What seem like ‘new’ problems have long been evident in settler colonial spaces but are becoming more acute and dispersed as our agitated planet heats: the protagonists in this contemporary ecological and social drama seem only to proliferate as it threatens to engulf all of us, even if its effects are so unequally distributed. (Povinelli 2016, 106)

This brings me to the question of my temporal illiteracy and why this matters for IR in the Anthropocene. I only know how to ‘read’ time in one way. However, the Anthropocene demands a different reading of time, because the future is already here and the past never ‘left’—worlds have already been ended. Temne ways of knowing reflect a non-linear temporality—the ‘past’ is not situated as a discreet moment ‘behind us’ and in fact is present now, as are the future generations. This way of knowing time ‘otherwise’ is crucial in the Anthropocene. This is not to say that Temne ways of knowing are ‘the’ solution to temporality in the Anthropocene. Rather, learning of Temne ways of knowing helps me to confront the limitations of my own understanding of ‘linear’ time. There are surely other ways that we can confront our temporal illiteracy, but as with the cautions of ‘desiring’ indigeneity outlined above, it is crucial that when we learn of other readings of time, we do so from a critique of knowledge where “the subject of knowledge remains the modern self,

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moving forward in linear time” (Garuba 2013, 36). This has two clear mandates. Firstly, that Indigenous temporality must not be seen as a ‘time-bound’ artifact where Temne communities are ‘stuck’ in a historical way of being, while ‘we’, modern subjects, are moving forward. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it means not treating Temne communities as the objects of knowledge, while ‘I’ sit as the subject of knowledge.

Conclusion Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017) confront us with a critical question: how can the term ‘Anthropocene’ undermine the conditions that it names? As a minimal start, they point out that without recognizing that from the beginning, the Anthropocene is a universalizing project, it serves to re-invisibilize the power of Eurocentric narratives, again re-placing them as the neutral and global perspective. By linking the Anthropocene with colonization, it draws attention to the violence at its core, and calls for the consideration of Indigenous philosophies and processes of Indigenous self-governance as a necessary political corrective, alongside the self-­ determination of other communities and societies violently impacted by the white supremacist, colonial, and capitalist logics instantiated in the origins of the Anthropocene. (2017, 763)

For IR to study and engage with the Anthropocene, I argue, means that questions of power and marginalization and erasure have to be the starting point. This is true for how IR approaches knowledge in and of the Anthropocene. In this sense, the method of mapping I used in communities in Sierra Leone does not purport to give answers to how to live in the Anthropocene. However, it does point to a way of learning of worlds that does not start from any claim of a right to curate or extract knowledge. Rather, the method hopes to make the researcher aware of their illiteracy. The method also hopes to reveal the limitations to Western notions of temporality. This is clearly crucial for IR in the Anthropocene because while it appears to ‘the West’ that the world is ending now, for Indigenous and black communities, worlds have already ended. IR will fail in its engagement with the Anthropocene if it pretends that this is new or emerging, rather than something that has for a long time been continuously arriving.

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Key Points  • Knowing ‘of ’ other ontologies requires first considering yourself illiterate. • This cannot be a matter of me ‘recognizing’ these ontologies—this would imply that I have the authority to decide what is and what is not valid knowledge. • ‘Casual’ mapping—asking people to explain objects and their social relations and the relations to their ancestors sustained through them—is a way of rendering other ontologies at least partially ‘legible’ to me. • The Anthropocene risks reproducing colonial violence if it does not de-­ center Western Man—one way to do this is recognize our own illiteracy. Key Questions  1. Why is it crucial that an understanding of the Anthropocene should start from an understanding of how violence and erasure has rendered some ways of knowing as ‘irrelevant’ or ‘illegitimate’? 2. How can this violence and erasure be challenged through methodological choices? 3. Is it necessary for IR methods in the Anthropocene to account for how ‘we’ got to climate catastrophe? What would this necessitate in terms of epistemology? 4. Why is it insufficient to think about other ways of knowing ‘only’ as stories? 5. How do other ways of knowing de-stabilize Western notions of temporality, and why might this matter for the Anthropocene?

Further Reading Garuba, H. 2013. On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections. In L. Green (ed.) Contested Ecologies. Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, 42–54. Gill, B. 2016. Can the River speak? Epistemological Confrontation in the Rise and Fall of the Land Grab in Gambella, Ethiopia. Environment and Planning A: Economics and Space 48(4): 699–717. Todd, Z. 2016. An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: “Ontology” is just another Word for Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology 29: 4–22. Tuhiwai Smith, L. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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References Davis, H. and Todd, Z. 2017. On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME International Journal of Critical Geography 16(4): 761–80. Garuba, H., 2013. On Animism, Modernity/Colonialism and the African Order of Knowledge: Provisional Reflections. In Green,  L. (ed.) Contested Ecologies. Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, 42–54. Gill, B., 2016. Can the River speak? Epistemological Confrontation in the Rise and Fall of the Land Grab in Gambella, Ethiopia. Environment and Planning A: Economics and Space 48(4): 699–717. Hunt, S. 2014. Ontologies of Indigeneity: The Plitics of Embodying a Concept. Cultural Geography 21: 27–32. Johnson, E. R., Kindervater, G., Todd, Z., Yusoff, K., Woodward, K. and Povinelli, E. A. 2019. Geontographies: On Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space  37(8): 1319–1342. Kumarakulasingam, N. and Ngcoya, M. 2016. Plant Provocations: Botanical Indigeneity and (De)colonial Imaginations. Contexto Internacional  38(3): 843–864. Li, T. M. 2018. After the Land Grab: Infrastructural Violence and the “Mafia System” in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Plantation Zones. Geoforum 96: 328–337. Makki, F. 2014. Development by Dispossession: Terra Nullius and the Social-Ecology of New Enclosures in Ethiopia. Rural Sociology 79: 79–103. Narayanasamy, N. 2009. Participatory Rural Appraisal: Principles, Methods and Application. London: Sage. Povinelli, E. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Ryan, C. 2018. (Analog) Mapping the Knowable and Ways of Knowing: Relational Ontologies of Chickens and Ancestors in Rural Sierra Leone. In Bargués-Pedreny, P.,  Simon, E. and Chandler, D. (eds) Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age. London: Routledge, 72–86. Scott, M. W. 2013. The Anthropology of Ontology (Religious Science?). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(4): 859–872. Shaw, R. 2002. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Tilley, L. 2017. Resisting Piratic Method by Doing Research Otherwise. Sociology 51: 27–42. Todd, Z. 2016. An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: “Ontology” Is Just Another Word For Colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology 29: 4–22. Tuhiwai Smith, L. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

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Watts, V. 2013. Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go On a European World Tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2(1): 20–34. Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

21 Spatializing the Environmental Apocalypse Suvi Alt

Introduction: The Anthropocene as Environmental Apocalypse Due to the emergence of the Anthropocene, the social sciences in general and international relations (IR) in particular will arguably need new ways of facing questions that have to do with both existence and extinction in the realm of the global (Burke et  al. 2016). Not least among these questions is how human beings relate to what might be called ‘the end of the world’. Questions concerning the end of things (i.e., eschatological questions; see Box 21.1) are central to the ways in which we exist in the world today. 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; an Earth where coastal areas are becoming submerged under rising sea levels, causing death, destruction, mass migration, and conflict. Such imagery bears significant parallels to the Christian biblical tradition of depicting the apocalypse, that is, the unfolding of the end times that precede the second coming of Christ. Therefore, the term ‘environmental apocalypse’ (or ‘ecological apocalypse’ or ‘climate apocalypse’) has been coined

S. Alt (*) Department of International Relations and International Organization, The University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_21

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to highlight the similarities between the current environmental condition and biblical descriptions of the end of the world. Such depictions used to belong mainly to the narratives of the environmental movement that has spoken of the dangers of environmental degradation already for decades. Yet, these drastic portrayals of the future of the planet have by now increasingly become part of an establishment discourse. For example, the former US Vice President Al Gore has been at the forefront of expounding the coming of a climate apocalypse, unless we make rapid changes (see Weber 2018). Similarly, the coverage of Australia’s “apocalyptic fires” that are said to be “a warning to the world” (Washington Post 2020) and an “apocalyptic nightmare” (Hennessy 2019) is a recent example of such depictions of the end times. The issue of climate change, as well as environmental politics more widely, involves frequent mediation to publics through the frame of apocalyptic discourse (McNeish 2017; Skrimshire 2014). While environmental politics in the Anthropocene takes various forms, ranging from institutional governance to market-based solutions to environmental justice, the environmental apocalypse narrative is one such key form. How should students of international relations approach such framings of environmental politics? What are the political effects of understanding environmental degradation in this way? On the one hand, the widespread popular portrayal of environmental issues through the apocalyptic frame can be alarmist and counter-productive because its sense of doom paralyzes people (Lilley et al. 2012; Feinberg and Willer 2011). This means that people are less likely to make decisions and choices that would contribute to protecting the planet because they feel that the situation is already hopeless. On the other hand, it is argued that the sense of urgency that the environmental apocalypse narratives carry can mobilize people to take the necessary political action to address environmental degradation (Ginn 2015; Globus Veldman 2012; Buell 2010). This position relies on the view that if people are sufficiently informed about how bad the situation is, they will take rapid action to protect the planet. Yet, the central argument of this chapter is that debating the motivational effects of apocalyptic depictions of environmental destruction disregards a central feature of these discourses that has important political implications. This feature is the embeddedness of the environmental apocalypse narrative in a particular modern, Western interpretation of the Christian eschatological tradition. This chapter shows that understanding the ‘environmental apocalypse’ through the frames of reference of this modern, Western tradition leads to a primarily temporal conception of ‘the end of the world’. This means that the end of the world is strongly related to a specific understanding of time. The

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end of the world appears as having a uniform planetary presence as a future threat that ‘we’ can try our best to avert. Consequently, conceiving of the Anthropocene in terms of an ‘environmental apocalypse’ risks reproducing a particular Western, Christian notion of it (Rothe 2019, 4). An alternative conception of apocalypse can be found in postcolonial theology, which is a field of theology concerned with the intersections of Christian religious thought and systems of domination, such as the empires that have historically effaced marginalized peoples’ interests, cultures, and identities. 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 that centers on questions concerning the types of seeds food producers should use and how these seeds should be stored and managed to best guarantee food security (see Boxes 21.2 and 21.3). This example is chosen because different actors’ positions in the debate on the future of food production express different forms of eschatological thinking. These examples demonstrate the political implications of different apocalyptic discourses and they emphasize the need to pay more attention to different spatial, material, social, and spiritual realities in the debates on existence and extinction in the Anthropocene. The next section begins by identifying how an apocalyptic mode of thinking is present in contemporary discourses of environmental degradation.

Box 21.1  What Is Eschatology? In Christianity, eschatology refers to the doctrine of the last things, the final events that bring history to an end (Wolfe 2017). More generally, eschatologies are systems of thought that are concerned with the end of things—the end of life, the end of time, and the end of the world. Although they are traditionally rooted on religious ground, eschatologies are nonetheless profoundly secular and political in their contemporary articulations. Especially since the nineteenth century, eschatological forms of thought have become a way of understanding the direction of historical progress as a whole (Wolfe 2017). This also entails that eschatologies often carry either implicit or explicit assumptions about the desired or necessary political and social organization of our world in light of the end that is envisioned (Dillon 2011). Therefore, studying eschatological forms of thought can reveal the political positions and preferences of those who speak of ‘the end’.

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 he Futural and Planetary Logic T of Environmental Apocalypse News about climate change, the extinction of bees, the loss of biodiversity, and various other environmental threats frequently make reference to the way in which time is running out and we are reaching or have already reached a tipping point after which all that remains is the unfolding of a catastrophe that will bring the world to an end. The ‘environmental apocalypse’ is the cumulative effect of various environmental problems that lead to destruction, conflict, and the eventual collapse of civilization. The language of ‘tipping points’ (see Chap. 3), ‘points of no return’, and ‘time running out’ identifies finality and an accelerating development toward the end. Although such discourses are sometimes perceived as overly gloomy, even critics of such alarmist tones usually share the understanding that ‘the end’ is something to be deferred to a hopefully very far-away future. Such critics are simply more optimistic regarding humanity’s ability to postpone the end through cooperation and technological development—Al Gore (2016) is perhaps the most prominent protagonist of this position. Overall, apocalyptic environmentalism relies on a dramatic imaginary of the organized world descending into chaos as a consequence of a future catastrophe. The apocalyptic frame in these scenarios is related in particular to treatments of time: time is directed toward a certain event that marks a definitive end and the apocalyptic era presents an accelerating development—‘time compression’—toward that end (Fagan 2017, 231). While accounts such as this emphasize the imminence of disaster and the urgency of action, they are nevertheless premised on a temporal separation of the present and the end. We may be inhabiting a situation of continuous and rising risk, but the ultimate disaster exists at a future point in time. Reflecting this temporal focus, according to Stefan Skrimshire (2010, 2), the purpose of examining the environmental apocalypse is to find out “how different ways of thinking, imagining, knowing and believing in the future impact upon political action and inaction”. “Why doesn’t the imagination of a catastrophic future galvanize people to act to avert it?” Skrimshire (2010, 2) asks. These questions illustrate the tendency to conceive the environmental apocalypse in decidedly futural terms. Formulated along these lines, the environmental apocalyptic incorporates and revises the main features of the Christian apocalyptic tradition (Buell 2010, 15). These features include a sudden rupture with the past, a presentation of a revelation, a narration of a world-end, and a dramatization of the last judgment. The environmental apocalypse depicts a world-end that is the result of slowly unfolding processes, which, nevertheless, accelerate as the end

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comes nearer. In these narratives, the imminent end of life on Earth produces a sudden rupture in people’s relationship to their planetary past. The revelation of the Anthropocene is that humanity has become a geophysical force capable of fundamentally changing life on Earth (Northcott 2015, 105). While environmental degradation has been depicted in apocalyptic tones throughout the history of the environmental movement, the most important recent change in the character of the environmental apocalyptic is that nature is no longer seen as categorically distinct from the human in the way it was still in the 1960s (Buell 2010, 28). The environmentalist claims of the second half of the twentieth century were often premised on an assumption of a distinction between humanity and nature, with the latter appearing as something that needs to be protected from the former. Contemporary environmental thought, however, perceives such a categorical separation of humans from nature as implausible and unhelpful. In this regard, the development of the environmental apocalypse narrative parallels the emergence of the notion of the Anthropocene that is premised precisely on such inseparability and enmeshment of humanity and nature. As a consequence of the intimate interconnectedness of all life in the Anthropocene, it is not enough to instigate change only among the enlightened few. This is why the environmentalist ‘faith’ needs to be adopted by everyone. As such, the environmental apocalypse lacks a last judgment where the faithful would be separated from the faithless. Rather, humankind is judged as a whole (Buell 2010, 15–16). In the words of the UN Secretary-­ General António Guterres (2019), “we are all in this together”. The emphasis on the shared burden of the impacts of environmental degradation reflects another significant transformation of environmental politics since the mid-­ twentieth century where there has been a shift from addressing local, geographically delimited environmental problems to focusing on climate change as a planetary problem. Since the 1950s, there has been a shift from the idea of geographically differentiated ‘climates’—plural, situated in places—to a placeless global climate (Turnhout et  al. 2016, 66). Consequently, climate change is now habitually approached through its decidedly global character. Yet, such a globalized representation fails to apprehend the very unequal effects that climate change and environmental destruction have. Challenging the idea of one global climate as a useful way of understanding climate change, Mike Hulme (2010, 563) argues that “there are no global pathways to the future because the world does not walk together; we walk along different paths towards different destinations”. Therefore, it would be more useful to ask how the climate will change from place to place (Stott and Thorne 2010, 158) and what the differentiated impacts of this will be. Yet, climate change

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and environmental degradation are typically perceived as a planetary issue. As such, apocalyptic narratives tend toward a representation of climate change that pictures a uniform global catastrophe, while giving little recognition to spatial differentiation in terms of either environmental impact or in terms of material and social inequality. Overall, the environmental apocalypse is thus depicted in, firstly, futural and, secondly, planetary terms. The next section examines the historical genesis of the Western eschatological tradition that the environmental apocalypse is embedded in. Box 21.2  The Doomsday Vault In 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened on a remote island in the Arctic Ocean. The purpose of the vault is to store duplicates of seed samples from the world’s crop collections and to keep these safe in the Arctic permafrost (Crop Trust 2017). More generally, the purpose of the seed bank is to guarantee the world’s agricultural biodiversity and thereby the world’s food security. The Svalbard seed bank quickly acquired the nickname ‘Doomsday Vault’ because it was framed in the media as a reserve of seeds to be used in the case of an apocalyptic event that would create a global catastrophe. Headlines such as “The Doomsday Vault: The Seeds That Could Save a Post-Apocalyptic World” (Goldenberg 2015) conjure an image of a future disaster that needs to be prepared for. Cary Fowler, the former executive director of the Crop Trust that manages the Svalbard vault, stated at the time of its founding that “these resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine” (Fowler in CBS 2008). The vault is “a place that might someday save humankind” (CBS 2008). Such a time horizon expresses an eschatology where the end looms in the future but can, nevertheless, be deferred by keeping safe the genetic resources that the seeds contain. In recognition of this, Fowler has later noted that the nickname is misleading because the disappearance of biodiversity should be understood as an ongoing process, rather than a catastrophe possibly taking place in the future. Thus, the eschatology attached to the vault is more complex than media representations would imply. But while representatives of the Svalbard vault recognize that biodiversity is being lost all the time, they nevertheless embrace a globalist discourse that does not prioritize the political and spatial differentiation that accompanies the loss of biodiversity. Sergio Fava (2013, 141) argues that the Svalbard vault represents the unification of agricultural practices centered on a global narrative of climate change. According to Fava (2013, 124), the Svalbard vault has been at the center of international developments where food security debates have shifted from a focus on equitable access to food in the present to a focus on increasing crop yields in the future. The Svalbard vault mobilizes global climate models and scenarios that propose the relative obsolescence of indigenous agricultural knowledge, thereby “creating one future” (Fava 2013, 118–119). These scenarios go hand in hand with a technocratic form of biodiversity preservation that disregards the dynamic and relational character of traditional forms of plant cultivation. Contrary to such a globalist narrative, a more spatially focused understanding of the end of the world can be identified in the claims of those small farmers who seek to preserve their indigenous seeds in their own habitat. For them, the end of the world is a matter of the present time, but it is also a matter of the places they inhabit (see Box 21.3).

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Apocalypse, Modernity, Time, and Space The apocalypse has a central position in Christian theology, even if this position has been interpreted in various ways throughout the history of Christian thought. While narratives of apocalypse predate Christianity, the imaginaries of apocalypse that currently proliferate in relation to environmental crises draw largely on the Christian eschatological tradition. This tradition is mainly shaped by the Book of Revelation where the apocalypse appears as a future catastrophic event that leads to God’s final judgment of humanity. Various strands of Christianity have interpreted the imminence of the end in different ways. Sometimes the apocalypse is projected in the very near future, with the Book of Revelation providing the signs of the end times, such as war, famine, earthquakes, and disease. While catastrophic and terrifying, the awaiting of an imminent apocalypse has often also been a signifier of hope for the oppressed. For early Christians, the expectation of the end provided sustenance under Roman rule and, in later periods, such expectation has often been taken up in situations of religious or socio-political oppression, especially when a repressive regime is seen to be coming to an end (Ward 2008, 109). On the other hand, the institutionalized Church has often sought to contain people’s apocalyptic aspirations in order to have them respect the authority of the Church in earthly matters. By interpreting the apocalypse purely symbolically, the Church has emphasized the Kingdom of God as existing eternally in the hearts of believers (Wojcik 1997, 34). The implication of this interpretation is the detachment of salvation from the concrete historical situation. Within Christianity, the apocalypse has thus been articulated not only in ways that sustain the existing power structures but also in ways that seek to contest them. In his examination of the uses of apocalypse “from antiquity to the empire of modernity”, John R. Hall (2009, 2–5) emphasizes that the apocalyptic is not a single, coherent ‘thing’ but a range of beliefs, events, and social processes that are concerned with the disjuncture that brings the old order to an end and operates as a passage to a new beginning. Similarly, Barry Brummett (1991, 6) argues that the apocalyptic should not be understood solely as religious discourse but rather as a common cultural vocabulary through which people express their hopes and fears for the future. Hall understands this passage to a new beginning in decidedly temporal terms: the “central concern is with times that are apocalyptic” (Hall 2009, 6, emphasis added). Such times are characterized not only by trial and hardship but also by the expectation of a new world. Whether religious or secular, the apocalyptic is thus a primarily temporal and, more specifically, future-oriented notion.

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It is important to note that although eschatology is typically perceived as a religious form of thinking, its structure has been carried over into modern political thought. In modern eschatological thinking, the Christian expectation of ‘the end’ becomes part of the historical process (Löwith 1949). This means that the end of things becomes the culmination of a historical development instead of an exit from the world. While not directing the way to the Kingdom of God, modern political philosophies have developed their own ultimate ends from the nation-state, to classless society, to liberal democracy. In teleological views of progress, history becomes universal and directed toward an ultimate goal that gives unified meaning to the history of humankind (Löwith 1949, 18–19). Such linear understanding of time can be contrasted, for example, with a cyclical one, which portrays the processes of birth and decay in nature. While natural processes are characterized by cycles of death and renewal, Christian thought and modern political philosophies understand time as a linear movement toward an ultimate goal. In this Western tradition, eschatological thinking is essentially understood to concern the end of time, and it remains more or less oblivious to spatial questions and realities (Westhelle 2012). History is directed at an ultimate purpose and space is present primarily as the homogenous background where progress plays out. As a consequence, space becomes organized without reference to its particularities (Giddens 1991, 17). This means that the coordination of human social organization assumes a form that is detached from spatial specificity. Anthony Giddens (1991, 16) identifies this kind of a separation of time and space as a key characteristic of modernity. Related to this tendency is the modern interest in objectifying and controlling nature, which has constituted a crucial aspect of ‘progress’. Understanding space as the neutral background for the history through which humans pursue their political projects parallels international relations’ tendency to view the environment as a neutral background for the pursuit of state and human interests. This assumption is now challenged by the Anthropocene, which makes it impossible to think of the environment as a mere background (see Dalby 2014). However, replacing the neutral and passive ‘environment’ with an active and entangled ‘planet’ may risk reproducing the disregard for spatial specificity. The next section turns to postcolonial theology to problematize this tendency.

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Postcolonial Eschatologies Alternative theologies containing elements of what more recently has been termed ‘postcolonial’ have existed around the world throughout colonial history (Yountae 2018, 728). While the dialogue between theology and postcolonial theory only increased in the 1990s as the latter gained popularity in the humanities and social sciences (Nausner 2012, 120), the borders of ‘postcolonial theology’ are not clearly fixed and the themes and arguments that are relevant for the purposes of this chapter have circulated for a much longer time in the fields of radical political theology, liberation theology, feminist theology, black theology, Latina theology, and so on. These are fields of theology that in various ways seek to revise the Christian tradition by foregrounding the experiences of the oppressed and the marginalized  (see Martínez Andrade 2015; Keller et al. 2004). As such, the impact of postcolonial theology is not confined to the Global South, but has had a significant impact also on Western Christian thought. Often an important starting point for such approaches is the observation that the early Christian movements were decidedly counter-imperial and resistant to exploitative and oppressive powers. While forms of Christianity have for centuries been complicit with repression, empire-building, and war, postcolonial theologies seek to recover the liberationist and resistant tendencies at the genesis of Christianity (Westhelle 2010; Taylor 2004, 49). Following these tendencies entails relocating theology from the immaterial, spiritual realm to ‘this world’ (Yountae 2018, 729). This relocation has significant implications for theology’s relationship to politics, and it relies on important parts on a rethinking of the meaning of eschatology. While the previously discussed temporal understanding of the apocalypse is undoubtedly central to Christianity, postcolonial theologies argue that Christian eschatology does not necessarily entail a linear, future-oriented conception of time (Tatschner 2018, 54). Rather, Vítor Westhelle (2012, 11) argues that the privileging of temporality is more the outcome of a particularly Western view of history than a biblically grounded reading of eschatology. Westhelle shows that in the New Testament ‘the end’ could refer to a spatial location, a geographical boundary, or a place in a rank, as well as having the more well-known temporal connotations. As a spatial location, the end can refer to a specific place, as a geographical location it refers to ‘the ends of the earth’, and as a place in a rank it can have the meaning of being the last in a hierarchical order (Westhelle 2012, 34). In other words, for the early Christians, ‘the end’ was associated with specific spatial realities. Nevertheless,

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such spatial meanings of the end have been glaringly absent from Western eschatological discourse (Westhelle 2012, 79). As a consequence, Christian history has developed a placeless theology that avoids the political realities constitutive of the spaces that people inhabit (Carvalhaes 2019, 462). But why is the spatial dimension important? Cláudio Carvalhaes (2019, 458) argues that the detachment from the Earth and the absence of space in Christian theologies have caused “an abyss between faith and matter”. In political terms, this means that Christian eschatology pushes the resolution of historical conflict outside the bounds of socio-economic-political history (Thistlethwaite and Potter Engel 1990, 110). When eschatology is understood in terms of a future realm at the end of time, it has the effect of ignoring present forms of conflict. The social antagonisms that exist in the present are concealed by the idea of a single future catastrophe (Rothe 2019, 4). “Future tenses can disguise present anguish” (Thistlethwaite and Potter Engel 1990, 110). Similarly, Pablo Richard (1995, 29) argues that studies of apocalypse have been limited due to their lack of interest in the social and historical context in which the apocalyptic takes place. These theological debates are relevant for the field of international relations because they are crucial for understanding the problems that come with the environmental apocalypse narratives that reproduce the structure of a very specific version of the Christian eschatological tradition. The following part of this chapter introduces an alternative way of understanding the meaning of the end of the world.

Latitudinal Environmental Eschatology Thinking the environmental apocalypse in spatial terms means paying attention to the places where it happens. Historical events take place: they are located and their significance is linked to the specific place where they occur. Hence, Westhelle (2012, xii) proposes to “frame eschatological thinking in a way that addresses the experience of those who live in and through the eschata [the ends] on a daily basis with regard to the places in which it happens”. For our thinking of the environmental apocalypse, this means that we pay attention to the catastrophe of the present, not assuming that the environmental, economic, political, or social problems entailed by the Anthropocene are globally uniform, nor that they conform to a globally uniform solution. Instead, they require carefully contextualized, spatially situated analysis. As an alternative to the predominant futural eschatology that makes claims to universality, Westhelle formulates ‘latitudinal eschatology’ as

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a discourse that is to be edged into the description of experiences close to the ground, attentive to its edges, mindful of crossings and passages, while aware that conceptual abstractions, speculations, or bizarre vagary are fed by a notion of history that does not take place, has no spatial location. It allows us to pay vigorous attentiveness to the present. (Westhelle 2012, 132)

In the latitudinal perspective, eschatology is not about progress—neither ‘positive’ progress toward a Kingdom of God or a classless society nor ‘negative’ progress toward environmental destruction or the collapse of civilization. Rather, eschatology is about the positions and margins that operate as turning points to other worlds within the present. Hence, latitudinal eschatology is not an abstract discourse on the future, but a concrete discourse on the action that is bringing to end the suffering taking place in the present (Richard 1995, 28). As such, eschatology is reconceptualized not as the doctrine of the last things but as continuous existence on a limit or an edge (Tatschner 2018, 56). Such limits and edges are not only geographical but can also be conceived in terms of, for example, social location, class, and ethnicity. The end, then, entails crossing the various spaces of oppression that order life. To do so, a latitudinal eschatology begins by asking questions about what differently affects our lived realities (Westhelle 2012, 138). The purpose of a latitudinal environmental eschatology is thus to think both space and time in ways that allow for questioning and critiquing the present. To begin to think of the environmental apocalypse in these terms, we need to acknowledge that the human actions that mark the Anthropocene originate in a particular time and space where we must attend to economic inequality, class struggle, racial conflicts, means of production, and their relation to the Earth that constitutes their place (Carvalhaes 2019, 462). Latitudinal environmental eschatology highlights the need to pay attention to issues of power and of geographical and material inequality in any engagement with climate change or environmental degradation. The Anthropocene should not be used as a concept that disguises the diversity of local contexts and the disparities in the distribution of wealth, consumption, and environmental impact across human societies (see Davis and Todd 2017). Spatializing the environmental apocalypse thus means examining climate change in a way that prioritizes the spaces where it takes place—‘the ends of the earth’.

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Box 21.3  Seed-Saving at the End of the World The representatives of the Svalbard vault are not alone in arguing that we need to take measures to preserve agricultural biodiversity. However, not everyone agrees with the globalist narrative of saving the world’s seeds through a centralized management strategy. While not necessarily rejecting the storing of seeds in places like Svalbard, critical small farmers emphasize that ultimately it is up to ordinary farmers and gardeners to save seed diversity and guarantee our food supply. This position is promoted through the mobilizations of, for example, the transnational social movement La Via Campesina and the Indian peasant organization Navdanya that coordinates the Global Citizens’ Alliance for Seed Freedom. It is further echoed by small farmers’ organizations across the Global North and South. They claim that diversity needs to be protected in its habitat. Conserving seeds in the habitat where they are to be used is arguably best able to guarantee that the seeds adapt to the changing environment. Yet, the argument for local seed-saving is made as much for cultural and spiritual as for ecological reasons (Chaskey 2014, 165). Some of the small farmers who are engaged in this struggle articulate the problem in terms of an ongoing end of a world (see, e.g., Ray 2012). The end of the world is something that is taking place every day. Such farmers often represent the seed as comprising everything that is and everything that could be: it contains the biological fundament of life but also the power of the sacred. The seed encapsulates a world (Ray 2012; Kinchy 2012, 49–74). The conception of world at stake here is very different from the globalist notions attached to the Doomsday vault. The farmers’ discourse expresses a latitudinal eschatology where the end of the world is spatially distributed in such a way that some live through it every day. Although they are living in the midst of marginalization and the ending of the diversity that their seeds harbor, the farmers also represent their farms and gardens as places of hope that function as an edge to another world—a world that is already prefigured in their ongoing practices of saving, sharing, and reusing seeds.

Conclusion The anticipation of global warming, ocean acidification, food scarcity, climate migration, and conflict is frequently conveyed through apocalyptic discourse that is heavily indebted to the Christian tradition of thinking the end of times. Yet, such apocalyptic environmentalism is often severed from the spaces where it takes place. Consequently, attention is focused on the time that remains before the catastrophe, while limited consideration is given to differentiation that exists in the present. The outcome of conceiving the apocalypse in this way is a representation of climate change and environmental degradation as, firstly, futural and, secondly, planetary.

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While the foundations of international relations are state-centric and there is a need to move beyond this limited understanding of our worldly reality, the calls to recognize ‘the planet’ as the subject that currently demands our attention can have equally problematic implications. The emphasis on the ‘planetary’ presence and impact of humanity is not politically neutral. The focus on the global or planetary scale can efface the different ways in which people are impacted by the Anthropocene. More generally, it is important to maintain a critical attitude toward the claim to novelty tied to the idea of the Anthropocene. Often notions that suggest the beginning of something fundamentally new have more of the old to them than we would like to admit. Therefore, we should remain vigilant in order not to reproduce old inequalities and oppressions through new ideas and concepts. This chapter has argued that understanding the Anthropocene through the frames of reference of ‘environmental apocalypse’ risks reproducing a temporal version of it that is neatly embedded in a modern, Western, Christian tradition. With recourse to postcolonial theology, this chapter has highlighted an alternative notion of the end of the world that proposes to understand eschatology spatially. Conceived in this way, the end of the world is happening now and it is variably distributed across geographical, social, and material divides in the present. Spatializing the environmental apocalypse entails putting these divides at the center of attention. By doing so, this chapter has offered one possible way of politicizing international relation’s engagement with the Anthropocene. Key Points  • The media, politicians, social movements, and academics often represent environmental politics in the Anthropocene as an ‘environmental apocalypse’ without questioning the political implications that this representation has. • Narratives of the environmental apocalypse reproduce the key characteristics of the Christian apocalyptic tradition: a rupture with the past, a presentation of a revelation, a narration of the end times, and a last judgment. • Postcolonial theology seeks to revise the Christian understanding of eschatology in ways that put more emphasis on the spatialized experiences of the oppressed and the marginalized in the present. • IR in the Anthropocene should recognize and deal with not only the ‘new planetary real’ but also the ways in which particular ways of framing it might reproduce rather than contest IR’s modern, Western bias.

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Key Questions  1. Why is it important to examine the ways in which conceptions of the end of the world are articulated? 2. How do postcolonial perspectives propose to revise the theological tradition? 3. What is the difference between a linear and a latitudinal eschatology? 4. What examples of different types of eschatologies can you think of? What political implications do they have? 5. Should we rather think of life in the Anthropocene in non-apocalyptic ways? What would this entail?

Further Reading Keller, C., Nausner, M. and Rivera, M. 2004. Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis: Chalice Press. Martínez Andrade, L. 2015. Religion without Redemption: Social Contradictions and Awakened Dreams in Latin America. London: Pluto Press. McNeish, W. 2017. From Revelation to Revolution: Apocalypticism in Green Politics. Environmental Politics 26(6): 1035–1054. Skrimshire, S. 2014. Climate Change and Apocalyptic Faith. WIREs Climate Change 5: 233–246. Westhelle, V. 2010. After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-Colonial Theologies. Eugene: Cascade Books.

References Brummett, B. 1991. Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric. New York: Praeger. Buell, F. 2010. A Short History of Environmental Apocalypse. In S. Skrimshire (ed.) Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. London and New York: Continuum. Burke, A., Fishel, S., Mitchell, A., Dalby, S. and Levine, D. J. 2016. Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR.  Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3): 499–523. Carvalhaes, C. 2019. Lex Naturae: A New Way into a Liturgical Political Theology. In R. Rosario Rodríguez (ed.) T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology. London: T&T Clark, 449–466. CBS. 2008. A Visit to the Doomsday Vault. 20 March. Retrieved from https://www. cbsnews.com/news/a-­visit-­to-­the-­doomsday-­vault/ [accessed 12 February 2020].

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Chaskey, S. 2014. Seedtime: On the History, Husbandry, Politics, and Promise of Seeds. New York: Rodale. Crop Trust. 2017. Svalbard Global Seed Vault. https://www.croptrust.org/our-­work/ svalbard-­global-­seed-­vault/ [accessed 1 February 2021]. Dalby, S. 2014. Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene. Global Policy 5(1): 1–9. Davis, H. and Todd, Z. 2017. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.  ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4): 761–80. Dillon, M. 2011. Spectres of Biopolitics: Finitude, Eschaton, and Katechon. The South Atlantic Quarterly 110(3): 780–792. Fagan, M. 2017. Who’s Afraid of the Ecological Apocalypse? Climate Change and the Production of the Ethical Subject. British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19(2): 225–244. Fava, S. 2013. Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art: Designing Nightmares. London and New York: Routledge. Feinberg, M. and Willer, R. 2011. Apocalypse Soon? Dire Messages Reduce Belief in Global Warming by Contradicting Just-World Beliefs.  Psychological Science 22(1): 34–38. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late-Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ginn, F. 2015. When Horses Won’t Eat: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105(2): 351–359. Globus Veldman, R. 2012. Narrating the Environmental Apocalypse: How Imagining the End Facilitates Moral Reasoning among Environmental Activists. Ethics & the Environment 17(1): 1–23. Goldenberg, S. 2015. The Doomsday Vault: The Seeds That Could Save a Post-­ Apocalyptic World.  Guardian,  20 May. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/20/the-­d oomsday-­v ault-­s eeds-­s ave-­p ost-­a pocalyptic-­w orld [acessed 14 February 2021]. Gore, A. 2016. The Case for Optimism on Climate Change. https://www.ted.com/ talks/al_gore_the_case_for_optimism_on_climate_change?language=nl [accessed 31 January 2021]. Guterres, A. 2019. Secretary-General’s Remarks at Opening Ceremony of UN Climate Change Conference COP25. https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/ statement/2019-­12-­02/secretary-­generals-­remarks-­opening-­ceremony-­of-­un-­ climate-­change-­conference-­cop25-­delivered [accessed 31 January 2021]. Hall, J. R. 2009. Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hennessy, J. 2019. Sydney Looks like a Smoke-drenched Apocalyptic Nightmare.  Business Insider, 10 December. https://www.insider.com/sydney-­ smoke-­bushfires-­causes-­climate-­change-­2019-­12 [accessed 31 January 2021].

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Hulme, M. 2010. Problems with Making and Governing Global Kinds of Knowledge. Global Environmental Change 20: 558–564. Kinchy, A. 2012. Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Lilley, S., McNally, D., Yuen, E. and Davis, J. 2012. Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth. Oakland: PM Press. Löwith, K. 1949. Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McNeish, W. 2017. From Revelation to Revolution: Apocalypticism in Green Politics. Environmental Politics 26(6): 1035–1054. Nausner, M. 2012. Postkoloniale Theologien.  Verkündigung und Forschung 57(2): 117–131. Northcott, M. 2015. Eschatology in the Anthropocene: From the Chronos of Deep Time to the Kairos of the Age of Humans. In C.  Hamilton, Gemenne, F. and Bonneuil, C. (eds) The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis. London and New York: Routledge, 100–111. Ray, J. 2012. The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing. Richard, P. 1995. Apocalypse: A People’s Commentary on the Book of Revelation. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers. Rothe, D. 2019. Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene.  Millennium: Journal of International Studies https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819889138. Skrimshire, S. 2010. Introduction: How Should We Think about the Future? In S.  Skrimshire (ed.) Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. London: Continuum. Stott, P. A. and Thorne, P. W. 2010. How Best to Log Local Temperatures? Nature 465: 158–159. Tatschner, F. 2018. Dekolonisierte Eschatologie. Ein Versuch der Veränderung christlicher Zeitlichkeitsvorstellungen. In A.  Nehring and Wiesgickl, S. (eds) Postkoloniale Theologien II: Perspektiven aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer GmbH, 53–72. Taylor, M. L. 2004. Spirit and Liberation: Achieving Postcolonial Theology in the United States. In C.  Keller, Nausner, M. and Rivera, M. (eds) Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St Louis: Chalice Press. Thistlethwaite, S. and Potter Engel, M. 1990. Introduction: Making the Connections among Liberation Theologies around the World. In S. Thistlethwaite and Potter Engel, M. (eds) Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers. Turnhout, E., Dewulf, A. and Hulme, M. 2016. What Does Policy-relevant Global Environmental Knowledge Do? The Cases of Climate and Biodiversity. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 18: 65–72. Ward, K. 2008. Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th- and 20th-­ Century Western Philosophy. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate.

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Washington Post. 2020. Australia’s Apocalyptic Fires Are a Warming to the World. 6 January. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/australias-­apocalyptic-­fires-­ are-­a -­w arning-­t o-­t he-­w orld/2020/01/06/138a4ffc-­3 0b8-­1 1ea-­9 1fd-­ 82d4e04a3fac_story.html [accessed 31 January 2021]. Weber, J. 2018. Al Gore Is Still Optimistic. Bloomberg Businessweek, 20 September. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-­09-­20/al-­gore-­beholds-­the-­ climate-­apocalypse-­and-­is-­still-­optimistic [accessed 8 January 2021]. Westhelle, V. 2012. Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wojcik, D. 1997. The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press. Wolfe, J. 2017. Eschatology. In J. Rasmussen, Wolfe, J. and Zachhuber, J. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 676–696. Yountae, A. 2018. Postcolonial/Decolonial Theology. In C. D. Rodkey and Miller, J.  E. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 727–734.

22 The Weather Is Always a Method Harshavardhan Bhat

Introduction The title of this chapter is somewhat an obvious one. Life exists within the atmosphere and the material relations in and of the weather. Any relation within cosmologies of the international surely exists within this. Yet, as other chapters in this collection have displayed, 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. This chapter is a brief glimpse at some ways through which the weather can help us do that. Therefore, 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. I use the word weather interchangeably with the air and the wind. The term weather linguistically simply offers a way of encapsulating an assemblage of materials and relations: air, wind, water, current, ground, dust, earth, muds and so much more. However, the term weather takes us to a particular imaginary of the assemblage that is informed by popular conversation and phenomena. Hence, the interchangeability is to remind us that our words are expressions for things deeply interlocked in powerful relationships that allow for the condition of our life-world. The air

H. Bhat (*) University of Westminster, London, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_22

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is weather just as much as the weather is the mud. For a chapter on IR in the Anthropocene, this piece is an attempt at helping readers think about ways through which weathers as methods inform IR in the Anthropocene and vice versa. For example, the air and the wind are methods for boats to move and seeds to pollinate. The currents are also a method for the air to become wind. People try to make methods out of the weather. People map it, architecture within it, fold and create all sorts of possibilities in/with methods and methodologies that work with the weather but are also within and because of this air. This chapter, inspired by contemporary readings, shows how the weather is always a method in international relations and its study. Even more so in the Anthropocene, where the material assemblages of weather carry and make transformation (see Chap. 6 on climate engineering), for me contextually, this is the air of the monsoon which was the subject of my doctoral research and which finds brief moments of expression in this text. There are three parts to this chapter. Each briefly introduces a narrative affixed to some of its contemporary literature and context. The attempt in each part is to show the reader different ways of how the weather is always a method. The first part, titled ‘Wind’, thinks with rice as a commodity of monsoonal spaces, bringing it in conversation with the spatio-temporalities of IR. The second part, titled ‘Bodies’, 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, titled ‘Aerosols Against Meteorology’, is an invitation for speculation with the knowledge systems in/of airborne matters we have come to deeply know. It asks the reader to think about how they come to know the winds and how disruptions in those methods can perhaps be openings rather than boxes that restrict the ontological reading of the materials of the air. This, I propose, is a unique and important moment for IR as it humbly asks for reconsideration, not simply for air’s ontological capacity but because the stakes of writing violent methods with the wind and the weather are high, in a climate of breakdown, for peoples who breathe and live in air.

Wind At my grandmother’s place in southern Karnataka, in the paddy field at the left of the house, they used to cultivate a local variety of rice. In the past five years, they have stopped because the monsoon has changed and they do not receive rainfall the way they used to in the past. The time, frequency and intensities of the air of the monsoon have changed, thereby changing the

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relationship between the people of the house and the paddy field. A paddy field after all is a flooded patch of soil. If the air of the monsoon does not distribute the material of optimal floods, any speculation of cultivation remains a fantasy. For monsoonal regions, water comes from the sky. The air is the method. These days, other vegetables are cultivated in that patch. The last time I asked my grandmother about rice—she had commented about the change in time and that the time of other places had come upon these lands. To discuss the Anthropocene is to always discuss a changing life-world, inundated by the work of more-than-humans and peoples. Peoples ‘here’ implicated in processes and materials, with people ‘there’. That simultaneity of several relations in motion is what makes the methods of the air particularly complicated to understand. For international relations, the monsoon can be understood not just through what we think of as the weather but also the commodities, communities, systems, infrastructures and biomes—that exist and influence because of the monsoon. The reversal in the direction of the wind that carries the ocean into the sky is not simply a metaphoric analogy for what a monsoon is. It is quite literally the greatest accumulation of aqueous matter sustained in the air. It is a spatio-temporal motion that entangles in/ with/because-of everything that is stuck and nurtured in its formation. For the paddy field, any change in the spatio-temporality of the monsoon affects the stickiness of the biome—an exemplification of what we conceptualise as humidity or moisture—the affective force which nurtures all the forms of life that gather in its air. If we think of the air of the monsoon in alliance with rice, air not just allows one to understand the world rice needs in order for its grass to grow but it allows the speculative future of the forms and places rice can occupy. From the situatedness of the paddy field, to take the air seriously is to take into deep account the multiplicity of assemblages—informatic, speculative, infrastructural, technical, biomic and relational. The air of the monsoon presents us with a method of thinking—with conditions not as weather events but as the stickiest of entanglements that are interlocked with a variety of matters and times in co-nurturing condition. As Elaine Gan (2019) writes, “Rice does not pre-exist its relations; what counts as rice (in its various modalities) arises when differential trajectories crisscross, forming unruly assemblages” (paragraph 1). Elaine Gan’s work teaches us how rice comes into being as a force of matter—associations that conjoin in particular ways that cajole emergence. Thinking with feminist scholars such as Anna Tsing, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, paying attention to more-than-human entanglements, Gan’s work helps me understand that rice, in/of the Anthropocene, can assist us in reading disturbances, disruptions and interconnections. International relations,

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despite the way it is often written, is always composed of them. Most importantly, rice—read as a grass attuned to monsoonal becomings—offers us the potential of entering a whole new category of political relations. The Bengal famine of the 1940s, exercised by colonial forces in Bengal, as a sustained act of extraction, theft and genocide, to deter the Japanese advance through Myanmar and defend British imperial interests, is one such example. Extractive processes are relationships with peoples and weathers. Mike Davis’ (2000) work on Late Victorian Holocausts and Neeladri Bhattacharya’s (2018) work on agrarian colonisation speaks to this relationship. The framing of the famine is the framing of the condition that colonial thinking seeks to perpetuate as process. In fact, the very concept of famine displaces the labour of peoples and violent extraction onto the air. It conceptualises the weather to have the agency of extractive suffering, thereby redefining the relationship between colonial praxis and agriculture. It also employs limited meteorological methodologies and speculations in designating oppression alongside so-­ called phenomenological weather. Despite the condition of the air, the forceful fabrication of relationships of peoples with weathers is to shift relations and thereby the conceptualisation of possibilities. So, if you read the work of rice (considering the importance of rice in Bengal and the broader region) as an interlocutor for the weather, in our exploration of international relations, you then begin to see how the weather worlds possibilities of interconnection that normative modes of IR are not able to grasp. Furthermore, the political assemblages that make the weather world in certain anthropocentric ways denote the production of knowledge practice of the weather—its air, water, grounds, life and what they come to mean. For example, a common critique of thinking-with-materials in disciplines like IR tends to be the accusation that these approaches are environmentally deterministic. They are not. IR’s history in/with the globalisation of commodities and its fetishism with commodities attracts this critique. Furthermore, the point of thinking-with-materials and weathers is not to write political studies where more-than-human matters design human relations with a god-like agency but to lay stress upon how human matters are never detached from materialities, weathers and more-than-human others. They are constantly co-producing the world. This approach, as also argued by feminist and multi-species scholarship, requires attention to how people are always making-with, because-of, in-the weather and its several ecologies (Barad 2007; Haraway 2007; Haraway et al. 2016; Neimanis 2017; Tsing 2015). In the case of the Bengal famine, the

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monsoon becomes the site of extraction through which colonial fantasies are enacted. While I have used this example because of its historical immensity, it is important to note that these methodologies of extraction are always ongoing and IR is implicated as a fundamental methodological formation that treats the weather (in/with its peoples and matters) through these fantasies of the colonial lens. Militarisation has always in modernity (and in our ongoing colonial time) played with the weather and has methodologically manipulated it. Today, the movement of the colonial military complex that plays a foundational role in the contemporary state of international relations is also a powerful formulator of weather. As recent reports indicate, “the US Department of Defense has a larger annual carbon footprint than most countries on earth. With a sprawling network of bases and logistics networks, the US military is the single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world aside from whole nation-states themselves” (Hussain 2019, paragraph 6). Colonial methodologies of the weather and contemporary capitalism address the nurturing capacities of weathers as resources. To assign the materials of life-world substances, substantiations (Choy 2011), forms and formations as resources is a methodological act that is not detached from the implications of weathers past and weathers future. What is inherited as a resource is always also a method of materiality. International relations can never be detached from that inheritance and the invention of the nation state is deeply affixed with methodological violence. In the case of the paddy fields of Bengal and the famine enacted by political forces, rice is not simply the analytical material for consumption and re-­ pollination but is chemically imbricated within the materialities of ongoing flows. These flows are both materially tangible and integral to the work of time. As Gan (2018) reminds us, “every grain embodies the creativities and violences of significant others that come in the forms and of companion species, landscapes, machines, and systems of measure, knowledge, and exchange” (2018, 87–88). The structures of relations are not just felt in the air but are materially present in making the composition of the future. IR methods to think with the wind, the air and the weather can begin with a simple grain of rice. Matter and people are never alone in a story that brings matters and peoples through a condition and material called the air. So much of the weather is inside this air, and hence even a grain of rice in/of the Anthropocene can expose us to how and why international relations can be understood differently.

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Box 22.1  Clouds of Industrial Agriculture Consider for example, the rice-wheat bi-cropping system in central and northern India. Accelerated by processes such as the green revolution from the 1960s and economic liberalisation policies in the 1990s, the developmentalist paradigm employed by the Indian state in disciplining the country’s waterways has enabled the bi-cropping system to participate in the national and international economy. So have neoliberalisation and industrial agricultural policies in powerful countries influenced other countries in joining them in this process. Through the geological engineering of Indo-Gangetic landscapes and gradual industrialisation, soils are taught to be attuned to bi-cropping systems. In India, the use of the combined harvester which is a machine that integrates the three functions of reaping (to cut), threshing (separating) and winnowing (blowing to remove the chaff) (Kumar et al. 2015) usually leaves behind stubble which farmers burn to clear and make way for the next cycle. Although legal measures have been placed against the practice, complex socio-political conditions have forced farmers to continue the practice of stubble burning. Each winter, northern India and cities such as Delhi choke in smoke because of meteorological conditions that keep the smog closer to the surface. As the stubble grass of rice are converted to carbons and other compounds that become the air, they transform the condition of the region, the Himalayas, expanding and mixing with other conditions in and of the world. If we follow Nicholas Shapiro’s (2015) work on the chemosphere which shows how bodies consume particular chemicals through the air, toxic atmosphere, as he reminds us, is part of a “complex give-and-take” (2015, 372) relationship. As international economic markets increase demand for the commodity and as national systems deepen their investments into the labour of rice, relationships in/of the air unfold—in exposing us to political formations complicit in international relations.

Bodies Christina Sharpe, in her article titled ‘The Weather’ (2017), frames the weather as follows: “In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is as pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies” (paragraph 9). Slavery, dispossession, racism and ongoing structural violence frame the current of antiblackness. In her reading of literature, history, scholarship, kinship, the human and more-than-human environment, antiblackness is not just a phenomenon but is history and practice written by colonialism on/with materials and the weather. Through Sharpe (2016a), one can read whiteness, colonialism and empire as methods that navigate winds, oceans and grounds in entrenching it with antiblackness, sustaining it as their political project. Reading the ‘wake’ in Sharpe’s (2016a) work then is both metaphoric and literal, affective and material. Sharpe (2016a) develops what she calls ‘wake

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work’ to understand, read, write and make sense of worlding with bodies in a world of antiblackness. As Sharpe (2016a) in her closing note, following Brand, underlines, there is both disaster and possibility in this weather. The work that the ‘work’ needs to do is draw out, flesh, annotate, redact, imagine, dream and perform the work of possibility in that weather. The currents of transatlantic slavery, its inheritance and ongoing logics, that Sharpe (2016a) refers to, expand the normative reading of the weather as a manipulated meteorological site in/of the Anthropocene. It shows how colonial logics account significantly in the deep manipulation of life-worlds. The ecologies that she speaks of are ecologies in/of colonialism and empire that are foundational principles in the work of cultivating ecologies of death and intergenerational suffering. Transatlantic slavery, colonialism and the framing of the nation state are living concepts and living weathers in/of contemporary conditions. International relations as a discipline therefore is an inheritance of racist, colonial history. The reason I invoke Sharpe’s work here is to remind us that bodies are entangled in the past, now and the future of methods and methodologies. The currents of air and water as logics drawn for the theoretical life of borders and the forcible displacement of bodies are work within the weather, and therefore, it changes the world. Sharpe’s proposal for ‘wake work’ is a method of possibility, a method for a conversation with other possible worlds—despite climates that are framed and theorised in other ways. The plantation is an example of that site of the weather. Plantations as micro-climates of homogeneous extractivist monocrop projects are global models of contemporary agriculture. As industrial agricultural systems collapse and deepen the precarity of soils and their farmers, one begins to see the connection between methodologies of internationalisation attuned with the method of breakdown. Climate breakdown therefore is a history of the Anthropocene, and the story of peoples and their methods in cultivating relationships with peoples and their life-worlds. Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton (2018)—who are also inspired by Sharpe’s work (her 2016 book In the Wake—On Blackness and Being)—think with it in the development of what they term as ‘weathering’: “In the face of the greatest climatic transformation that human bodies have ever known, weathering means learning to live with the changing conditions of rainfall, drought, heat, thaw and storm as never separable from the ‘total climate’ of social, political and cultural existence of bodies. This includes anti-blackness, but also, we suggest, coloniality, misogyny and the resourcing and thingafication of other bodies— poor, queer, non-human, disabled” (2018, 82). Hamilton and Neimanis (2018), in their pedagogical work on weathering develop a field guide to think about the weather “through our bodies” (2018, 1) inviting readers to consider that the weather is always embodied, submerged,

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in/of/with bodies. Their work on the weather enables the work of ‘method’ to not just be performed from the analytic figure of what we consider as ‘data’ but centres the weather in/of itself, that cuts across architectures, atmospheres, ocean and wind as methods that are always understood with and through bodies. For a student of IR in the Anthropocene, such “tactics” (Hamilton and Neimanis 2018) can be valuable starting points in trying to understand the architecture and infrastructures, locally around oneself and internationally that cohabit what one thinks of as the weather. International relations after all is a human-centric affair that has historically been built on/for the fantasies of colonial ordering. To begin a process of pedagogical awareness of context, situation, implication, entanglement, atmosphere and system is always an opportunity to more-than-reflect: to identify how methods of breakdown, cultivation and living are always in collaboration with the air. We are unable to think without it. We do not exist without it. The weather cannot be written off as a meteorological phenomenon, but is a material, implicated in much if not everything. Methods in international relations claiming power relations, structures and intentions of change are also methods of changing the air and the world around us. Therefore, it is important to read them with care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Following the scholarship of Édouard Glissant (1997), Sylvia Wynter (2003), Saidiya Hartman (2008), Katherine McKittrick (2013) and Tiffany Lethabo King (2019), I have been inspired by how a pedagogical, methodological, embedded story of air’s flow, current, time and matters can be read and understood differently. Who writes the air? How do they write the weather? Glissant, Wynter, Hartman, McKittrick and King, in my limited list, are all scholars of politics. They are researchers, poets, writers and storytellers, but to me, they are also in their work reading international relations from a perspective that is key to confront and engage the mess of how whiteness addresses and produces IR. Methods matter and it matters where a reading of the weather begins. Which bodies and what people tell you what and why about the weather are important questions for consideration. Climate breakdown, after all, is not a method of equality. The process impacts some more than others, and the disaster is written into the methodology of breakdown. From the above scholars, for instance, one can read how particular methods of understanding winds and ocean currents have played a role in transatlantic slavery, the time of the plantation, the contemporary nation state, blackness and its kinships. Reading the weather as and through colonial technologies and knowledge systems deepens the potential of intergenerational breakdown. But, so does it frame international relations—it frames contemporary notions of concepts like the ‘United States’, it exposes us to the entanglements that formalise violence and infrastructure, and it cultivates a methodology of how one version of the world can exist. As Sharpe (2016b) reminds us,

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slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship. Kinship relations structure the nation. Capitulation to their current configurations is the continued enfleshment of that ghost. Refuse reconciliation to ongoing brutality. Refuse to feast on the corpse of others. Rend the fabric of the kinship narrative. Imagine otherwise. Remake the world. Some of us have never had any other choice. (2016b, 12)

If we acknowledge the kinship of international relations with colonial history and colonial knowledge, then we also begin to acknowledge that colonial knowledge seeks flourishing through death work (Bird Rose 2011). The term ‘death work’ that I get from Deborah Bird Rose in my reading is not a simple binary understanding of life and death but is a term that helps us think about the trajectory and interconnections that gather the assemblage of deaths. The assemblages of air, water and ground—as the weather—become the primary site of both extraction and death distribution. Climate breakdown and mass extinctions therefore are implicated in the colonial method of the weather. The colonial method of practising their/its work with the currents of the wind and the ocean relies on the hope of climate breakdown for the ‘others’ that it does not consider as human, living, interconnected and worthy of the earth. If you choose to think with scholarship that writes the history of international relations through colonialism, conquest, genocide, ecocide and its vast relations, you begin to see how International Relations is, in fact, a discipline in and of the Anthropocene. A very particular treatment of the weather—the assemblages of life-worlds—enables for IR to exist in a world that presents itself to be theorised by the apparatus of IR. Therefore, for a student of IR, where can a study of the weather as a method begin? In Box 22.2, I provide an example.

Box 22.2  Monuments The American artist Kara Walker was commissioned for the Tate 2019–2020 Turbine Hall installation. Her piece, a large live fountain titled Fons Americanus taking inspiration from the iconic Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, is not a celebration of empire and colonisation unlike the latter. Walker describes it as a piece about the Atlantic Ocean and global waters that have connected continents in the project of colonial prosperity and worldly plunder. Juxtaposed with the Victoria Memorial which celebrates the idea of victory and progress, Walker’s piece—remaining true to her art and deep political relations—asks us to “regard the immaterial void of the abyss” in a “delightful family friendly setting” (Walker 2020)—invokes slavery, quietly, loudly and saliently—in the affective state of a presence of knowledge and matter, situated and implicated with this time. I stood in front of the installation for quite some time and I remember reading the poetics of the poster on the wall by the piece, in some wonder and pain. An excerpt from the piece is as follows:

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Witness the FONS AMERICANUS THE DAUGHTERS OF WATERS An Allegorical Wonder Behold! The Sworling Drama Of the Mercliness Seas, Routes and Rivers, upon which our dark fortunes were traded and on whose frothy shores lay prostrate Captain, Slave and Starfish, alike. (Walker 2020)

While there is no image of the work on these pages, I invite the reader to visit the piece online (search for Kara Walker: Fons Americanus), to think about the site of finding method. Through what confrontations can new methods be developed? How are we implicated in the methods we use? What forms of inheritance ask us to use what methods and why? A comparison of the Victoria Memorial with Fons Americanus shows two different versions of history, the future and an imagination of the weather. How is the weather writing the possibility of methods? Like the part of Walker’s work featuring a shell, an oyster like sculpture of a boy drowning in the ocean, who and what is made to drown in the methods of inheritance and continuity?

Aerosols Against Meteorology Thinking with aerosols (i.e. fine matter in/of the air) enables unique political ways of perceiving, writing and telling about the weather. Aerosols confront modernist and colonial approaches to climate change by disrupting techno-­ scientific projections of developmentalist futures. They also help demonstrate entanglements and assist in understanding some of the dangers in notions of containment, securitisation, economisation and colonisation that modern IR allows for. The weather here is a story told with aerosols and the conceptual possibilities that therefore provides. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documentation, for instance, sheds light on the challenges aerosols—that is, the matter in/of air—pose to science: “Clouds and aerosols continue to contribute the largest uncertainty to estimates and interpretations of the Earth’s changing energy budget” (Boucher et al. 2013). Clouds and aerosols are very hard if not impossible to capture through mathematical formula and contemporary computation systems. Different particulates do different things to different flows and thereby are at dynamic odds with measurement, as clouds constantly form into future forms, of

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themselves, distributed and becoming. Scientists are finding out new things about clouds every day. For example, Kimberly Prather’s group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been demonstrating that sea spray and the composition of sea spray affects clouds, their formation and behaviour (DeMott et al. 2016). Dust storm aerosols confront governmental notions of meteorological infrastructure (Zee 2017). The list ever goes on. Clouds constantly assemble matter, energy and liveliness and change. Clouds are known to complicate climate models and they are also one of the biggest reasons why forecasts are inaccurate in many monsoonal parts of the world: their deep relationship with geologic, oceanic, more-than-organic and lively matters tends to complicate scientific and aesthetic interests that tend to a modernist approach. Suprabha Seshan, an ecologist and a biodiversity caretaker in the Western Ghats in southern India, has been publishing field notes vocalising a perspective that the elimination of our forests could impact the monsoon as we know it. Antonio Donato Nobre (2014) in the Future Climate of Amazonia Report speaks of how the forest orchestrates the waters of the air and its role in hydrating the atmosphere. Aerosols become clouds and clouds are composed of aerosols—matter borne in the air but also entangled with other forms, processes, grounds and waters. Therefore, the section title ‘aerosols against meteorology’ is also an experiment posed as a material question or provocation that takes us beyond the confines of the modernised zone of containment. Meteorology, as we also understand from Davis (2000), Amrith (2018), Coen (2018) and Yusoff (2018), is a deeply political practice. In the Indian subcontinent, we see the development of the discipline of meteorology, thanks to empire’s interest in planning value extraction from farmers and economic markets. It evolves as a visual imagining of the flows that contain India and frame India in relation to a world (Amrith 2018). As a mapping practice, it can also be understood as a knowledge system to cultivate capacities of productive value extraction from land, people and markets (Davis 2000). Considering meteorology’s inheritance of its foundational methods from geology, we can also learn from Kathryn Yusoff’s (2018) critical work on the Anthropocene, where she argues that “as the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life—anthropos—through a universalist geologic commons, it neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations”. Following Yusoff (2018), who reads geology as a practice invested in the erasure and manipulation of racialised life, the relations that it nurtures into the future carry the force of those matters in times to come. The historian Deborah Coen (2018) addresses meteorology in the context of the Habsburg Empire as a practice that develops through climatology in

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the interest of seeking a methodology of unity across the Empire’s vast geographical scale. Speculatively mapping this trajectory onto the present, atmospheric science and meteorology in a whole range of scientific disciplines form the assemblages of how many of us are taught to understand the planetary. However, taking this context into situated analysis might open up different ways of realising how imaginaries of nations are entangled with imaginaries of the weather. The material apparatus that forms the planetary on the ground below, in our oceans, in airs and in orbit feeds back into the methodological computational and visual infrastructure that some call the technosphere (HKW 2015). From the sciences of unity and planetary-wide extraction to contemporary advancements in natural science, the ability to deeply map and theorise into the geos, cosmos and biomes is expanded. IR is realised through this, but it is also broken down because of its capacity to break down life-­ worlds. The weather is always a method because even in the wake of contemporary global climate breakdown, the response of many powerful countries is to further geoengineer in a weather system that we still, despite the infrastructure, do not understand very well. The monsoon is a good example. Monsoonal variability, timeframes, densities, causation and disruptions are all aspects that are entangled with the planetary but have very specific impacts on specific levels. The fantasy of geoengineering, for example, carries on the legacy of the fantasy of colonial assertion and manipulation of the weather. The Solar Geoengineering Research Programme at Harvard University defines geoengineering as “a set of emerging technologies that could manipulate the environment and partially offset some of the impacts of climate change” (Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Programme website 2020: https://geoengineering.environment.harvard.edu/home). Their work explores the use of a variety of aerosols in different formations and spatio-temporal atmospheric contexts that speculatively intend on assisting against global warming. However, the reason I invoked the aerosol through commentary in the opening of this section is because I think the aerosol is an interesting ontological material to think with, in the context of IR and the Anthropocene. The aerosol worlds the possibility of a knowledge that is more-than-human because, despite colonial fantasies of rupture and control, aerosols leak, seep, move, premise, background, storm and exist as the air. Aerosols make, change, become and situate the condition that we call the air. For a student of international relations interested in changing climates—our airs, waters, earths and life-worlds—aerosols are moments into methods that are always there for us to understand a lesson in ontological humility, entanglement and the work that goes into what keeps things together. It can also be a theoretical

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connection between the forms of neoliberal/capitalist/fascist anthropocenic conditions that entangle the burning earth. Most importantly, aerosols show us that the weather is always a method. Aerosols connect and interconnect. They are matter; understanding matter is political. Its ontological force has political agency, and our bodies and knowledge systems are entangled with it, in many ways. Box 22.3  Cloud Seeding In the context of the winter smog in Delhi, the government has in the past few years (2017–2019) attempted to cloud seed to produce rain over the region to reduce atmospheric toxicity. In each of these years, the government has failed because the winter smog of Delhi is a dense aerosol cloud that is submerged into the city (Lalwani 2018; Mohan 2019). Cloud seeding exercises require very particular cloud conditions up in the atmosphere for them to succeed. You need clouds to cloud seed. In recent years cloud seeding has become a regular exercise in several parts of the world from the United States to Dubai and to China for a variety of purposes from tourism to agriculture (Guilford 2013; Harper 2017; The UAE Research Programme for Rain Enhancement Science 2020). Cloud seeding in monsoonal regions remains a challenge because of the unique conditions of the monsoon and its spatio-temporalities throughout the year. Uncertainties in the method of cloud seeding are experienced due to the politics of aerosols. Anthropogenic formations in the air are expensive and resource- and labour-­ intensive. The fantasy of exercising a transformative politics of technological rupture of clouds is only offered to us through the ontological capacities of the cloud. To conspire against clouds in a world where the method of the cloud is its own entangled enactment is a failed conversation between knowledge systems. Technologies are not simply answers to the breakdown but rather signify a technics of breakdown—that is, the question perhaps is not how to cloud seed but what we learn about our desire and use of knowledge from the political assertion to cloud seed? I invoke this example not to simply exercise a failed conversation between science and politics but to ask if there are other ways of imagining the politics of clouds considering failed modernity which still refuses to imagine differently.

Conclusion Through the three sections, I have attempted a brief reading of how the weather is always a method for studies in IR. The Anthropocene is a problematic and powerful time and space for this engagement because it is only in the breakdown that IR begins to confront the materials (past, present and future) that constitute its imaginary. The weather exposes the Anthropocene as a material of drastic history and transformative violence that is sustained by the dynamics of the material. The air inherits those matters. Through this

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life-­world material of the weather, IR is revisited. With some help from winds, bodies and aerosols—read with contemporary literatures that flesh out the substantiation of those matters—I argue that the weather is not simply a phenomenological site detached from human and lively matters. The weather can be a way through which other imaginaries and methods can flourish. Let us attempt that possibility, despite its inherited warmth, radioactivity, toxicity and interspecies death. The air is here and will be here, despite. Key Points  1. The weather is a method for life-worlds, but so is it for death-­work. They are not binaries but modes of visibility that inform us of speculative possibilities with the ontological force of the weather. 2. International relations as a discipline is in/of the Anthropocene. There is no escape from this context of trouble and fragility. Yet, reading the air, winds and current with IR helps us understand the stakes of ongoing methods in the discipline and its broader use. 3. Methodological moments for thinking with the weather lie everywhere. The stories you choose to see, read, write, draw, think and breathe with are matters of project, condition and speculation. Write what matters to you and the community around you. We are just people, despite the grandiosity of the international. Key Questions  1. What methods help you to think of the weather and why? What role should those methods play in thinking an IR for the Anthropocene? 2. What are some of the technologies being used today to understand what we think of as the weather? What are their histories? 3. If you draw a map of the materials you think of that constitute the air, how far can those relations in the map be traced? How are concepts, places and forms of matter and life connected to that air? 4. Why should international relations be concerned with the weather and its assemblages? 5. If the knowledge systems of the weather have let you down, where and how do you find kinship with knowledge systems that help you breathe/exist in a changing weather?

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Further Reading Da Cunha, D. 2019. The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Coen, D. 2018. Climate in Motion: Science, Empire and the Problem of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ingersoll, K.  A. 2016. Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press. Neimanis, A. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthumanist Feminist Phenomenology. Sydney: Bloomsbury Taussig, M. 2018. Palma Africana. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tsing, A. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

References Amrith, S. 2018. Unruly Waters—How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons have Shaped South Asia’s History. London: Allen Lane. Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bhattacharya, N. 2018. The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Bird Rose, D. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming—Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Boucher, O., Randall,  D.,  Artaxo, P.,  Bretherton, C.,  Feingold, G.,  Forster,  P., …Zhang,  X.  Y.    2013. Clouds and Aerosols. In Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K.,  Tignor, M., Allen, S. K., Boschung, J. ... P. M. (eds) Midgley Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 571–658. Choy, T. 2011. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham: Duke University Press. Coen, D.  R. 2018. Climate in Motion—Science, Empire and the Problem of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, M. 2000. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso. DeMott, P. J., Thomas, C. J., Hill, C. S., McCluskey, K. A., Prather, D. B., Collins, R.  C. and Sullivan, M.  J. 2016. Sea Spray Aerosol as a Unique Source of Ice Nucleating Particles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(21): 5797–5803.

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Gan, E. 2018. Timing rice: an enquiry into more-than-human temporalities of the Anthropocene. New formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 92: 87–101. Retrieved from https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/689859. Gan, E. 2019. Sorting Seeds into Racialised Futures and Pasts. Catalyst—feminism, theory, technoscience 5(2) https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i2.32834 Glissant, E. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Guilford, G. 2013. China creates 55 billion tons of artificial rain a year and it plans to quintuple that. Quartz, 22 October. Retrieved from https://qz.com/138141/ china-­creates-­55-­billion-­tons-­of-­artificial-­rain-­a-­year-­and-­it-­plans-­to-­quintuple-­ that/ [accessed 16 February 2021]. Hamilton, J. M., and Neimanis, A. 2018. A Field Guide for Weathering: Embodied Tactics for Collectives of Two or More Humans. The Goose  17(1): article 45. Retrieved from https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/45 [accessed 8 February 2021]. Haraway, D. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D., Noboru, I., Scott F. G., Kenneth O., Tsing, A.L. and Bubandt, N. 2016. Anthropologists Are Talking—About the Anthropocene. Ethnos 81(3): 535–564. Harper, K. 2017. Make It Rain: State Control of Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartman, S. 2008. Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. HKW Technosphere Project. (2015–2019). Retrieved from https://www.hkw.de/en/ programm/projekte/2015/technosphere/technosphere.php [accessed 16 February 2021]. Hussain, M. 2019. War on the world: Industrialised Militaries are a bigger part of the climate change emergency than you know. The Intercept, 15 September. Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2019/09/15/climate-­change-­us-­military-­war/ [accessed 14 February 2021]. Kumar, P., Surender K. and Joshi, L. 2015. Socioeconomic and Environmental Implications of Agricultural Residue Burning. SpringerBriefs in Environmental Science. New Delhi: Springer. Lalwani, V. 2018. Pollution check: Experts cast a dark cloud over Centre’s plan for artificial rain in Delhi. Scroll, 28 November. Retrieved from https://scroll.in/article/903554/pollution-­check-­experts-­cast-­a-­dark-­cloud-­over-­centre-­s-­plans-­of-­ artificial-­rain-­in-­delhi [accessed 18 February 2021]. King, T.L. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. McKittrick, K. 2013. Plantation Futures. Small Axe 17(3): 1–15. Mohan, V. 2019. Artificial rain: IIT-Kanpur hopes plan takes wings. Times of India, 31 October. Retrieved from https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/ artificial-­rain-­iit-­k-­hopes-­plan-­takes-­wings/articleshow/71827899.cms [accessed 18 February 2021].

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Neimanis, A. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthumanist Feminist Phenomenology. Sydney: Bloomsbury Neimanis, A. and Hamilton, J.  M. 2018. Weathering. Feminist Review  118(1): 80–84. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-­018-­0097-­8 [accessed 8 February 2021]. Nobre, A. D. 2014. The Future Climate of Amazonia. Retrieved from https://wwfint. awsassets.panda.org/downloads/the_future_climate_of_amazonia_report.pdf [accessed 17 February 2021]. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shapiro, N. 2015. Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime. Cultural Anthropology 30(3): 368–93. Sharpe, C. 2016a. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharpe, C. 2016b. Lose your kin. The New Inquiry, 16 November. Retrieved from https://thenewinquiry.com/lose-­your-­kin/ [accessed 14 February 2021]. Sharpe, C. 2017. The Weather. The New Inquiry, 19 January. Retrieved from https:// thenewinquiry.com/the-­weather/ [accessed 14 February 2021]. The UAE Research Programme for Rain Enhancement Science. 2020. Retrieved from http://www.uaerep.ae/. Tsing, A. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World—On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walker, K. 2020. Fons Americanus. Tate Modern, London. Wynter, S. 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337. Yusoff, K. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zee, J. 2017. Holding Patterns: Sand and Political Time at China’s Desert Shores. Cultural Anthropology 32(2): 215–41.

23 Thought Experiment as Method: Science-­ Fiction and International Relations in the Anthropocene Isabella Hermann

Introduction Science fiction (SF) offers inspiration for both methods and perspectives for IR in the Anthropocene. This is because the genre’s thought experiments reveal insights into the possibilities of alternative futures and can thus be understood as a mode of thinking about 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, 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. SF not only offers thought experiments that make humans appear as both subjects and objects, but also expands the time scale and allows for different Anthropocene temporalities.  It is exactly the speculation approach which destabilises the relation between the present and the future that makes SF so fascinating. The genre confronts us with alternative possibilities that serve as a magnifying glass for our human desires, anxieties and problematics, where our humanity and humanness are at stake. While in mainstream discussion in policy-circles the potential consequences of the Anthropocene are generally

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framed as a future threat, for SF the future is already here. In these ways, SF provides one avenue for thinking beyond “the end of the world” past traditional security approaches of saving and preserving the status quo. The fundamental point of departure of SF is a fictional technological progress or imaginary but science-based novelty, a “novum” (Suvin 1979), which establishes a new world different from the one we know. But still this new world remains in the realm of logical understanding and scientific plausibility, a characteristic dubbed as “cognitive estrangement” (ibid.). From an International Relations (IR) perspective, it is interesting how SF deals with cognitive estrangement when it comes to the Anthropocene and classical concepts in world politics such as global governance (Biermann 2014), since the gloomy effects of the Anthropocene have long been playing a major role in SF directly and indirectly; even the relatively new genre “climate-­fiction” tends to be framed as a sub-genre of SF (see Box 23.1). SF can offer thought experiments on how we could think global governance and resistance in light of the negative effects of the Anthropocene, thus providing insights into underlying value systems regarding technology and politics. SF as a genre covers literature, films, series, graphic novel, comics and so on, all of which are valuable methods of and for analyses in many ways. SF films have some characteristics that make their study particularly fruitful. For one thing, SF films establish stories and narratives, but they have to do so in a condensed form and with clear messages for reasons of time constraints. On the other hand, films can present powerful images so that “the genre’s fictions of progress […] are precisely rendered visible in science-fiction films” (Kuhn 1999, 4). In this sense, SF films use visual effects to find powerful illustrations for themes related to the Anthropocene, such as floods, drought, devastation of or escape from Earth. In sections 3 and 4 the focus is primarily on SF blockbuster films. They are among the world’s most successful feature films (Hayes 2019) and are therefore watched by a wider audience and discussed on a broader scale in magazine pieces and blogs. Naturally, they pursue less educational but rather commercial interests, yet this opens a particular interesting conversation regarding the extent to which alternative futures are conceivable or fearable in our current capitalist-oriented system. Before that, the upcoming section will outline how SF is currently approached as a method for speculative thinking within the discipline of IR.

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Box 23.1  Climate-Fiction “Climate-fiction” or “cli-fi” was dubbed as a term in 2007/2008 by blogger and author Daniel Bloom and soon became the name for a contemporary literature genre that deals with human-induced climate change as a result of the Anthropocene as its main topic. Thus, cli-fi “is deeply indebted to climate science and therefore overwhelmingly concerned with anthropogenic warming” (Milner and Burgmann 2018a, 26). In the meantime, the term cli-fi has spread from literature to films, graphic novels and other popular art forms with that subject matter. Cli-fi as a genre has a mission, namely, to make people think about climate change and global warming. By that it presents a whole spectrum of possible responses that “appears to run from the gloomiest dystopia to the brightest eutopia by way of many kinds of intervening ambiguity” as, for example, “denial, mitigation, positive adaptation, negative adaptation, deep ecology” (Milner et al. 2015, 7). Nonetheless, there are scientists, activists, writers and artists who hope and even believe that cli-fi can move people towards a change of behaviour. James Richard Burgmann, who is researching into climate-fiction, writes in a book review on Green Planets that “[w]ithout overplaying literature’s hand, it is with a desire called utopia that I hope literature, or art in general, might help to trigger widespread change; because ‘if this goes on’, […] and our current political and scientific trajectory prevails, then the planet loses, and so too do we” (Burgmann 2015, 78). More concretely, cli-fi has the potential to bring peerreviewed scientific findings to life “through compelling storylines, dramatic visuals, and characters” to make people care about climate change and also give them hope (Perkins-Kirkpatrick 2017). But on the other side, dramatic storylines and glimpses of hope can  only be a “shadowy mirror” since “[l]iterature has always been a humanist endeavour: it intrinsically and helplessly affirms the value of the species” (Waldman 2018). Cli-fi as a genre then can cut both ways, enabling new approaches which are less anthropocentric as well as reinstating a human-­centred view of conquering nature. Beyond that, it is not well defined whether cli-fi is more of a sub-genre of SF or a genre of its own. There are voices—among them Burgmann—who locate cli-fi in the realms of SF for more historical reasons of genre development (Milner et al. 2015; Milner and Burgmann 2018b), whereas for Daniel Bloom himself “cli­fi is a new fiction genre of its own and will define itself more and more as time goes by” (Holmes 2014). Sure enough, cli-fi can take place in the future featuring new technologies, but it can as well be set in the present without any technological novum which is determining for SF. Michael Crichton’s 1994 novel State of Fear or Ian McEwan’s 2010 novel Solar are examples of cli-fi without SF elements.

 cience-Fiction as a Methodological Field S for International Relations One starting point for describing SF as a field of methodological interest for IR in the Anthropocene is the discipline’s growing interest in popular culture and its relationship to world politics. About 20 years ago scholars of IR started

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to bring the idea of an interconnectedness of popular culture and international relations/world politics to the fore as far as one can now speak of a sub-­ discipline of Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) (Caso and Hamilton 2015). PCWP recognises that popular culture in the form of films, books, graphic novels, computer games street art, concerts, social media and so on, influences world politics because “it is within popular culture that morality is shaped, identities are produced and transformed, and effective analogies and narratives are constructed and altered” (Neumann and Nexon 2006, 6). Yet, this relation is not a one-way street, but mutual and complex “that makes a strong case for viewing popular culture and world politics as a continuum. Each is implicated in the practices and understandings of the other” (Grayson et al. 2009, 158). Within PCWP, SF (and fantasy as well) as part of popular culture has attracted its own attention because of the specific nature of the genre, since it deals with issues such as scientific-technological progress, socio-political change or the potential to overcome structural problems—and thereby tells a lot about our present. Just as PCWP can be framed as intertext between popular culture and world politics, Jutta Weldes speaks of an “SF/world politics intertext” since “SF texts repeat and rework generic conventions, and readers bring knowledge of those conventions, their generic expectations, to their consumption and appreciation of any particular text” (Weldes 2003, 13). In a similar vein Nicholas Kiersey and Iver B. Neumann speak of “socially constitutive energies” which are “the pent-up social charges created by human interest in and engagement with, any number of social phenomena that have come to be seen as problematic” (Kiersey and Neumann 2013, 1). Within these intertextual relations—or energies—between SF and world politics, SF not only serves as a mirror but also produces world politics itself, since it can “naturalize or normalize a certain social order by further entrenching the expectation,” but also be disruptive and challenging to a certain system (ibid.: 5). Examples of the rather naturalising effect of certain practices of US foreign policy and diplomacy can be found within the Star Trek franchise (Buzan 2010; Neumann 2001; Weldes 1999). In the following, I refer to films that are not older than 25  years, with Waterworld from 1995 being the oldest. The reason for that is to be in congruence with the popularisation of the concept of the Anthropocene. While SF films by definition take a stance towards science and technology, I tried in particular to select SF films in which (global) governance and politics play a role in order to be able to highlight different approaches to both the human

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as subject and as object and to the temporality of the Anthropocene, as something we are already experiencing.

 he Human as Problem and Solution: Staying T on Earth in the Face of Apocalypse While the films The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Geostorm (2017) play in the present or very near future of the time in which they were released, Waterworld (1995), Snowpiercer (2003) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) are located in a more distant future. In all these films, however, the negative effects of the Anthropocene on the human civilisation do not occur in the future, but have already begun in our current present and even in our past. As a subject humans are both, they are responsible for the Anthropocene, but they also proactively find ways to survive, even when objectified in archaic or dictatorial structures. This conveys a message of hope for human endurance against all odds. The Day After tomorrow is situated in 2004 and begins with a huge fragment of ice breaking away from the Larson B ice shelf in Antarctica, which is an indicator for melting icebergs and thus for global warming and climate change. In the film, things are now happening fast: the melting icebergs are diverting ocean currents that are dramatically changing the climate and trigger a new ice age in large parts of the world. This is heralded by devastating global hurricane-like ice storms that freeze anything coming in their way. At the end of the film we see the Earth covered with ice and snow—we only find a small strip of warmer land in between the northern and southern hemispheres. Even though the speed of the events is not plausible, the film’s message is clear: it could have disastrous consequences if we continue to be disrespectful of our environment. The film takes the side of climate scientists and their evidence on climate change and global warming. The audience sees an inverted world in which US citizens flee to Mexico, the US vice president and later president who denies climate change is reformed, and the formerly rich countries of the North are the ones being hit the hardest. The film points the way to a future in which we have learnt our lesson and care more about nature. But still, the film’s message is ambivalent, because it tells us, whatever bad things happen, in the end humans will survive as a species or “[i]n other words climate change is a problem, but it’s not the end of the world” (Maynard 2018, 254). In this sense, the film is not so much a call to action, but rather a

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human-centred self-affirmation that “even if we make a mess of things, we can use our grit and ingenuity to find a way out” (ibid.). The anthropocentric celebration of our grit and ingenuity is at the forefront of the film Geostorm, which is set in a very close future. In the film’s present of 2019, after an unprecedented number of natural disasters caused by global warming, an international coalition led by the US constructs a satellite-based climate control system in space. The system proves to be operational when it neutralises a major typhoon threatening Shanghai, but three years later, in 2022, suspicious phenomena occur such as a completely frozen village in the Registan Desert or an enormous temperature rise in Hong Kong leading to massive gas explosions. Obviously, some of the satellites have serious malfunctions, and instead of preventing extreme weather conditions, they initiate them in the first place. What follows is the revelation of a conspiracy by the US Secretary of State who gave orders to manipulate the system to cause a worldwide “geostorm” and thus international chaos, to eliminate the “enemies of the US” and seize power. Until the Secretary of State is finally stopped and the system restored, even more disasters occur, like a thunderstorm in Orlando, the freezing of Rio de Janeiro, hailstorms in Tokyo, tornadoes in Mumbai, a heat wave in Moscow and a huge tsunami in Dubai. Through the plot of the manipulated satellite system, the viewer can observe all kinds of possible and impossible extreme weather conditions in a Hollywood-like hyperbole. But the film also conveys some noteworthy messages: firstly, a criticism of the political dominance of the US in the personification of the megalomaniac Secretary of State longing for world power; and secondly, advocacy for international cooperation since the satellite system was only realised by an international coalition and is ultimately no longer under US control but managed by an international committee. If we work together internationally on a global scale, we can find technical solutions to our problems, the film tells us. Its third message suggests that human-induced changes to the climate resulting in extreme weather conditions can be easily mitigated by a technical quick fix without changing our current lifestyles and ways of production (Svoboda 2017). While the plea for international cooperation is certainly a positive step to solve any international problem, the solution of a “tech fix” through geo-­ engineering is more problematic. As Geostorm presents it, the satellite system only fixes the negative effects of global warming but does not fix global warming itself. However, global warming is leading to climate tipping points, for example, the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the West Antarctic ice sheet

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with mounting evidence “that these events could be more likely than was thought, have high impacts and are interconnected across different biophysical systems, potentially committing the world to long-term irreversible changes” (Lenton et al. 2019). That the satellite system—as unrealistic as it may be—could also be a solution for dealing with these irreversible changes is rather unlikely. Apparently, in the more distant future of Waterworld, some tipping points have been crossed, after the polar ice caps have melted and cover most of the Earth with water. Communities of people live under anarchic conditions on floating atolls, which are regularly attacked by pirates. While in Waterworld the incapacity to stop global warming resulted in a flood of biblical proportions, in Snowpiercer it was precisely failed climate geo-engineering experiments (see Chap. 6) which led to a new ice age and the extinction of almost all life on Earth. The only survivors are the passengers on board a snowpiercer, a massive train going around a circular line. Life on the snowpiercer is defined by the despotic leadership of a privileged class living in luxury over the impoverished and exploited “scum” in the rear of the train. This kind of rule is also the point of origin in Mad Max: Fury Road, where a human-induced energy crisis provoked oil and water wars and has transformed the Earth into an inhospitable wasteland where everyone desperately is in need of water. An unscrupulous dictator reigns an inhumane terror regime withholding water from the people. In all those dystopian postapocalyptic scenarios of a world either drowned in water, covered with ice and snow, or suffering from drought, human interaction with technology turned out to be disastrous and led the way to anarchy and tyranny. Where technology is still used, it is in the form a brutal machinery that oppresses the people. However, each of the films offers a glimpse of hope: in Waterworld, “dryland,” the top of Mount Everest, is found at the end; the Snowpiercer derails and the only two survivors see a polar bear, proof of life on Earth, and in Mad Max: Fury Road, at least the tyranny is ended with the prospect of a new and fair rule by the (female) group who had overthrown it. The narratives are clear: as bad as it can get, humans will survive one way or another. As different as these films are, they all have certain main views in common. They are critical of uninformed, unequal and unfair governance structures, and the abuse of power. Major disasters on Earth will be overcome by humans, leading to better cooperation, fairer structures or at least carrying the chance for a new beginning. While those films normalise the idea of better cooperation between humans, between societies and between states, at the same time an anthropocentric worldview persists.

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 fter the End of the World: Leaving Earth A to Survive as a Species Another anthropocentric way of dealing with the Anthropocene and its negative consequences is to leave Earth: either to find an escape or a better life on a space station and/or to search for new planets where humanity can find a new home or at least exploit resources (see Box 23.2 “Mission to Mars”). In the scenarios of Interstellar (2014), Cargo (2009), the end of the world is presented as natural and therefore inevitable against the background of human behaviour—and it has already started. Nevertheless, human behaviour will not change, but be rewarded in the end by finding new habitable planets or by the possibility to return to Earth. Interstellar presents us a world in a not-so-distant future of the mid-twenty-­ first century, in which the Earth has become almost uninhabitable. People are plagued by gigantic sandstorms, blight destroys the harvest and agricultural production has collapsed—it seems to be a matter of time until even the last source of food will be exhausted. The only solution for the survival of humanity is to find a new planet with the right environment. A wormhole near Saturn promises some hope as it opens the way to 12 potentially habitable planets in another galaxy. In the end the mission succeeds, a new planet is found on the other side of the wormhole and humanity is saved. The new planet is never shown, but a space habitat orbiting Saturn near the black hole. Whether it is real within the film or just the delusion of the protagonist does not really matter, but what the habitat looks like, Being just a delusion of the film’s protagonist or not, it is significant how the habitat looks like, because it is a perfect imitation of an ideal piece of mid-Western US as we know it today: everything is green; there is a baseball field, fertile farmland and neat farmhouses. Since the habitat is in a cylinder—it shares similarities with an O’Neill cylinder (O’Neill 1977)—it looks like the landscape is folded upwards and forms a whole circle above people’s heads. The space habitat is the ultimate techno-fix; nature is not thinkable except in an artificial, cultivated and temperate form. This depiction normalises the view that nature is a human product that we have at our disposal, which is exactly the mindset that in the reality of the film made people leave Earth and in our current reality resulted in the Anthropocene. Cargo similarly reinforces the view that nature is something at human disposal. In the year 2267, an ecological collapse made Earth uninhabitable. The remaining people live on a gigantic but overcrowded, cold and dark space

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station in the orbit around Earth. The only hope is to get to “Rhea,” a distant geo-engineered planet as a utopian ideal place with a lush vegetation and a functioning ecosystem. The advertisements present Rhea in sun-drenched images of a woman walking in an endless grain field living a good and pure life in a natural environment which is perfectly adapted to humans. Rhea is a computer simulation though, in which people who think they travel to the planet are without knowing plugged in. The film is itself critical of this kind of escapism, but it nevertheless strengthens the view of nature being good when it is the ideal product of and for humans. Even more, at the ending of the film we find that parts of the Earth are fertile again, which immediately leads to groups of people returning to try to grow food and make it habitable again for humans. In the same manner, in the far away future of the twenty-­ ninth century of the animated film Wall-E, Earth has become a literal wasteland, completely covered in garbage. Humans live on a spaceship and are cared for by machines like pets so that over the years they have degenerated intellectually and physically. When Wall-E, the last waste-collecting robot on Earth, finds a living seedling, humanity comes back to start over again. At the end, the film’s credits show that humans have recovered and, with the help of machines and technology, have made Earth a fertile paradise. All these three films normalise a mindset that nature should be cultivated to serve human interests; thus, as Timothy Morton puts it in Dark Ecology, “[n]ature as such is a twelve-thousand-year-old human product, geological as well as discursive” (Morton 2016, 58). The regularly applied nature-culture split is, according to Morton, “the result of a nature-agriculture split” which led to “the machine that is agriculture as such, a machine that predates Industrial Age machinery” which he calls agrilogistics (ibid., 42–43). Moreover, agrilogistics is an agricultural programme, which created “the granddaddy hyperobject, the first one made by humans, and one that has sired many more. Toxic from the beginning to humans and other lifeforms, it operates blindly like a computer program” (ibid., 42). Hyperobjects are so difficult to confront because they are entities—like global warming as well— of such temporal and spatial scope that they are hardly thinkable in ways accessible to humans (Morton 2013). The films even seem to expand the spatiotemporal dimension of the hyperobject of agrilogistics by transferring it further into the future. The films show that agrilogistics, closely intertwined with technology, has led to a devastated Earth, but that technology also provides (temporary) fixes to cope with the situation be it in the form of spaceships, space habitats or

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even simulations. In Elysium technology plays an important role as the very solution to social problems. In the film, set in the year of 2154, people must hold out on an ecologically ruined Earth and try to make ends meet with the limited resources available under precarious conditions. Only the wealthy live on the enormous space station “Elysium” in the orbit around Earth, which mimics a perfect “earthly” environment in a mild climate and green vegetation. While the people on Earth are controlled by robots and subordinated to tech, on Elysium technology serves the people, especially autonomous medical pods which can cure all kinds of diseases immediately. So, first and foremost, the film is a critique of social inequalities which are aggravated by technological progress only serving a small elite (Maynard 2018, 109–127). Interesting enough, the film solves the problem of social inequality by hacking Elysium and providing every person on Earth with the advanced technology. Apart from the fact that such an easy solution is quite naïve considering the fact that social inequality is complex, this does not provide any solution to the major problem of the ecologically ruined Earth, which appears to be one of the root causes for the kind of social inequality presented in the film in the first place. The questions of where the resources will come from to provide every citizen with advanced technology in the future and who will build it when there is no more cheap human labour remain unanswered. Remarkably, in all of the films mentioned above, nations no longer seem to play a major role, if any. The main narrative is about humanity as such and the Earth as a whole—even though the films show humanity as rather white and Western and the ideal “Earth” as a temperate climate zone. But what happened is that—apart from the rather near-future film Interstellar—in all the other films global corporations appear to steer the fate of humanity. In Cargo it is Kuiper Enterprises which operates the Rhea-simulation, in Wall-E the megacorporation Buy n Large (BNL) builds and operates the spaceships on which humanity left Earth, and in Elysium it is Armadyne, the company who designed the space station, produces its defence systems as well as police robots on Earth, which actually exercises political power. To recite Fredric Jameson’s famous quote: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Jameson 2005, 199).

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Box 23.2  Missions to Mars In 2015, the SF blockbuster film The Martian (2015) based on the 2011 novel of Andy Weir was released and ranks 11th among the world’s most successful films (as of 2019) (Box Office Mojo 2019a). In the film’s reality of 2035, astronaut Mark Watney is left behind on Mars after a NASA expedition was cancelled due to a dust storm. Mark Watney has to endure inhumane conditions for surviving on the red planet. He tries to produce water and grow food, before he gets rescued by a quite hazardous mission. The film would have never been made without the expertise of NASA, which was closely involved in the production and the marketing (NASA 2015). In time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 2019, US Vice President Mike Pence confirmed US plans to “lead the creation of a base at the moon’s South Pole where astronauts could reside for weeks and months” and from there to “become the first nation in the history of mankind to set foot on the red planet of Mars” (Pence 2019). NASA itself states that in order to lay “the foundation that will eventually enable human exploration of Mars,” “NASA is going to the Moon with commercial and international partners to explore faster and explore more together” (NASA 2019). International partners surely include the European Space Agency, while NASA has with commercial partners US private aerospace companies in mind that independently promote and work on settlements on Mars. With his company SpaceX, Elon Musk supports an SF narrative that there was a natural evolution of humans to expand into space and live on Mars (Musk 2017). Altogether this contributes to a powerful discourse, a global space-travel/SF intertext which is well illustrated by the National Geographic TV series Mars (2016–2018) about the first manned mission to colonise Mars in 2033. The future history series is presented like a documentary following the fictional stories of astronauts who settle on Mars and mixing these fictional elements with real interviews of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. This space-travel/SF intertext normalises a view that settlements on Mars are inevitable. Furthermore, SF and the corresponding intertext also open up space for scientific discussion. In contrast to the real NASA, which seeks to build a base on the Moon from where to go to Mars, there is a new fictitious NASA Ares-V mission launch to Mars directly from Earth at the end of The Martian. A direct mission from Earth to Mars is also the proclaimed aim of Elon Musk, who nevertheless plans commercial space flights to the Moon. This view is contested by Jeff Bezos, CEO of the aerospace company Blue Origin, who is quoted saying that it would be an “illusion” to skip going back to the moon before heading to Mars, and has his own plans for building a base on the Moon (Hamilton 2019). A moon base for the exploration of deeper space is also the reality of the near-future SF film Ad Astra (2019), which ranks 50th among the world’s most successful films, as of 2019 (Mojo 2019b) and has been broadly discussed for its noir depiction of space travel. The film further normalises space travel by introducing the new leading space corporation/agency/ authority “SpaceCom” which offers a commercial flight schedule to the Moon. Nonetheless, the film also sets a critical counterpoint to the positive narrative of Elon Musk, when the protagonist criticises the commercial and capitalist structures on the moon, saying that “[a]ll the hopes we ever had for space travel, covered up by drink stands and t-shirt vendors. Just a recreation of what we’re running from on Earth. We are world-eaters” (Ad Astra 2019). Critical or not, it can generally be said that Hollywood is currently producing rather “hard science-­ fiction” based on facts and the ambition to present science in a realistic way.

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Conclusion In summary, the SF films presented here are an example of the diverse methodological assumptions and ambivalent narratives they feed with regard to the human and to the temporality of the Anthropocene. They convey a sceptical view on technology, because mankind has destroyed the earth with its help; yet, still they normalise a belief in simple tech fixes. Nature is perceived as a product that humans can build and use, but at least humanity tends to get unified, just as powerful corporations become truly global. In this way, SF can be also understood as “boundary management” (Hermann 2018, 213) where different technological, material, social, ethical or ideological viewpoints concerning the Anthropocene meet and must be dealt with. It can be criticised, however, that SF is not able to establish a new narrative for the future that proposes solutions to the problems of the Anthropocene. Instead, the genre remains within its familiar tropes of apocalyptic storms and high-tech space stations. Having said that, the criticism can be countered because SF also offers a metaphorical view on the Anthropocene, technology and politics, and does not represent a practical solution to current challenges. As J.P. Telotte puts it, “[s]cience fiction does not detail the realities of specific problems so that we might avoid them, but rather represents our most pressing cultural fears […] a start of discussion rather than a solution to the problem, is probably the best we can expect” (Telotte 2014). Besides, as Susan Sontag has stated, “science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art” (Sontag 1965, 44). In this sense, those films satisfy our desires for destruction and apocalypse and provide what we expect: disaster porn. Hence, we should not forget that SF as a mix of pop culture and art also fulfils our desire for entertainment. Key Points  1. Science-fiction (SF) as a genre deals with fictional scientific and technological progress and its effects on our way of life, socio-political organisation and world political structures. Problematics discussed in SF always relate to contemporary human experiences while transferring them to extreme, alternative settings such as encounters with the alien other or the end of the world. In these settings, both current and timeless social-political challenges emerge as if viewed under a magnifying glass.

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2. The study of SF within the discipline of international relations (IR) falls within the research area of Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP). In this regard, SF is not only investigated as mirror of world politics, but also has its own role in normalising or challenging structures of world politics. 3. Even though SF deals with the future, at least commercial SF films generally strengthen an anthropocentric view of a dichotomy between nature and culture/society; yet a view prevails that in the face of catastrophe humanity is revealed as a unity actor. 4. SF has an ambivalent view on both humanity and tech: on the one side, technology and science enabled humanity to destroy Earth; on the other side, tech fixes are presented as the solutions instead of trying to change the exploitative habits of the human civilisation. Key Questions  1. Does SF need to be scientifically correct? Does or should SF provide solutions to real-world problems? 2. What are the differences and similarities between SF and climate-­ fiction (cli-fi)? 3. Why can strong intertextual relations between world politics and SF be problematic? 4. Do we need settlements on the moon? Or even on Mars? 5. How does the presentation of artificial intelligence, conscious machines and sentient robots in SF influence the current discourse and discussion around these topics?

Further Reading Bal, M. 2009. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Canavan, G. and Robinson, K.  S. (eds) 2014. Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan UP Paperback. I am Mother. 2019. Film directed by Grant Sputore. Australia. Retrieved from https:// www.imdb.com/title/tt6292852/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Milner, A. and Burgmann, J. R. 2020: Science Fiction and Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weldes, J. 2001. Globalisation is Science Fiction. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30(3): 647–667.

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References Ad Astra 2019. Film directed by James Gray. USA, China. Retrieved from https:// www.imdb.com/title/tt2935510/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Biermann, F. 2014. Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Box Office Mojo. 2019a. 2015 Worldwide Box Office. Retrieved from https://www. boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2015/?grossesOption=totalGrosses [accessed 17 February 2021]. Box Office Mojo. 2019b. 2019 Worldwide Box Office. Retrieved from https://www. boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2019/?ref_=bo_nb_hm_tab [accessed 17 February 2021]. Burgmann, J. R. 2015. Book review of Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology 5: 77–78. Buzan, B. 2010. America in Space: The International Relations of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(1): 175–80. Cargo. 2009. Film directed by Ivan Engler and Ralph Etter. Switzerland. Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381940/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. 2015. Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies. Bristol: E-international relations publishing. Geostorm. 2017. Film directed by Dean Devlin. USA. Retrieved from https://www. imdb.com/title/tt1981128/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Grayson, K., Davies, M. and Philpott, S. 2009. Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture‑World Politics Continuum. Politics 29(3): 155–163. Hamilton, I.A. 2019. Jeff Bezos took another veiled shot at Elon Musk, arguing that reaching Mars is an ‘illusion’ without going via the moon.  Business Insider, 20 June. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-­bezos-­elon-­musk-­ must-­go-­to-­moon-­before-­mars-­2019-­6?r=DE&IR=T [accessed 17 February 2021]. Hayes, A. 2019. Top Grossing Sci-Fi Films Of All Time.  Investopedia, 25 June. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/061115/top-­ grossing-­scifi-­films-­all-­time.asp [accessed 31 December 2019]. Hermann, I. 2018. Boundaries and Otherness in Science-Fiction: How we cannot escape the human condition. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture 8: 212–226. Holmes, D. 2014. Cli-fi’: Could a literary genre help save the planet? The Conversation, 20 February. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/cli-­fi-­could-­a-­literary-­ genre-­help-­save-­the-­planet-­23478 [accessed 17 February 2021]. Interstellar. 2014. Film directed by Christopher Nolan. USA, UK, Canada. Retrieved from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816692/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Jameson, F. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London, New York: Verso.

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24 Disrupting Anthropocentrism Through Relationality Jarrad Reddekop and Tamara Trownsell

Introduction Literatures on the Anthropocene in 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 (Latour 2017; Rothe 2017; Chandler 2018; Harrington 2017). 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. There is a long history to this idea. The Enlightenment period, while in the process of “shedding” the influence of religion on intellectual endeavors, nonetheless remained predominantly dedicated to establishing how Man was exceptional (and, indeed, God-like) due to possessing major distinguishing factors from the rest of creation such as language, reason, and free will (see also Chap. 13). Modern societies have accordingly been structured around the idea that human beings

J. Reddekop (*) Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador T. Trownsell Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito, Ecuador e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_24

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can and should be masters of nature, reordering its essentially passive material to suit our ends, such that everything that exists has been increasingly related to as fungible or disposable resources for us, receiving value from us, and awaiting our direction (Bryan 2000; Leiss 1994; Mathews 2005). Such conceptions are encoded within modern property regimes and capitalist economies predicated on extractivism and commodification. Anthropocentrism is, however, not the only way to conceive of humans in relation to the epoch, planet, or cosmos (see also Chap. 21). It becomes “second nature” or commonsensical to us because it reflects the way we are used to thinking about, and acting in, reality. 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. These assumptions can be understood as philosophically prior, basic “moments” that express how, at the most fundamental level, existence and that which exists, is conceived. Ontological assumptions set the terms for how it makes sense to understand, co-constitute, and “play” the game of existence, through which we understand and co-enact ourselves as selves, others as others, and so on. In this chapter, we will look at two complementary opposite sets of assumptions concerning the basic conditions of existence: separation, and what we call robust relationality or interconnection. When we speak of “co-constituting” reality, we mean to suggest that ontological assumptions frame how we are able to see, question, and interpret the world. But they also delimit the ways in which the other beings we interact with are able to be engaged as responding, and the ways our own energies continually lend co-creative force to “how the world is.” As such they constitute fundamental patternings of interrelation. Indeed, our existential assumptions can become self-fulfilling prophecies as the relational entailments of these decisions accrue over time and function as common sense largely immune from questioning. Ontology, in other words, is something both thought and lived/practiced in embodied ways, delimiting the terms of our sensual and linguistic being-with the cosmos (see Chap. 21). In order to disrupt our commonsensical anthropocentrism, this chapter is organized into three sections. First, we will elaborate how we understand these contrasting sets of assumptions and their “fruits” or consequences. We will then examine, each in turn, how these assumptions inform different possible ways of then approaching, understanding, and responding to the crises of the Anthropocene.

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Existential Assumptions and Their Fruits To suppose that existence is constituted through separation is to assume that all phenomena that we encounter in existence have existential autonomy at the most basic level. We see ourselves as separate from all that surrounds us and that which surrounds us consists of “pre-existing, fixed, separate, and stable entities” (Trownsell et al. 2019). Through this atomist and atomizing ontology, it makes sense to see human characteristics (reason, language, etc.) as constitutive of a universal category that stands apart from other classes of objects/beings, like plants, animals, and minerals (Descola 2011). This ability to isolate/extract out entities from one another, and corresponding modes of cognition based on more or less stable categories and taxonomies, allows for the tendency to ontologically fragment existence along such foundational schisms as humans versus nature or versus the divine (Latour 1993). But how does assuming separation also lead us to the hierarchical scheme of anthropocentrism? As much of the Western tradition shows, if one starts with the existence of isolable entities, it follows readily that differences can be understood in terms of entities’ distinctive properties or faculties. What has seemed distinctive and exceptional about human beings (free will, reason, language, etc.) assumed its familiar meaning and interpretation within a vertical Judeo-Christian cosmology and value scheme that has subsequently been secularized into the contemporary ideology of technological world-­ mastery (Heidegger 1977, 14). The hierarchical nature of this cosmology is required by a fundamental moral structuring (that is also separation-based): the conception of a Good above and separate from the world, which provides a standard against which existence may be judged, which must eventually be made to prevail within creation and to which our faculties give us special access. Embracing interconnection or relational ontology, however, generates a very distinct conceptual and interactive panorama. Here, existential interdependence is taken to be the starting point and primordial condition of existence. Relations are thought to be “prior to the existence of entities,” which means that “what entities are … is not given in advance. In relationality the limits between human and natural, life and death, present, past and future are blurred, and they coexist in a constant exchange and complementarity” (Trownsell et al. 2019). This is because the very idea of limit is not that of a

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line drawn between independent units, but more that of a liminal space of between-ness, inter-resonance (or dissonance), and also a whole domain of co-constitutive play that occurs across that experiential distance of differentiation between intertwined components. Rather than “entities” or categories, these components of relations are dynamic, emergent, and complex. These components, taken by themselves, are secondary to and produced by the relation itself. Humans, in this case and like all other beings, emanate into/with and emerge from an immense web of relations and as such are participants in co-creation just as all our other relations are. Many relational traditions of thinking, such as Indigenous American ones, accordingly tend to have an expanded sense of what counts as another self-in-­relation. Nonhuman interactors such as stones, rivers, mountains, trees and other plants, animals, and even weather events will often count as selves and meaningful interlocutors, part of a spectrum of social relations and interacting co-conversants among whom we are embedded (Ingold 2000; Bird-David 1999). Because the question of relationships is primary, a core angle of orientation concerning these selves is the ethical problem of relating with/across barriers of difference. The skills and teachings necessary to keep up relations with nonhuman kin are, in these traditions, often not essentially different from those needed for relating across less extreme forms of difference such as between individuals within human groups (see Box 24.1). The difference in interacting with trees or animals and interacting with other “humans” is one of degree in terms of the kind of relational distance or opacity involved, not in kind (as between selves who speak and reason and those who cannot). Accordingly, the general framing of life is one that situates the (human) self from the outset much more sensitively and dialogically—because dialogue is deemed meaningful and possible—within particular ecologies of relations, distributions of co-adapted, and often complementarily differentiated selves that have come to be in a delicate and lively balance over time. In North America, where ecologies were immediately seen by Europeans to be vibrant, balance has been paid heed to, cared for, and adapted to over immense time-­ depths, with ethical systems continually oriented toward the fostering of mutually nurturing relations and thus more life (e.g., Simpson 2011, 141). Moreover, although the basic existential assumption of interconnection suggests

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a general condition of ontological relatedness, Indigenous traditions can help us see that it matters which relations one comes from, is embedded in, and enacts from day to day. Relations are kept up by putting time and energy into them, or they can be allowed to atrophy, and this becomes consequential for the kind of selves they compose—for example, selves that are constituted, attuned, and rooted in place and in the land or selves that never seem to grow such roots. Before moving on, it is worth noting that basic ontological assumptions, in our view, also influence in a profound way even the basic “ground mood” that informs how we navigate the world. If I understand myself as an atomistic being cut off from the world and required by myself, alone, to invent and secure my own direction, I am apt to experience certain kinds of existential angst that may be mistaken as universal to the human condition but are not. If, on the other hand, we know ourselves to be interconnected outside of ourselves and with “all our relations,” the basic existential problem of “what is to be done” in life is apt to resonate differently. If we ask ourselves what we should do, assuming interconnectedness likely leads to prioritizing efforts at reading the complex and interdependent dynamics of the whole in motion. It is necessary to learn attentiveness and appropriate timing to adjust, harmonize, and foster healing and the regeneration of life within it (more on this below). Legitimate ways of paying attention to and navigating the world will exceed the intellectualized terms sanctioned by Enlightenment thought. If we start with independent isolable units, their relations become secondary and uncertain, in need of being proved; the self-subsisting Cartesian cogito brackets all sense experience and withdraws into itself and comes out again only willing to talk about select things it can build on a foundation of certainty. If everything is assumed to be richly interconnected, those relations are not immediately rendered suspect or uncertain; rather, we begin from a place of assuming that we are relationally connected all the way down. How things resonate, feel, draw, or repel us, the rich folds of sense that attune us within a given time-­ space moment or relational constellation—all this constitutes important aspects of a broader relational conversation. We do not need to come out with decisions about what to do as though we were alone in a vacuum; it is rather a sufficiently open sensitivity within our interdependent field of relations that often points the way.

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Box 24.1  Relational, Non-anthropocentric Conceptions of the Human: An Amazonian Example The Amazonian Quichua word that most approximates the term “human” is runa. If the nature and status of “human” is bound up with a certain universalist, taxonomic form of reason and a tradition of human exceptionalism, then runa is quite different. Runa means most properly someone “like us” from the relationally situated point of view of Quichua people. It applies in a privileged way to others within an ayllu or network of relatives: it means the people with whom it is possible to converse, who reciprocally share food and drink, for whom one feels empathy and compassion. Runa is distinguished from outsiders or strangers, although the range of the term expands or contracts depending on context and experience. Yet runa also applies beyond the limits of the “human” and can include plants and animals and other beings. This latter usage points us to a fundamentally different way of thinking about species difference and the relative status of “us” vis-à-vis nonhuman beings. In Quichua origin stories, other species are described as having been people or runa in “beginning times,” who then later transformed into the bodily forms recognized today. This transformation occurs as a process of distancing into relative emotional and communicative opacity and privacy, due, for example, to preceding breakdowns in relations through anger and heartbreak and so on. Plants and animals withdraw from their earlier network of relatives in order to develop and privilege new relations in the land that in turn compose them as different kinds of selves, with new habits of eating and interacting and so on (Swanson and Reddekop 2017). Species difference is therefore approached in a way that foregrounds the relational constitution of selves. That is, it privileges the question of what differences in bodily habitus and modes of being/relating entail for the kinds of relationships, the kind of between-ness, that can transpire across them. Communication and empathy become more difficult, sexual attraction is muted, and so on. But at some level, other species remain runa; they are “like us” although this is now more difficult to see. To refer to plants or animals as runa therefore emphasizes that they remain beings or social selves with whom empathy is possible. It also suggests that something of their modes of being and moving, and so on, might be learnable, to the enhancement of one’s own self. Seeing other species as runa becomes, accordingly, an important part of Quichua practices of becoming relatives to and with the land, which aim to open empathetic and communicative windows across species barriers, mitigating somewhat the distance caused by speciation (Swanson and Reddekop 2017). Not only, then, does the concept of runa reflect a non-anthropocentric way of conceiving “the human.” Its use actively forms part of practices through which Amazonian Quichua people constitute and maintain communities that comprise the land as interlocutors and relatives. Through this process, Quichua people also transform and cultivate the kinds of selves they are, since Quichua selfhood is not thought to be fixedly stable but composed through relationships. This informs an experience of the self as attuned and tied to place in multimodal ways. Runa as a concept thus cuts across the modernist orienting terms of humanity and nature, at the same time that it configures a way of life that is dramatically different from that of capitalist anthropocentrism.

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Responding to the Anthropocene Through Separation Dominant institutions and political discourses tend to imagine our future in responding to current crises in terms of a continuation of dominant lifeways and patterns. Somehow, at some seemingly magical future moment, we will overcome the economic and environmental contradictions—familiarly framed in anthropocentric terms—between the divergent demands of the (capitalist, globalized, extraction-and-commodification-driven) economy and our “environmental support-systems.” Mainstream political framings, insofar as they take the problem seriously at all, tend to lean heavily on the promise of yet-unknown and unrealized technological solutions (Homer-Dixon 2000). Any projected implementation of these solutions in turn tends to be oriented around the epistemic, managerial, and agentive prowess of state governments, likely with the help of international institutions like the UN. In all of this, the terms of engagement remain predicated upon (and in turn reinforce) dominant underlying assumptions about the nature of reality as characterized by separation. For our purposes, we highlight a few aspects here. The first is that the basic anthropocentric, separation-based world-­ configuration we have described above is retained. If the idea of the “Anthropocene” suggests a universal, exceptional human subject (Rothe 2020), in addressing its challenges humans remain the privileged species that must grasp the logical/causal blueprint of the world in order to manage, intervene in, and reorder it in significant ways. For moderns, we noted above, nature as a whole has predominantly figured as something mute, available for use, but intrinsically meaningless and incapable of telling us how to live (Mathews 2005, 9). Now an intrinsically indifferent and uncaring nature grows even less hospitable to human life, which requires us to redouble our efforts to get nature “in hand.” Proponents of large-scale interventions like geoengineering (see Chap. 6) argue that there is indeed hardly any alternative: unless we devise a “practical” plan to solve runaway climate change and other crises, we too shall soon be extinct. “Practical” here tends to mean technical interventions into the natural world—for example, spraying sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to cool the sun’s rays and counteract global warming, or seeding oceanic algae blooms to sequester carbon (Kaufmann 2019)—alongside digestible policy tweaks premised on the idea that we can overcome the environmental effects of liberal capitalism while still remaining liberal (or perhaps some other form of ) capitalists. Everything remains subsumed within a dominant

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imagining and constitution of “reality” and human existence, a “one world” we all must acknowledge and adhere to if the crises of the Anthropocene are to be tackled (Blaney and Tickner 2017). Secondly, technical problems (and proposed fixes) tend to be framed so as to grapple with issues in an isolable, piecemeal fashion that underemphasizes intersections and holistic thinking. Climate change, rapid extinction rates, and novel diseases like the 2019 coronavirus are arguably all (at some level) interconnected outcomes of the pressures our globalized economy and associated land use and development models wreak upon the rest of our world. Yet insofar as they are not reducible to a single chain of immediate, efficient causal relations, they are unlikely to be responded to as interconnected. Indeed, institutions (and most “common sense” in Western societies) tend to favor knowledge-production that fits within a Newtonian worldview that assumes linear conceptions of causal relations and our capacity to intervene in them (Malette and Stoett 2018). Such a conception is predicated on understanding the relations between entities as secondary and uncertain; our interventions should be based on epistemological processes of sorting out which relations do matter and which do not. This underlying skepticism concerning interrelationships has been an intrinsic part of modern scientific methods and their successes, but taken alone it also has its limits. Naturalizing this ontology of separation tends to reinforce certain lacunae of the modern worldview with regard to its own practices. For example, from a relational point of view, it is hardly surprising when a drive to experiment with supposedly “isolated” factors in turn often unleashes a series of “unexpected” secondary effects. When we start by assuming the ontological independence of things, however, this often leads us to underestimate the impact and significance of such secondary effects until they hit—a danger endemic to the geoengineering proposals mentioned above, but also to countless other more quotidian practices. Third, a notable feature of contemporary liberalism is a tendency to privilege a framework of rights as both the “building block[s] of ethics” (Douzinas 2013, 84) and as a means for legally and administratively operationalizing issues to make them “count” officially and therefore be dealt with administratively. While political mobilizations around the Rights of Nature or Mother Earth arguably subvert a number of anthropocentric tropes and foreground a conception of the world as interdependent (Querejazu and Tickner 2020), we also worry these more productive disruptions risk being subsumed within the overarching fragmenting effects of liberal rights discourse as such. Rights discourse has the advantage of being able to translate concerns into liberal frameworks. However, its legacy is to make an issue revolve, on the one hand,

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around a given isolable agent and its will to act in the world—rather than, for example, bonds of mutual responsibilities (Douzinas 2013, 85) or bonds of nurturance (see below). On the other hand, rights discourse also brings issues to revolve around a political center (the state) that recognizes and secures those rights and balances them against all others. Here, though, the problem of reconciling and balancing nature’s rights with all of the others already allotted to human beings that already encode specific forms of relations—and thus the fundamental tension between environment and anthropocentric liberalism— simply reappears again rather than being resolved. We also reproduce a certain separation-based idea that if we adequately secure the rights proper to all isolable entities, we will resolve our problems and arrive at a sustainable justice for all. Finally, the worldview that places humans in a position of willful mastery over existence finds a political expression in centering political action around the agency of the modern state, that super-atom built up out of so many lesser atoms as in the famous frontispiece image of Hobbes’ Leviathan. The existential need to for us humans by ourselves to fix the crises of the Anthropocene requires us to imagine that all the disparate efforts, fragmented responses, and competing values (e.g., environment and economy) of dominant society may be squared and sewn together by some central intelligence and agent. Costas Douzinas (2013, 104) argues, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, that the subject always needs to assume the law is like a seamless and complete web, coherent and tying up all ends. The idea of law—or of the state as a sum of democratic, administrative, and other procedures—having “all the answers” (ibid.) leads us to imagine the state as a kind of secular God—which becomes the only alternative we can imagine to obviously insufficient, individualized lifestyle responses. In the Anthropocene, we want the state—that collective emblem of our special human agency and rationality—to reconcile all the divergent interests, resolve all the contradictions, and save us from the terrible futures we anticipate. Yet continually states show us that by themselves and as they are currently constituted, they cannot. Writing about the “tragedy of liberal environmentalism,” Dempsey (2016, 237) suggests that we find ourselves, as a result, stuck within a certain kind of temporality and pacing. We find ourselves in a perpetual “waiting room,” where the functional integration of environmental concerns into the dominant system remains “just out of reach, just past the next problem, just over the next epistemological or policy hump.” Accordingly, we find ourselves caught within a kind of void in terms of what to do and how one can act. The need to do something is clear, and yet the only kinds of doing that seem possible or sensible—those avenues available to

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us in our “one-world world” (Law 2015)—leave us caught in the temporality of waiting, in the meantime going about our lives with a gnawing sense of helplessness. But what if part of the problem here is precisely that we imagine we can only meaningfully understand and respond to our present crises through that “one world” and its dominant enactment of reality based on an ontology of separation?

Responding to the “Anthropocene” Through Relationality How might we be inclined to respond to the phenomena of the Anthropocene if we began from relational ontological premises? This subject could fill entire volumes. It is also the case that insofar as different philosophical traditions around the world articulate/enact distinct versions of relationality, the fruits of that relationality play out in specific and anchored ways. Still, one valuable grounding for this problem can be found in Andean ways of thinking about dis/harmony and mutual nurturance within the interdependent whole of the cosmos, as suggested in the Quechua notion of ayni.

Box 24.2  Ayni as Mutual Nurturing A central principle of Andean philosophy, ayni, offers a window through which we can see how making distinct existential assumptions can get us out of anthropocentrism and to other, more useful logics for confronting complex times. Ayni, as mutual nurturing, radically re-orients our purpose in life. Rengifo (1998b, 174) explains, Wisdom for the Andean people is not associated with an accumulation of knowledge—to know a lot about many things—rather it is associated with the attribute of nurturing, where the sensitivity to know how to nurture is as important as knowing how to allow oneself to be nurtured. This reciprocal nurturing is what recreates life in the Andean world … not the power-­ giving knowledge that one can have about others. Ayni in this robust sense only becomes imaginable by shifting our fundamental existential assumption from separation to interconnection. (continued)

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Box 24.2  (continued) This mutual nurturing occurs through what Rengifo (1998a, 107) calls the “wider conversation.” This conversation takes place not (only) through human language but through bodily interaction, movement, and all forms of inter-­ resonance and vibration experienced through all sensory and affective registers. Anything encountered in the cosmos can be understood here as a “being” or “person” that is in constant, differential inter-resonance with others and with us. As in any conversation, beings speak, listen, and respond dialogically; in this case though the conversation is a multiscalar, multidimensional, and multidirectional co-creative process. We are already participating in this conversation no matter what existential assumption we embrace, because we are constantly emanating vibrations with our life force and we receive resonances in return. In this sense our constant participation in co-creation is a given, even if our awareness thereof is not. Beyond participating in this conversation, ayni requires that we engage in mutual following and mutual nurturing. Rengifo (1998a, 105) asserts, “We all [need to] be disposed to listen perpetually and in each circumstance to the ‘speaking,’ to the sign of each one” in the more robust ayllu. Good or appropriate action requires developing a sense of timing and fitting responsiveness informed by this sensitive listening, following the signs and the complex and never-quitepredictable interplay of selves within this broader milieu that comprises human and nonhuman relatives. Ayni also does not refer only to individual action but suggests the image of a group of extended relatives whose life-­rhythms and collective existence together have come to be shaped through this attentiveness. Individual and collective human existence is here in a continual, dialogical engagement with land, weather, seasonal cycles, and so on, to ensure a continuous flow and regeneration of life (Rengifo 1998a, 106–109; Swanson 1992). When you understand yourself as a “mere” component of relation, it makes sense that your own well-being requires paying attention to and nurturing your relations—which in turn fosters the broader web of life and diversity in which you are nested. Because interconnectedness is linked to wholeness or balance at the macro level, this orientation prods us to harmonize our contributions to those relations and heal them in a dynamic fashion. That is, for us to align with that balance we must appropriately respond in terms of what we emit in the wider conversation. We figure this out by reading the signs as they emerge. The sign that we notice—for example, in moments of blockage, anger, or even clumsiness—is indicative of our participation in co-creation in emergent fashion. It points to our relative state of balance or imbalance, which means that to fulfill the broader purpose of harmonizing, our response must be one of “following” and adjusting ourselves to the message. But broader issues—problems in the tending of crops, even climate change—may also be analyzed in a similar vein in terms of imbalances in relationships, in which our own participation at a range of levels is also implicated (c.f. Rengifo 1998a, 134). With this Andean principle, we can appreciate the current crises as the result of a consistent, long-term denial of the existence of this conversation and our participation in it. If we cannot recognize this, then we cannot even conceive of the call to participate in ayni as dynamic harmonizing that becomes possible through both mutual nurturing and mutual following.

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Building on this notion of ayni, the ecological, climatic, and other crises of the Anthropocene era might be viewed less as discrete phenomena than as interconnected effects of a prolonged obliviousness and conversational ineptitude. Such ineptitude fosters disharmony and the widespread breakdowns in relations of mutual nurturance of the kind ayni cultivates. Blazing through in oblivious violence and domination, we witness the generosity of the earth withdrawing (Povinelli 2016, 28, 78). Still, we can respond to these tragedies as signs telling us that and how we are out of adjustment. This, in and of itself, may not sound so strange. Is this not more or less what ecologists or climate scientists have been saying publicly for years? In some ways this is so and should not be surprising—since in either case these sciences incorporate versions of relational principles in their understanding of phenomena (e.g., ecological interdependence), if not as robustly at the level of ontology. Embracing interconnection as a fundamental existential assumption, though, allows us to also push this matter much farther and into domains these more mainstream examples would not. One way this can be fleshed out is at the level of the self and how we understand ourselves as we navigate the world from a first-person vantage-point. It is easy to see, of course, how dominant ecocidal patterns of existence involve constituting the self, its parts, and its orientations in particular ways (and here the critical theoretical work associated with Deleuze, Foucault, Marcuse, and others, problematizing modernist subjectivities, is helpful). The other side of the question, however, is what it would mean to constitute the self-in-relation-­ to-others—or co-create existence in the world both conceptually and through practices—differently. Here concepts like ayni can be especially instructive. But it is easy to see how even the faculties that would allow us to sense with sufficient nuance the dynamics of Rengifo’s “wider conversation” currently find themselves in a very atrophied state, in our dominant societies, due to the exclusive employment of ontological separation and the (intellectualizing, Cartesian, etc.) consequences that follow. Relationality, in this sense, invites us to work through re-focusing our sensing attention (in multimodal and multiscalar ways) to a broader range of interlocutors, with a keen awareness of the contingency and specificity of the emergent time-place’s afforded circumstances. Furthermore, we can learn to take cues from such nonhuman interlocutors (and the co-nurturing relations they model) in terms of what healthier forms of living and relating might be. Indigenous American traditions, for example, teach how the land and its relationships may be regarded as teachers concerning law—that is, what appropriate or good ways of being (and being-together) are. John Borrows (2019, 38) has written that the Anishinaabe term akinoomaagewin (pointing to the earth and taking direction from it) describes

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precisely this practice. How a river flows into a lake and supports an abundance of life, in this way of thinking, allows us to take direction about how to live or (in the teaching Borrows shares) what it is to love. Here the anthropocentric hierarchy is altogether supplanted: phenomena like rivers are (and not metaphorically) teachers and we are students, including in such important “human” domains as understanding what love is. A key question here is how it might be possible to heal relationships, to become good relatives with an earth so badly abused. To ask such a question from within a relational framework entails both transforming subjects into ethical and attentive selves capable of such action, but also sharpening an “analytics of existence” (Povinelli 2016) and relationships that is fundamentally different from the kind of technological model of causal manipulation we so predominantly naturalize. Additionally, of course, it is a matter not only of transforming the individual or atomized self, but of the broader, anthropocentrically composed communities in which we are embedded and that also, inevitably, make us who we are. At stake here is not simply an anthropocentric obliviousness of dominant communities with regard to land, but generalized processes of actively marginalizing, excluding, and dispossessing alternate and actually existing relational communities and legal orders to secure our anthropocentric framework as the (totalizing) framework for existing (see Chap. 5). A healing of relationships to land in such colonial contexts thus invites the question of healing relationships with, for example, Indigenous peoples and communities and their legal orders. This is especially so in that these precisely tend to reflect a listening co-nurturance negotiated uniquely with particular ecologies over immense spans of time. But such a question points us toward a fundamental reimagining and reconstitution of the political and collective bodies we understand ourselves to inhabit. Where relations of mutual nurturance with the earth have so badly broken down through species loss, deforestation, and other events, can we still take direction from concepts like ayni? We would add our voice to those (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) who have argued in the affirmative. Often Indigenous traditions and place-names (Sinclair 2018) encode memories of what the “wider conversation” within places had once been like (and perhaps how they could be again). But Kimmerer (2013, 334) also suggests that this is not a question we need to decide on our own; if we shift our thinking, even seeing how weeds slowly reclaim industrialized sites allows us to see how other beings and species lend their own aid in remediation. If we can work at developing our own sensitivity to such processes and re-imagine our own roles relative to them—not as masters of the earth but as co-responsive relatives—then perhaps we will have taken some steps toward learning a mode of responding to the Anthropocene without anthropocentrism.

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Conclusion In this chapter, we have introduced two different sets of fundamental ontological assumptions: separation and relationality/interconnection. As we have drawn out the implications of either model for grappling with the Anthropocene, it is likely that the dominant picture will seem more familiar (if recognizably problematic) but also perhaps more comprehensive. In many ways it is easier to start with an ontology of separation and draw out its consequences in politics because this is the dominant model many of us have come to know and study so intimately. The question remains open, from what has been said so far, as to what kind of broader, alternative politics can better enact relational ontologies. Here, however, it is worth reminding ourselves that such alternative politics need less to be “invented” than made space for. As Trownsell et  al. (2019) note, “millions of people across the world practice existence based on deeply relational assumptions. Relationality is prevalent in cosmologies such as dharma, din, dao, advaita, Buddhism, Confucianism and Sikhi.” Across these different expressions, of course, relational assumptions are apt to be articulated and played out differently, composing unique understandings of the “human” as such and how to best engage agencies “beyond” it. It is the premise of our dominant framing of the international system and its politics that all such forms of “difference,” many of which compose relations between humans and nonhumans in alternative and non-anthropocentric ways, may be assimilated adequately as “multicultural” difference, “religious beliefs,” and so on. But as many authors have pointed out (Querejazu and Tickner 2020; Brown 2011), these remain forms of capture or domestication that require such difference to be encompassed by dominant construals of reality (thus preserving anthropocentric human-nonhuman relations as primary). The question, then, perhaps becomes how such alternate co-creations of existence may be foregrounded within alternate politics, legal regimes, and constitutions of political communities and the horizons of their interrelations. Such a task may seem less “direct” as a way of addressing the crises of the Anthropocene, but our sense is that this may well provide a more viable and transformative direction than the perpetual “waiting rooms” of liberal environmentalism. Key Points  1. Ontological assumptions describe how we most fundamentally understand the nature and structure of existence and accordingly how we practice existence and interrelate. Separation and relationality are two different sets of ontological assumptions.

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2. In learning to think and live through relational ontological assumptions, we can begin to imagine radically non-anthropocentric alternatives, including in how we respond to the crises of the Anthropocene. 3. Taking relational ontological assumptions seriously invites us to explore a radical politics on a number of fronts: in the constitution of selves and communities, dynamics of de/coloniality, how we continually participate in the co-creation of realities, and forms of something like “environmentalism” precisely beyond the confines of a nature/culture split and attendant anthropocentrisms. Key Questions  1. Ask yourself how often you are influenced by the idea that plants and other animals have less sophisticated inner lives than we do. How does that assumption make aspects of our lives seem “easier”? How might you have to change if you assumed, as in the runa example, that underlying their strangeness, nonhuman beings are “people like us”? 2. Learn about the history of the place where you live, its distinct ecologies and cycles, and the relationships between species that are indigenous to your locality. In what ways does your town, city, or broader polity reflect an adaptation to that ecology or an obliviousness to it? 3. What barriers, if any, do you experience within yourself at the idea of acknowledging and engaging trees, rocks, birds, and so on, as conversants communicating with each other and with you? What barriers might you encounter in broader public contexts? How might different ontological assumptions reinforce, or challenge, those barriers? 4. We often think of “politics” as being about conflict or competition, as in the survivalist/anarchic model of international relations, or electoral contests. If politics were instead about forming and maintaining balanced relationships with difference (human and nonhuman), how might this change things? 5. Social constructivism invites us to understand all legal orders as, precisely, social constructions produced by human discourse in different contexts. This might invite us to see Indigenous legal orders and modern Western law as merely two different, but equivalent, analogous human creations. Robust relationality however challenges this equivalency. Drawing on the information in this chapter, why/how might this be so?

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Further Readings Bird-David, N. 1999. ”Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology. Current Anthropology 40(S1): S67-S91. Blaney, D. and Tickner, A. 2017. Worlding, Ontological Politics and the Possibility of a Decolonial IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(3): 293–311. Kimmerer, R. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Swanson, T. and Reddekop, J. 2017. Looking Like the Land: Beauty and Aesthetics in Amazonian Quichua Philosophy and Practice. In Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85(3): 682–708. Trownsell, T. et  al. 2019. Recrafting International Relations through Relationality.  E-International Relations. https://www.e-­ir.info/2019/01/08/ recrafting-­international-­relations-­through-­relationality/ [accessed 17 February 2021].

References Bird-David, N. 1999. “Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology. Current Anthropology 40(S1): S67-S91. Blaney, D. and Tickner, A. 2017. Worlding, Ontological Politics and the Possibility of a Decolonial IR. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(3): 293–311. Borrows, J. 2019. Law’s Indigenous Ethics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Brown, W. 2011. Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians. In H. de Vries and Sullivan, L. (eds) Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. Fordham University Press, 298–317. Bryan, B. 2000. Property as Ontology: On Aboriginal and English Understandings of Ownership. Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 13(1): 3–31. Chandler, D. 2018. Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing, and Hacking. New York: Routledge.  Dempsey, J. 2016. Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Descola, P. 2011. Más Allá de La Naturaleza y Cultura. In L. M. Martínez (ed.) Cultura y Naturaleza: Aproximaciones a propósito del Bicentenario de La Independencia de Colombia. Jardín Botánico de Bogotá, Bogotá. Douzinas, C. 2013. Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis: Greece and the Future of Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harrington, C. 2017. Posthuman Security and Care in the Anthropocene. In C. Eroukhmanoff and Harker, M. (eds) Reflections on the Posthuman in International Relations: The Anthropocene, Security and Ecology.  Bristol: E-International Relations, 73–86.

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Heidegger, M. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W Lovitt. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Homer-Dixon, T. 2000. The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable World.  New York: Knopf. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. New York: Routledge. Kaufmann, R. 2019. The Risks, Rewards, and Possible Ramifications of Geoengineering Earth’s Climate. Smithsonian Magazine, 11 March. https://www. smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/risks-rewards-possible-ramifications-geoengineering-earths-climate-180971666/ [accessed 17 February 2021]. Kimmerer, R. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. Law, J. 2015. What’s wrong with a one-world world? Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16(1): 126–139. Leiss, W. 1994. The Domination of Nature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Malette, S. and Stoett, P. 2018. Posthumanist International Relations and Ecopolitics. In E.  Cudworth, Hobden, S.  and Kavalski,  E.  (eds) Posthuman Dialogues in International Relations. New York: Routledge, 109–127. Mathews, F. 2005. Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture.  New York: SUNY. Povinelli, E. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism.  Durham: Duke University Press. Querejazu, A. and Tickner, A. 2020. The Rights of Mother Earth: A Pluriversal Reading of Climate Change Governance. In T.  Teo and Wynne-Hughes, E.  (eds)  Postcolonial Governmentalities: Rationalities, Violences and Contestations. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 217–237. Rengifo, V. G. 1998a. The Ayllu. In F. Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC (eds) The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean culture confronting Western notions of development. London: Zed Books, 89–123. Rengifo, V. G. 1998b. Education in the Modern West and in the Andean Culture. In F. Apffel-Marglin with PRATEC (eds) The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean culture confronting Western notions of development. London: Zed Books, 172–192. Rothe, D. 2017. Global Security in a Posthuman Age? IR and the Anthropocene Challenge. In C. Eroukhmanoff and Harker, M. (eds) Reflections on the Posthuman in International Relations: The Anthropocene, Security and Ecology.  Bristol: E-International Relations, 87–101.

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Rothe, D. 2020. Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene.  Millennium: Journal of International Studies 48(2): 143–164. Simpson, L. 2011. Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arp Books. Sinclair, R. 2018. Righting Names: The Importance of Native American Philosophies of Naming for Environmental Justice. Environment and Society 9(1): 91–106. Swanson, T. 1992. Weathered Character: Envy and Response to the Seasons in Native American Traditions. Journal of Religious Ethics 20(2): 279–308. Swanson, T. and Reddekop, J. 2017. Looking Like the Land: Beauty and Aesthetics in Amazonian Quichua Philosophy and Practice. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85(3): 682–708. Trownsell, T. et  al. 2019. Recrafting International Relations through Relationality. E-International Relations. https://www.e-ir.info/2019/01/08/recrafting-international-relations-through-relationality/ [accessed 17 February 2021].

Correction to: Security in the Anthropocene Maria Julia Trombetta

Correction to: Chapter 9 in: D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­53014-­3_9 Chapter “Security in the Anthropocene” was previously published non-open access. It has now been changed to open access under a CC BY 4.0 license and the copyright holder updated to ‘The Author(s)’. The book has also been updated with this change.

The updated version of the chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­53014-­3_9 © The Author(s) 2022 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_25

C1

Index1

A

Accountability, 229, 294–299, 302 Activism, 29, 51, 317, 364 Actor network theory (ANT), 117, 163–165, 233, 237–239, 241, 243 Adaptation, 4, 48, 98, 123, 135, 149, 151, 175, 180, 183, 185, 196, 200, 260, 278, 279, 282, 292, 319, 427, 455 Adaptive capacities, 182, 199, 340 Adaptive ecosystems, 332 Adaptive management, 341 Aerosols, 96, 98–104, 106, 148, 351, 408, 416–420 Aesthetic, 280, 361–364, 367, 368, 417 Affect, 19, 23, 27, 30, 44, 70, 96, 99, 100, 102, 107, 117, 214, 238, 241, 252, 264, 316, 361–363, 399, 409, 417 Affective and aesthetic processes, 368 Affective registers, 451 Afghanistan, 81

African Anthropocene, 87, 264 Agency, 2, 4–7, 10, 12–14, 24, 28, 33, 117, 144, 163, 168, 177, 181, 183, 201, 221, 222, 237, 238, 242, 243, 251–266, 275, 279–284, 304, 305, 362, 364, 365, 381, 410, 419, 435, 449, 454 Agenda 2030, 324 Agent Orange, 63 Age of man, 79 Agrarian colonisation, 410 Agribusiness companies, 350, 373 Agricultural biodiversity, 394, 400 Agricultural systems, 142, 413 Agriculture, 32, 140–143, 148, 181, 276, 301, 374, 381, 383, 410, 412, 413, 419, 433 Alaimo, Stacy, 258, 259 Alternative approaches to resilience, 175, 180–185 Alternative futures, 33, 80, 426 Amazonian Quichua, 446 Amazon rainforest, 27, 430

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3

459

460 Index

Analytical categories, 45, 117–119, 228, 252–254 Analytics of existence, 453 Anarchic dynamics, 103 Ancestors, 79, 217, 350, 373–375, 378–383, 386 Andean philosophy, 450 Andean ways of thinking, 450 Anders, Gunther, 65 Animist, 281, 282 Anomalies, 63 Antarctica, 429 Anthropocene, 1–14, 17–33, 39, 59–71, 77–91, 96, 113–128, 133–151, 155–168, 173–186, 191, 209–223, 227–231, 234, 251, 271–284, 291–306, 311–326, 331–343, 349–368, 374, 389–391, 407, 441 as a condition, 2, 4, 5, 157, 265 governance, 13, 20, 114, 227, 229, 255, 304, 312, 316–325, 335, 337 represents a sharp break with the past, 19, 60 Anthropocene deja-vu, 124 Anthropocene Working Group, 59 Anthropocentric, 13, 29, 31–33, 89, 163, 197, 228, 233, 234, 241, 252–256, 262, 280, 283, 297, 333, 349, 410, 427, 430–432, 437, 447–449, 453, 454 Anthropocentrism, 22, 29–32, 34, 162, 197, 233, 253, 254, 256, 257, 262, 265, 271, 280, 342, 351, 352, 441–455 Anthropogenic interference, 25 Anthropos, 3, 137, 167, 245, 272, 417 Antiblackness, 412, 413 Anticipatory governance, 11 Anti-submarine warfare, 63 Apocalypse, 88, 251, 252, 350, 351, 389–402, 429–431, 436

Apocalyptic discourse, 390, 391, 400 Apollo 11, 435 Architecture, 291, 304, 319, 322, 337, 408, 414 Arctic Ocean, 394 Art, 14, 303, 341, 354, 355, 365, 415, 427, 428, 436 Artificial trees, 97 Artificial world, 138, 150 Asia-Pacific, 229, 271–284 Assemblage, 124, 164, 165, 234, 317, 332, 343, 383, 407–410, 415, 418, 420 Asylum seekers, 80 Atlantic Ocean, 415 Atmosphere, 20, 24, 27, 48, 61, 95, 97, 99, 148, 150, 198, 244, 245, 407, 412, 414, 417, 419, 447 Atomic bombs, 61, 64, 242 Auschwitz, 65 Australia, 63, 79, 81–84, 195, 203, 278, 279, 282, 300, 390 Autonomous being, 235, 238 B

Bäckstrand, K., 293, 294, 297 Balance-of-power, 7, 67 Baldwin, W. A., 82, 83, 195 Bangladesh, 83, 229, 277, 279, 283 Barad, Karen, 359, 361, 409 Baro-Akobo river basin, 381 Barrett, S., 101 Buzan, Barry, 61 Beck, Ulrich, 10 Bengal, 410, 411 Bengal famine, 410 Beyond the human, 13, 31, 33, 221, 228, 241–243, 245, 246, 349–352 Bezos, Jeff, 435 Biermann, Frank, 214, 255, 294, 301, 311, 314, 316, 319, 320, 334

 Index 

Big Data, 13, 183–184, 186 Bikini, 61, 64, 68 Bilbao, Tatiana, 354, 365, 366 Binary divides, 8 Biodiversity loss, 32, 45, 60, 67, 157, 162, 203, 276, 316 preservation, 391, 394 Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), 96–98, 105, 106 Bio-geochemical cycles, 43 Biological conservation, 340 Biological mutations, 69 Biomass loss, 27 Biome, 27, 409, 418 Biopolitics/biopolitical, 31, 82, 166, 167, 222, 223, 332 Biosphere, 23, 48, 63, 106, 157, 160 Black, 81, 83, 84, 163, 179, 238, 260, 264, 382, 385, 397, 432 boxed, 7 and Indigenous peoples, 378 Black Studies, 351, 408 Bloch, Ernst, 78 Blue marble, 120, 121 Bodies, 27, 41, 59, 63, 70, 82, 86, 100, 185, 212, 220, 222, 233, 236, 239, 259, 296, 301, 333, 351, 355, 360, 408, 412–416, 419, 420, 453 Bolsonaro in Brazil, 140 Bonds of mutual responsibilities, 449 Book of Revelation, 395 Booth, Ken, 7, 29, 193, 195 Borders, 22, 23, 81, 87, 195, 200, 279, 292, 298, 299, 350, 359, 397, 413 Boreal forests, 27 Boundary management, 434 Braidotti, R., 31, 354, 356, 357, 359, 360, 363 Brand, Steward, 122

461

Bratton, Benjamin, 334 Brazil, 86, 105, 240, 299, 358 Breakthrough Institute, 318 Brundtland, Gro Harlem, 139 Burke, Anthony, 4, 9, 21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 31, 40, 60, 61, 101, 106, 158, 160, 195, 203, 252, 255, 256, 317, 389 C

Californian counterculture, 20, 120, 121 Capitalism, 28, 29, 61, 62, 77, 78, 84, 88, 105, 143, 184, 215, 235, 237, 245, 252, 256, 258, 260, 275, 280, 300, 331, 359, 376, 411, 434, 447 Capitalist economies, 313, 442 Capitalocene, 245, 256, 258, 279, 360 Carbon, 27, 96–98, 100, 105, 106, 138, 273, 276, 412, 447 budgeting, 13 capitalism, 61 debt, 106 emissions, 264, 273, 334 flows, 335 footprint, 411 neutrality, 106 sinks, 48, 97, 99, 106 Carbon dioxide removal (CDR), 97, 98, 101, 104–107, 200 Care/caring, 32, 79, 88, 116, 123, 135, 136, 162, 209–223, 258, 262, 414, 427, 429 ethics, 211–214, 216, 217, 220, 222, 223 practices, 31 Carlyle, Thomas, 7 Cartesian dualism, 120, 228 Cartesian logic, 89 Cartographies, 356 Cascading collapse, 27

462 Index

Causal manipulation, 453 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 3–5, 77, 84, 91, 113, 255, 275, 299, 323, 360 Chalecki, E.L., 103 Challenges for democracy, 297–301 Chandler, David, 5, 134, 174–176, 181–183, 185, 199, 211, 255, 256, 281, 283, 340, 357, 360, 361, 363, 364, 441 Cheap nature, 105 Chemicals, 62, 63, 146, 259, 412 Chemosphere, 412 China, 63, 86, 90, 149, 229, 273, 275, 276, 278, 279, 283, 419 Christian biblical tradition, 389 theology, 395 thought, 395–397 Christianity, 89, 282, 391, 395, 397 Chthulucene, 360 Cities, 79, 85, 145, 148, 149, 183, 230, 231, 282, 299, 331, 332, 335–341, 343, 412 Civic epistemologies, 104 Civil society, 9, 24, 51, 202, 261, 293, 294, 296, 303, 320 (Classical) security, 47 Class struggle, 399 Climate anarchy, 101, 107, 108 apocalypse, 389, 390 breakdown, 413–415, 418 catastrophe, 27, 381, 384 change, 2–6, 9, 11, 13, 20, 23, 24, 27, 30, 32, 34, 43, 61, 66, 69, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88, 89, 96–101, 103, 106–108, 114, 117, 118, 133–135, 137, 139, 141, 145–150, 155, 157, 160, 162, 174–177, 182, 185, 192–203, 209, 210, 218, 220, 227, 229, 230, 238, 243, 244, 260, 264, 276–279, 281–283, 291, 298,

299, 304, 316, 319, 331–334, 336, 338, 341, 361, 390, 392–394, 399, 400, 416, 418, 427, 429, 447, 448, 451 change negotiations, 278–279 control system, 430 engineering, 20, 95, 408 Leviathan, 335 migration, 400 models, 98, 100, 104, 394, 417 science, 140, 427 security, 101, 135, 161, 194–198 terror, 147 Climate-fiction, 424, 425 Climate-induced displacement, 195–198 Climatology, 417 Clouds, 65, 98, 412, 416, 417, 419 Cloud seeding, 97, 419 Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, 121 CO2 emissions, 48, 209, 260, 273, 274 CO2 levels, 361 Coastal cities, 336, 338 Coastlines erode, 148 Co-creation, 90, 444, 451, 454, 455 Coerced resilience, 178–180, 184 Cognitive biases, 32 Cold War, 3, 6, 11, 18, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 70, 115, 120, 123, 146, 243, 252, 292 Collage, 354, 356, 357, 360, 362, 365, 366 Collapse of civilization, 392, 399 Collective security, 44 Collier, P., 159 Collier, S. J., 117, 338 Colombian Exchange, 79 Colonial colonial extraction, 382 expansion, 252, 275, 376 exploitation, 137 fantasies, 411, 418

 Index 

history, 80, 219, 263, 266, 397, 413, 415 legacies, 7, 219, 229 logics, 115, 413 methodologies, 411, 415 ordering, 414 technologies and knowledge systems, 414 thinking, 410 violence, 261, 386 Colonialism, 19, 60, 67–70, 77–79, 81, 82, 84–86, 89, 91, 229, 257, 258, 260, 275, 280, 284, 359, 383, 412, 413, 415 Colonisation, 105, 151, 215, 257, 272, 275, 280, 284, 377, 382, 385, 410, 415, 416 Command and control, 336 Commodification, 163, 253, 256, 279, 442, 447 ‘Common but differentiated responsibility,’ 202 Communication, 69, 118, 120, 141, 147, 220, 282, 313, 380, 446 Communities, 5, 7, 10, 18, 23, 24, 29, 31, 39–42, 44, 45, 49–53, 62, 69, 70, 90, 118, 123, 135, 140, 146, 162, 174, 175, 178–186, 195, 196, 199, 202, 204, 215, 219, 220, 222, 227, 243, 245, 256, 264, 275–277, 280, 282–284, 292, 300, 301, 303, 305, 316, 336, 339, 340, 350, 373–375, 377–385, 409, 420, 431, 446, 453–455 emergency response trainings, 340 involvement, 336 mapping, 350, 373 meetings, 379 resilience, 181 species, 236–237, 257, 262, 411 Complex, 2, 10, 18, 19, 22, 24–27, 29, 40, 41, 44, 60, 66, 68, 113, 127,

463

136, 145, 155, 158, 164, 166, 168, 174, 176–179, 181, 183–185, 198, 211, 212, 214–216, 219, 227, 229, 239–241, 243, 245, 264, 282, 319, 322, 324, 333, 336, 337, 341, 342, 357, 359, 366, 367, 394, 411, 412, 428, 434, 444, 445, 450, 451 adaptive system, 41 interactions, 24, 26 system thinking, 337 Complexity, 24–27, 33, 78, 134, 157, 163, 165, 166, 174–180, 198, 228, 229, 233–246, 272, 305, 317, 322, 380 thinking, 233, 237, 239–241 Compositions/compositional, 89, 245, 350, 356, 360, 411, 417 Concept of movement, 89 Conceptual roots of the Anthropocene, 20, 113 Conditions of the ‘sayable,’ 116 Conference, 9, 123 Conflict, 7, 12, 17, 25, 31, 40, 45, 51, 52, 81, 101, 103, 107, 138, 146, 147, 155, 157–160, 184, 194, 196, 200, 210, 213, 214, 217, 223, 242, 261, 313, 316, 389, 392, 398–400 Conservation, 28, 115, 218, 220, 294, 319, 340 Conspiracy, 430 Containment, 254, 416, 417 Control and manipulation of nature, 425 Co-production of knowledge, 13, 350 Coronavirus (COVID-19), 2, 52, 103, 291, 300, 301, 448 Cosgrove, D., 120 Cosmologies, 19, 51, 85, 124, 164, 229, 383, 407, 443, 454 Cosmology of flat empires, 124

464 Index

Cosmopolitan, 85, 256, 280, 293 democracy, 9 Cosmopolitanism, 8, 256 Cosmopolitics, 317 Cowboy nomad, 123 Crisis, 6, 11, 18, 21–24, 26, 28–30, 50, 51, 66, 77–80, 82–84, 87, 89–91, 95–96, 105, 116, 137, 145, 148, 158, 166, 186, 193, 204, 209, 227, 228, 231, 235, 244, 252, 265, 275, 276, 301, 302, 316, 318, 319, 337, 339, 342, 431 Critical animal studies, 233, 234 Critical discourse moments, 120 Critical infrastructure, 333, 338, 339 Critical methodology, 356 Critical scholarship, 90, 353, 363, 364, 366, 367 Critical security studies, 45, 156, 195 Crutzen, Paul, 40, 59, 98, 114, 176, 209–210, 235, 244, 273, 319 Culture, 235 Cybernetic system, 12, 17, 20, 120–123, 184, 332, 342, 343 Cybernetic systems theory, 121 Cyberspace, 147 Cyborgs, 236–237 D

Dalby, S., 4, 5, 25, 28, 79, 133, 134, 139, 141, 146, 147, 158, 159, 191, 200, 255, 316, 318, 332, 396 Dangerous, 12, 25, 28, 33, 41, 43, 66, 79, 81n1, 88, 133, 140, 146, 148, 150, 193, 194 Data centers, 117 Dauvergne, Peter, 29, 143, 144, 316 Decarbonisation, 96, 263, 264 Decision-making processes, 24, 293, 294, 296, 312, 374

Declaration of the Rights of Man, 5 Decolonial, 6, 19, 84, 86, 228, 229, 251–266 Decolonization, 384 Deconstruction, 302, 305 Deep ecology, 427 Deep geological time, 230, 315 Deep-sea navigation, 63 Deep time, 315 Defence, 66, 141, 165, 192, 342, 434 Deforestation, 27, 275–277, 283, 453 Delhi, 279, 412, 419 Deliberation, 296, 302–304, 324, 325 Deliberative, 293, 296, 303, 325 Deliberative democracy, 297 Democracy, 6, 9, 89, 229, 230, 291–306, 313, 321, 396 Democratic deficit, 294, 295 Democratic practice, 13, 230, 297, 304 Democratisation, 293, 294, 296, 301 Demos, 230, 298, 299 Denial, 377, 427, 451 Department of Defense, 62 Departure from human-nature dualism, 281 Depoliticizing, 13 Derrida, Jacques, 69 Design, 316, 319–321, 325, 332, 336–342, 350, 354, 364–366, 368, 373, 384, 410 Detachment, 395, 398 Devastation, 376, 426 Development, 6, 10, 18, 19, 22, 27–30, 40, 41, 48, 51, 60, 61, 63, 67–69, 88, 90, 95–97, 100, 102, 105, 116, 120, 125, 139, 144, 150, 166, 174–179, 183, 211–214, 219, 236, 240, 254, 255, 257, 261, 265, 275–277, 279, 294, 295, 298, 313, 319, 322, 324, 335, 365, 392–394, 396, 413, 417, 427, 448 Development programming, 379

 Index 

Dichotomy, 18, 22, 27–30, 260, 263, 266, 437 Differentiated vulnerability, 84, 91, 278 Digital technologies, 147, 245 Dilemma, 7, 19, 20, 83, 96, 101, 276, 294 Diplomacy, 26, 67, 100, 101, 350, 359, 428 Diplomatic bargaining, 22 Disaster, 84, 89, 141, 142, 146, 147, 176, 181, 183, 184, 251, 277, 300, 333, 392, 394, 413, 414, 430, 436 Disciplinary history of International Relations, 3 Discontinuities, 116, 357, 359, 360 Discourse of climate security, 135, 192, 194–198 networks, 361 of security, 194, 198 Discursive problematizations, 117 Diseases, 142, 162, 395, 434, 448 Dispositif, 342–343 Dispossession, 80, 83, 88, 91, 144, 214, 283, 412 Distribution of wealth, 399 Divestment/investment, 30, 146, 178, 279, 374, 380, 412 Divides between culture and nature, 210 DIY, 122 Domination, 78, 257, 259, 262, 391, 452 Drones, 81, 147, 216 Drought, 81, 84, 134, 139–141, 146, 148, 150, 210, 215, 243, 278, 333, 389, 413, 426, 431 Dryzek, J. S., 281, 292, 293, 296, 298, 299, 302, 304, 312–321, 323, 324 Dubai, 419, 430 Dynamic and unstable Earth system, 315

465

E

Earth, 4, 13, 17, 18, 20–33, 39–53, 59, 65, 66, 70, 84, 88, 98, 100, 114, 120–122, 124, 128, 135, 137–139, 142, 145, 148, 168, 176, 180, 191, 198, 209, 214, 218, 223, 239, 244, 252, 258, 261, 263, 271, 275, 280, 291, 311, 314, 320, 334, 342, 389, 393, 397–399, 407, 411, 415, 416, 418, 419, 426, 429–434, 436, 437, 452, 453 Earth history, 84, 313 Earth movement, 114, 120–128 Earth Summit, 202, 294, 299 Earth system, 13, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 40–45, 48–50, 52, 53, 61, 63, 77, 82, 95, 99, 105, 106, 113, 114, 123, 127, 133, 138, 140, 143, 145, 148, 150, 192, 198, 214, 228, 230, 238, 255, 258, 271, 275, 281, 313, 315–319, 321, 342 Earth System Analysis, 320 Earth system governance (ESG), 115, 230, 256, 312, 319–321, 331, 334–336, 342, 343 Earth System Science (ESS), 12, 17, 18, 26, 39–53, 255 Earth System Science Partnership, 41 Earth systems functionality, 192 Earthquakes (tornadoes and tsunamis), 63, 395, 430 Eckersley, Robyn, 203, 233, 281, 303, 318 Ecocidal patterns of existence, 452 Ecocide, 252, 261, 415 Ecofascism, 79 Ecological apocalypse, 251, 389 Ecological approach to security, 191–205 Ecological balance, 29, 291–292 Ecological blindness, 21

466 Index

Ecological boundaries, 324, 325 Ecological catastrophe, 28, 33, 77, 255 Ecological change, 23, 142, 192, 193, 198, 199, 244 Ecological collapse, 22, 432 Ecological crisis, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 66, 78, 83, 87, 89–91, 192, 194, 196, 203, 204, 221, 252, 294, 301, 441 Ecological degradation, 32, 316 Ecological destruction, 69, 376 Ecological infrastructure, 331, 340 Ecological insecurity, 201 Ecological integrity, 324 Ecological interdependence, 214, 452 Ecological limits to human freedom, 28 Ecologically aligned, 272, 280–283 Ecological map, 23 Ecological security, 31, 162, 192, 198–205 Ecological security discourse, 135, 192, 200–203 Ecological sustainability, 28 Ecologies in/of colonialism and empire, 413 of relations, 444 Ecomodernist, 125–127, 180, 318 Economic growth, 60, 87, 117, 140, 273, 277, 278, 313, 324 Economic inequality, 278, 399 Economic markets, 412, 417 Economisation, 416 Economy, 28–30, 79, 80, 89, 96, 101, 105, 107, 134, 138, 140–144, 146, 148–151, 160, 202, 213, 264, 273, 276, 278, 279, 283, 284, 293, 294, 298, 313, 319, 412, 442, 447–449 Ecosystem/s, 12, 23, 24, 27, 29–32, 44, 66, 95, 97, 105, 133–135, 144, 145, 162, 178, 191–193, 198–202, 204, 251–253, 255, 263, 264, 275, 291, 319, 332, 343, 381, 433 resilience, 193, 198, 199, 203

Ecotopia, 78 Einstein, Albert, 65 Embeddedness, 23, 83, 204, 213, 264, 321, 390 in the natural world, 202 Emerging technologies, 13, 418 Emissions reductions, 96 Empire-building, 397 End of the world, 350, 389–391, 394, 398, 400, 401, 426, 429, 432–434, 436 Energy crisis, 431 generation, 319 networks, 337 Enewetak, 64, 68 Engines, 122, 143, 144, 150, 273, 298 English School, 7 Enlightenment, 5, 6, 234–236, 260, 441, 445 period, 235, 441 thought, 445 Entangled/entanglement, 12, 13, 17, 18, 22, 29, 31, 33, 40, 41, 44, 50–53, 67, 83, 88, 113, 124, 136, 158, 163, 197, 210, 211, 214, 216, 221, 230, 258, 265, 283, 314, 317, 323, 333, 335, 337, 340, 342, 349, 350, 358–361, 363, 368, 396, 409, 413, 414, 416–419 networks, 340 Entrepreneurial self, 123 Environment, 3, 4, 12, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 40, 41, 45, 61–64, 66, 69, 70, 89, 99, 106, 107, 115, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 137, 139, 140, 143, 146, 147, 156, 158, 159, 162–164, 177, 178, 183, 184, 191, 193, 198, 212, 220, 229, 240, 273, 279, 294, 299, 303, 311, 312, 315–317, 320, 336, 340, 360,

 Index 

361, 363, 365, 396, 400, 412, 418, 429, 432–434, 449 agreements, 22, 105 apocalypse, 350, 389–402 catastrophe, 78, 389 changes, 25, 105, 117, 121, 139, 159, 183, 261, 271, 272, 277, 284, 316, 350 collapse, 121, 343 degradation, 158, 159, 202, 273, 278, 331, 332, 390, 391, 393, 394, 399, 400 footprint, 273 governance, 3, 4, 227, 230, 251, 261, 262, 293, 294, 311–326 insecurity, 13, 133, 140 justice, 261, 390 movement, 220, 390, 393 multilateralism, 101, 107 politics, 350, 390, 393, 401 problems, 105, 121, 124, 128, 134, 155, 160, 165, 227, 229, 254, 291, 301, 311, 313–316, 340, 392, 393 refugees, 81 of the rich, 144 security, 12, 61, 133, 158 side effects, 20, 96 support-systems, 447 threats, 164, 281, 392 warfare, 63 Episteme, 5, 6, 11, 303 Epistemic violence, 19, 78, 79, 259, 260 Epistemology, 3, 6, 11, 14, 25, 83, 85, 157, 261, 349 Eritrea, 81 Escape from Earth, 426 Eschatological thinking, 391, 396, 398 Eschatology, 391, 394, 396–399, 401 Ethic of care, 211, 213, 218 Ethical/ethics, 7–9, 11, 14, 19, 26, 28, 31, 60, 67, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91,

467

135, 136, 146, 163, 202, 204, 211–214, 216–223, 234, 251, 256, 293, 323, 444, 453 boundaries, 31, 33 framework, 42, 201 Ethiopia, 81, 381 Eurocentric narratives, 385 Eurocentrism, 19, 78–82, 85, 263 Europe, 79, 81, 86, 87, 90, 142, 143, 159, 273, 276, 278 European conquest of the Americas, 62 European imperialism, 142, 383 European Space Agency, 435 Euro-Western knowledge production, 377 Everest, 66, 431 Existential autonomy, 443 Existential threats, 18, 39–41, 45, 48, 50, 52, 103, 157, 195, 197 Experimental methodology, 339 Experimentation, 228, 230 Experiments, 78, 245, 296, 303, 304, 331, 333, 336, 338, 341–343, 351, 417, 448 Expertise, 30, 165, 315, 340, 359, 378, 435 External threats, 2, 4, 165, 174, 176, 177 Extinction, 4, 19, 30–32, 50, 60, 64–67, 70, 137, 140, 142, 144, 157, 209, 215, 244, 262, 378, 389, 391, 392, 415, 448 of bees, 392 rebellion, 88, 140, 144, 202, 203 Extraction, 79, 81, 140, 142–144, 202, 275, 375, 378, 382, 383, 410, 411, 415, 417, 418 Extractivism, 264, 442 Extra-human agency, 381 Extreme weather conditions, 2, 4, 103, 140, 174, 218, 430

468 Index F

Famine, 215, 395, 410, 411 Farming communities, 350, 373 The Fate of the Earth, 66 Feedback(s), 44, 120, 122, 123, 126, 136, 175, 178, 181, 214, 313, 321 effects, 25, 27, 173, 180–183 loops, 27, 183, 184, 200 mechanisms, 43 Feminist, 6, 8, 211, 216, 217, 259, 350, 351, 354, 397, 409, 410 discourses, 136, 211 Ferrari, L. L., 103 Fierke, Karin, 213–214, 216 Financial institutions, 337 Fixed concept of security, 41 Flood(s)/flooding, 141, 146, 148, 174, 175, 210, 215, 278, 279, 300, 333, 337, 338, 341, 381, 409, 426, 431 barriers, 381 events, 141 Food insecurity, 103 scarcity, 400 security, 88, 218, 316, 391, 394 Forced, 68, 179, 181, 379, 383, 412 migration, 316 Foreign Affairs, 66 Forensic Architectures, 364 Foresight methods, 315 Fossil economy, 80 Fossil fuels, 13, 81, 97, 105, 106, 133, 134, 140, 143–150, 160, 178, 201, 276, 277, 298, 382 Fossil fuels uneconomic, 149 Foucault, M., 20, 114, 116, 117, 166, 222, 452 1492 and the conquest of the Americas, 79 Fracking, 145 Framework of rights, 448

France, 63 Franke, A., 120, 124 French Polynesia, 63, 68 FridaysForFuture, 88 Fuller, Buckminster, 122, 124, 338, 357 Functionalism, 323 Future generations, 67, 140, 192, 196, 197, 199, 202, 205, 299, 305, 306, 384 G

Gaia, 157, 258, 262, 263, 354 Gaia-hypothesis, 66 Gases, 95, 99 Gene manipulation, 98 Genealogical study, 118 Genealogies, 20, 113 Genocide, 260, 261, 410, 415 Geo-or genetic engineering, 318 Geodesic dome, 124, 126 Geo-engineered planet, 433 Geoengineering, 4, 13, 19, 20, 80, 95–108, 115, 126, 128, 148, 200, 228, 418, 425, 430, 431, 447 proposals, 448 technologies, 12, 17, 96–99, 103, 107, 108, 319 Geographical and material inequality, 399 Geological conditions, 17, 21, 25, 26, 33 engineering, 412 epoch, 3, 25, 26, 70, 114, 117, 197, 210, 283, 323 era called the Anthropocene, 40, 133 period, 137 Geology, 114, 259, 355, 357, 417 Geophysical force, 40, 84, 91, 393 Geopolitics, 13, 61, 64, 86, 133, 137–151, 166, 167, 279

 Index 

Geoscientists, 115 Ghosh, A., 77, 80, 81, 177 Giddens, Anthony, 10, 396 Gill, Bikrum, 381 Gilroy, Paul, 84 Global, 17–20, 227–231 capitalism, 105 catastrophe, 27, 394 cooling, 62, 100, 142 corporations, 425, 434 governance, 8, 9, 52, 104, 252, 256, 292–297, 306, 314, 319, 320, 334, 426, 428 health, 313 imaginaries, 11, 64 institutions, 244, 254, 256, 333 mean temperature, 27 North, 77, 105, 295, 300, 400 security, 21 slave trade, 376 South, 87, 105, 147, 159, 295, 300, 397 stewardship, 42, 43 warming, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 27, 32, 95, 97, 107, 117, 157, 160, 210, 238, 334, 400, 418, 427, 429–431, 433, 447 ‘Global Citizens’ Alliance for Seed Freedom, 400 Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation, 149 Global ecology, 19, 60 Global environmental governance (GEG), 254, 255, 261, 291, 293–296, 303, 320 Global environmental politics (GEP), 29 Global governance, 227 Globalisation, 8–11, 410 of commodities, 410 Globalist discourse, 394 Globalized economy, 448 Globalized world, 137

469

Good Anthropocene, 4, 5, 108, 126, 318, 334 Good governance, 6, 281 Google, 122 Gore, Al, 80, 390, 392 Governance as management and control, 322 mechanisms, 294, 320 recursive, 10 structures, 227, 230, 254, 256, 319, 320, 334, 431 systems, 315, 319, 320 Governing capacities, 314 Great Acceleration, 60, 143, 252, 256, 260 Greenhouse gases (GHGs), 24, 30, 45, 48, 60, 95–97, 99, 101, 102, 107, 199, 200, 277, 343 Greenland ice sheet, 27 Greenpeace, 377 Green social movements, 29 Guterres, António, 393 H

Habitat, 32, 105, 144, 276, 291, 394, 400, 432, 433 Haiti, 83 Hamilton, John T., 215, 216 Hansen, Lene, 61, 116, 159 Haraway, Donna, 6, 78, 79, 88, 236–237, 245, 255, 257, 258, 262, 263, 335, 342, 356, 366, 409 “Hard” sciences, 18, 40, 49–52 Harvey, David, 105 Held, Virginia, 212 Herz, John, 65–67 High politics, 7, 193, 204 High-probability but low impact and low-probability but high impact events, 25 Himalayan ice sheets, 80

470 Index

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 61, 68, 242 Historical materialists, 101, 106 History of humankind, 396 History of the present, 116 Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 216, 449 Holistic, 31, 64, 263, 448 Holistic picture, 26 Holling, C. S., 332, 333 Hollywood, 430, 435 Holocene, 12, 17, 24, 40, 50–53, 113, 176, 228, 252–261, 265, 273, 292, 301, 311–313, 315, 316, 321–323, 325, 334, 375 Holocene environmental governance, 312, 325 Hong Kong, 430 Hope, 85, 88, 104, 126, 179, 257, 332, 333, 338, 343, 363, 374, 378, 385, 395, 400, 415, 427, 429, 431–433, 435 Horn of Africa, 81 Hothouse Earth, 18, 39–53, 134, 145 Human, 17–19, 133–136, 228–230, 349–352 agency, 252–254, 259, 262, 275, 449 body, 27, 413 condition, 139, 445 development, 5, 28, 29, 89, 324 exceptionalism, 4, 6, 162, 236, 237, 360, 446 extinction, 19, 50, 60, 64, 66 history, 32, 113, 209, 242, 271 impacts, 4, 12, 22, 133, 140, 315, 334 rights, 9, 11, 80, 89, 105, 235, 313 scale, 83 societies, 83, 84, 91, 99, 105, 106, 142, 275, 279, 281, 282, 313, 320, 399 subject, 223, 254, 265, 275, 447 survival, 40, 66, 67, 82, 142 Human-induced, 25, 48, 427, 430, 431

Humanists, 26, 33, 84, 87, 235, 236, 427 Humanist thinking, 236, 246 Humanitarian, 9 Humanity/ies, 2, 3, 10, 11, 18, 21–27, 29–33, 43, 50–52, 67, 79, 84, 85, 89, 106, 122, 126, 135, 138, 139, 150, 164, 176, 191, 192, 199, 202, 204, 222, 235, 236, 244, 245, 251, 255, 258, 272, 280, 281, 301–303, 305, 317–319, 323, 333, 334, 338, 355, 360, 392, 393, 395, 397, 401, 425, 432–434, 436, 437, 441, 446 as a geological actor, 114 Human-nature binaries, 217, 223, 407 Human-nature dualism, 281, 283 Human-nature relationality, 272 Human/nature separation, 336 Human security discourse, 162, 197 Hurricane/s, 140, 141, 338, 429 Hurricane Katrina, 83 Hurricane Sandy, 83, 338 Hyperobject/s, 433 I

Ideology of technological world-­ mastery, 443 Imaginaries of progress, 6 Immanent possibilities, 202 Imminence of disaster, 392 Inclusion, 51, 229, 254, 294, 295, 299, 365, 377 India, 80, 86, 98, 143, 273, 279, 282, 283, 412, 417 Indigeneity, 382, 384 Indigenous agricultural knowledge, 394 Indigenous American, 444 traditions, 452 Indigenous communities, 24, 69, 181, 182, 186, 219, 222, 227, 283, 284, 383 affected by nuclear testing, 69

 Index 

Indigenous conceptions of care, 220 Indigenous cosmologies, 19, 85, 383 Indigenous histories, 377 Indigenous knowledge, 87, 283, 377, 381 Indigenous peoples, 31, 80, 144, 260, 261, 303, 377, 378, 382, 383, 453 Indigenous philosophies, 280, 385 Indigenous self-determination, 384 Indigenous temporality, 385 Indigenous traditions, 445, 453 Indigenous ways of knowing, 31, 377, 382, 384 Industrial agricultural, 412, 413 Industrialisation, 79, 177, 272, 279, 284, 412 Industrial Revolution, 30, 209, 273, 275, 298 Information theory, 20, 120, 123 Infrastructure/s, 62, 68, 97, 104, 117, 141, 163, 164, 278, 279, 282, 296, 331, 333, 337–343, 360, 409, 414, 417, 418 Instability, 24–27, 33, 159, 165, 174, 194, 196, 229, 301, 305, 314, 322, 332, 338 Institutionalists, 103, 106, 254, 319, 321 Institutional politics, 359 Integrated Earth system, 316 Intentional climate change, 103 Interaction, 19, 106, 135 Interconnectedness, 148, 393, 428, 445, 451 Interconnection, 10, 26, 151, 162, 175, 337, 409, 410, 415, 442–444, 450, 452, 454 Interdependence, 157, 214, 219, 220, 230, 317, 443, 452 Inter-disciplinarity, 355 Interdisciplinary, 18, 22, 26, 41, 42, 66, 120, 211

471

Intergenerational suffering, 413 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 41, 52, 80, 97, 98, 104, 105, 209, 276, 278, 416 Internal capacities, 174 International collaboration, 3, 4 International Commission on Stratigraphy, 59 International cooperation, 45, 430 International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), 114 International institutions, 140, 180, 185, 186, 230, 241, 293, 305, 447 International peace, 6, 193 International Relations (IR), 1–14, 17–33, 39–41, 44, 45, 49–53, 59–61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 85, 90, 96, 99, 101, 103, 106–108, 113–115, 133, 134, 136–138, 140, 145, 150, 151, 155, 157, 158, 163, 164, 168, 185, 191, 194, 195, 203, 204, 210, 211, 213, 214, 217, 227–229, 233–246, 252–266, 280, 292–298, 333, 350, 351, 353–368, 375, 377, 381, 382, 384, 385, 389, 390, 396, 398, 401, 407–416, 418–420, 426, 427, 437, 441, 455 International Renewable Energy, 149 International security discourse, 196 International system, 19, 22, 23, 25, 67, 96, 97, 99–101, 103, 107, 204, 253, 254, 261, 262, 265, 281, 454 Internet search, 122 Interspecies conception of politics, 31 Interspecies death, 420 Inter-state system, 22 Intertextual relations, 428

472 Index

Intervention, 9, 20, 70, 78, 89, 95–100, 102, 135, 173–176, 178–182, 184, 200, 212, 213, 215, 218, 221, 227, 230, 253, 260, 283, 295, 362, 363, 367, 368, 447, 448 Iran, 81 Iraq, 81 Island, 68, 80, 81, 148, 278–279, 283, 304, 338, 339, 394 Israel, 81, 213–214 J

Jobs, Steve, 122 Judeo-Christian cosmology, 443 Justice, 28, 83, 88, 104, 107, 117, 196, 201, 212, 215, 261, 278, 292, 293, 296, 304, 313, 321, 322, 324, 325, 390, 449 K

Kant, Immanuel, 363 Kazakhstan, 63 Kingdom of God, 395, 396, 399 Kiribati, 80, 278, 279 Klein, N., 77, 79, 81, 88 Knowledge(s), 5, 10, 11, 13, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 41, 49, 51, 63, 64, 70, 78, 80, 83, 85–91, 104, 114, 116–120, 123, 124, 127, 128, 157, 165, 173, 175, 177, 181–184, 214, 219, 221, 228, 234, 235, 255, 260, 275, 282, 283, 297, 303, 314, 315, 349–351, 354, 357, 364, 374, 375, 377, 378, 381–386, 394, 407, 410, 411, 415, 418, 419, 428, 450 artefacts, 117, 118, 124, 127 mobile, 118

struggles that are “always bound up with power relations,", 116 systems, 221, 351, 377, 407, 408, 414, 417, 419, 420 Knowledge-transfer, 382 Kolbert, E., 64, 244 L

La Paz, Bolivia, 149 La Via Campesina, 400 Land-based environment, 32 Landscape design, 340 ecology, 340 Large-scale interventions, 97, 102, 447 Last judgment, 392, 393, 401 Late liberalism, 383 Latitudinal eschatology, 398–400 Latour, Bruno, 4, 6, 9, 11, 118, 163, 176, 234, 237–241, 255, 258, 280, 335, 342, 354–356, 360, 441, 443 Learning, 8, 13, 85, 87, 90, 91, 136, 211, 228–230, 243, 254, 301, 321, 384, 385, 413, 453, 455 Level of ‘causes,’ 10 of ‘effects,’ 10 Leviathan, 10, 449 Lewis, S. L., 62, 142, 215, 260 Liberal, 2, 3, 6–11, 44, 85, 174, 219, 230, 235, 241, 252, 253, 256, 293, 297, 302, 331, 332, 339, 342, 343, 396, 447–449, 454 capitalism, 331, 447 democracy, 297, 396 government, 332 rights discourse, 448 subjects, 332, 343 Liberalisation, 8, 412 Lifeboats for the rich, 84

 Index 

Life-worlds, 223, 407, 409, 411, 413, 415, 418, 420 Linear, 2, 10, 12, 17, 18, 25, 26, 39, 41, 43, 50, 52, 90, 125, 174, 176, 180, 183, 239, 260, 337, 362, 374–376, 384, 385, 396, 397, 402, 448 conceptions of causal relations, 448 temporality, 375 understanding of time, 396 Linklater, A., 202, 281 Literary studies, 357 Literary theory, 355 Local communities, 52, 175, 181–184, 276, 282, 316, 374 Localised approaches, 13 Local knowledge, 182, 377, 378 Logging, 32 Logics of anarchy, 103 Lövbrand, Eva, 51, 203, 204, 271, 292, 298, 311, 314, 316, 317, 319, 320, 322, 323 Lovelock, James, 66 M

Major disasters, 431 Mali, 81 Manhattan, 83 Mapping, 11, 135, 175, 350, 373, 378–386, 418 practice, 417 Marginalization, 135, 175, 197, 377, 385, 400 Marine environment, 32 Market-based solutions, 390 Mars, 432, 435 Marshall Islands, 63, 68 Maslin, M. A., 62, 142, 215, 260 Mass bleaching on coral reefs, 32 extinctions, 32, 215, 415 migration, 214, 389 species extinction, 4

473

Material assemblages of weather, 408 entanglements, 361 knowledge system, 351, 407 Materialist international approaches, 101 Materialities, 78, 161, 259, 356, 360, 361, 363, 364, 410, 411 Mbembe, A., 12, 86, 87, 89, 90 Means of production, 399 Mediterranean, 364 Melting icecaps, 140 Merchant, C., 280 Meshwork, 118 Meteorological infrastructure, 417 Meteorology, 64, 351, 408, 416–419 Method, 13, 25, 26, 44, 95, 96, 101, 102, 106, 107, 116, 118, 119, 315, 349–354, 360, 362, 367, 373–375, 378, 379, 381–385, 407–420, 426, 448 of collaging, 350, 353–368 Methodological approach, 368, 407 Methodological violence, 411 Methodologies, 13, 83, 86, 159, 261, 332, 333, 339, 342, 349, 350, 353, 354, 356, 357, 359, 361, 363, 364, 366–368, 383–384, 408, 410, 411, 413, 414, 418 Mexico, 195, 429 Miami Beach, 341 Microsoft, 106 Middle East, 81, 256, 300, 379 Migrant, 83, 103, 222, 279 Militarisation, 18, 48, 59, 61, 70, 193, 411 Military, 18, 40, 44, 61–64, 68, 70, 81, 104, 123, 141, 148, 150, 159, 174, 193, 200, 202, 212, 242, 299, 411 rivalries, 13, 61, 133, 140 Military-industrial complex, 359 Mills, Wright, C., 65

474 Index

Mini-lateral, 102 Mining, 13, 32, 63, 138, 140, 217, 264, 349 MIT’s Radiation Lab, 123 Mitigation, 4, 23, 96–98, 101, 104, 194–197, 200–201, 276, 318, 427 deterrence, 97 Modern political philosophies, 396 political thought, 396 societies, 25, 160, 441 state, 166, 449 Modernist, 2, 5–12, 17, 19, 85, 123, 176, 177, 180, 181, 184, 210, 223, 253, 257, 258, 280–283, 300, 340, 357, 416, 417, 446, 452 Modernity, 6, 10, 11, 27, 77, 85, 88, 163, 164, 166, 179, 210, 275, 363, 395–396, 411, 419 Modes of being, 135, 175, 177, 181, 446 of governance, 13, 222, 223, 229, 252–254, 261, 293 Monsoon, 408, 409, 411, 417–419 Moore, Jason, 101, 105, 175, 185, 245, 258, 279 More-than-human, 67, 90, 218, 221, 228, 229, 241, 242, 246, 251–266, 299, 317, 418 entanglements, 88, 335, 409 environment, 412 matters, 410 others, 410 world, 31, 234, 236, 245 Moscow, 430 Mouffe, C., 293, 294 Multi-dimensional representations of space, 379 Multilateral governance, 103 Multilateralism, 101, 107, 164 Multi-level governance, 314

Multinational corporations, 82, 106, 303 Multiple crisis, 246, 316 Multiple worlds, 356 Multiplicity, 13, 85, 86, 89, 100, 116, 162, 228, 229, 356, 357, 365, 409 Multiplier, 141, 162, 200 Multi-species scholarship, 410 Mumbai, 430 Mumford, Lewis, 65 Musk, Elon, 435 Mutual nurturing, 450–451 Mutual vulnerability, 31 Myanmar, 410 N

Naess, A., 233 Napalm, 63 NASA, 120, 121, 435 National governments, 298, 314 National interests, 7, 11, 22, 24, 104 National policies, 312 National security, 60, 64, 104, 117, 146, 156–160, 162, 166, 192, 194–198, 200, 333, 339 Nation state, 10, 39, 40, 148, 193, 195, 202, 222, 227, 229, 230, 254, 281, 292, 293, 297, 298, 304, 313, 314, 334, 343, 396, 411, 413, 414 Natural disasters, 195, 215, 218, 277, 279, 338, 430 scientists, 33, 40 Nature, 2, 17, 18, 21, 40, 62, 77, 101, 116, 133, 135, 139, 156, 176, 192, 210, 228–230, 233, 254, 275, 292, 311, 331, 349–352, 362, 373, 393, 425, 441 Nature/culture divide, 5, 7, 12, 13, 260

 Index 

Nature-society, 18, 22, 27–30, 34, 252, 257–260, 263, 266, 350 Nauru, 81 Navdanya, 400 Negative emissions, 97, 106 Neoliberalisation, 412 Neoliberalism, 90, 125, 245, 340 Neo-Malthusian, 67 Neo-Marxist, 8 Neorealist, 106, 254 New environmental reality, 314 New geopolitics of the Anthropocene, 146 New materialism, 106, 165, 349 New normal, 333, 336–338 New Orleans, 83, 338 Newton, 25 Newtonian worldview, 448 A New World, 149 New York, 338, 339, 341 Nigeria, 81 Nomad, 123 Non-agency, 363 Non-governmental organizations, 29 Non-human agency, 253, 257, 320 Non-human agents, 299 Non-human forms of life, 24, 29, 31, 33, 217 Non-human interlocutors, 452 Non-human kin, 444 Non-human life, 18, 22, 31, 87, 106, 218, 220, 336 Non-humans, 19, 78, 101, 105, 134, 136, 177, 211, 221, 223, 228, 237, 275, 282, 303, 317, 337, 342, 444, 446, 451, 454, 455 Non-human world, 12, 17, 176, 313, 321, 332 Non-linear consequences, 176 Non-linearity, 18, 22, 240 Non-linear temporality, 384 Non-traditional security issues, 155 Non-Western contexts, 218

475

Non-Western knowledges, 13, 228 Normativity gap, 324 Norms, 25, 101, 116, 161, 164, 196, 202, 203, 315, 323–325 North Africa, 81 North Africa to Gaza, 81 North America, 143, 159, 444 Norway, 150, 217 Nuclear acceleration, 60–61 Nuclear age, 59, 64, 65, 67 Nuclear arms race, 18, 70 Nuclear colonialism, 60, 67–70 Nuclear testing, 59, 61, 63, 64, 68–70, 79 Nuclear testing is not recognized as ‘real,’ 69 Nuclear war, 18, 65, 66, 68–70, 139 Nuclear weaponry, 12, 63 Nuclear winter, 66, 252 O

Object of knowledge, 64, 70, 159, 351, 407 Ocean, 13, 102, 148, 230, 349, 409, 415, 416 Ocean acidification, 4, 45, 60, 252, 260, 334, 400 Oceanography, 417 Odum, Eugene, 64 One world, 17 One world world, 9, 450 Ontological assumptions, 442, 445, 454, 455 Ontological separation of humanity from Nature, 441 Ontological shift, 312 Ontology, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14, 25, 85, 86, 89, 164, 203, 223, 257, 258, 280, 283, 349–351, 373–386, 442, 443, 448, 450, 452, 454 Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth, 122

476 Index

Orbis Spike, 260, 263 Orientalism, 81, 81n1 Origin point, 79 Orlando, 430 Osborn, Fairfield Our Plundered Planet, 65 Osborne, T., 67 Our Common Future, 139 Ozone hole, 117, 227 P

Pacific Islands, 195, 278–279 Pacific Proving Grounds, 68 Palestine, 83, 213–214, 364 Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2015), 27, 140 Participatory citizen science, 336 Participatory design, 336 Path dependencies, 264, 292, 313, 315, 320, 321 Patriarchy, 77, 78, 383 Paulino, Rosana, 354, 358 Pence, Mike, 435 Permafrost, 218, 394 Pessimistic view, 67 Petroleum, 13, 133, 140, 143 Philosophical traditions, 450 Philosophy, 80, 83, 84, 89, 90, 115, 211, 220, 280, 281, 283, 357, 385, 450 Pickering, J., 281, 292, 299, 302, 304, 312–314, 317–321, 323 Placing the Anthropocene, 87 Planetary, 12, 17–22, 26, 28, 30, 34, 42, 43, 48, 50, 51, 78, 83, 85, 90, 100, 227–231, 251, 255, 281, 296, 324, 418 boundaries, 13, 18, 39–53, 158, 162, 166, 255, 257, 314, 318, 334 conditions, 3, 298 governance, 299

management, 319, 338 problem, 314, 393 real, 22, 26, 28, 401 scale, 4, 5, 18, 19, 28, 33, 42, 78, 83, 114, 281, 303, 334, 376, 401 stewardship, 67, 314 Planet politics, 203, 255 Plantation, 79, 98, 142, 144, 245, 275, 380–382, 413, 414 agriculture, 143, 374, 383 Plurality, 221, 272, 275, 278, 324, 354–357, 360, 368 of ‘worlds,’ 12, 17 Pluriversal thinking, 88, 91 Pluriverses, 86, 263, 356, 364 Plutonium, 63 Polar ice caps, 431 Political action, 32, 123, 390, 392, 449 Political assemblages, 410 Political philosophy, 293, 396 Political Science, 2, 8, 50, 53 Pollution, 23, 32, 62, 63, 82, 121, 144, 160, 314 Popular culture, 427, 428, 437 Population biology, 20, 120, 123 control, 319 growth, 30, 65, 89 Populism, 367 Positive feedback effects, 25 Positivist, 18, 22, 25, 34, 157, 158, 160 Post-anthropocentric turn, 32 Postapocalyptic scenarios, 431 Postcolonial theology, 350, 391, 396, 397, 401 Postcolonial theory, 19, 78, 82–86, 91, 397 Posthuman, 67, 221, 234, 235, 241–246 Posthuman International Relations, 228, 233–246 Posthumanism, 84, 85, 89, 90, 106, 228, 233–237, 240–244

 Index 

Posthumanist humanism, 84 Post-social, 13 Poststructuralist, 8 Postwar institutions, 333 Power, 2, 3, 5, 10, 11, 13, 20, 22, 23, 40, 44, 45, 50, 52, 65, 67, 68, 79, 80, 82, 84, 87, 90, 91, 103, 105, 106, 114, 116, 128, 133, 137–151, 160, 180, 184, 210, 213, 215, 230, 239, 240, 254, 255, 257, 259, 265, 276, 292, 295, 303, 317, 333, 360, 367, 374, 385, 395, 399, 400, 430, 431, 434, 450 politics, 22, 23, 33, 40, 107 relations, 51, 52, 104, 116, 257, 378, 414 Precautionary principle, 104, 199, 202, 240 Preparedness, 200, 340 Prevention, 18, 23, 165, 196, 238, 315 Primordial conditions of existence, 442 Problematization, 117, 118, 122–123, 125, 127, 166, 354, 359–362, 368 Problem-solvers, 3, 5 Problem-solving, 6, 29, 179, 254, 258, 260, 280, 281, 283, 303, 315 strategies, 252, 258 Production, 13, 20, 28, 30, 69, 70, 97, 98, 103, 105, 114, 116–119, 124, 133, 140, 144, 149, 157, 178–181, 183, 185, 186, 195, 199, 221, 235, 253, 258, 260, 273, 275, 276, 279, 280, 282, 303, 338, 343, 350, 351, 357, 359, 377, 378, 381, 384, 391, 399, 410, 430, 432, 435, 448 Progress, 5–7, 9, 10, 24, 25, 77, 86, 88, 90, 174, 176, 177, 179, 202, 219, 221, 342, 365, 375, 376, 391, 396, 399, 415, 426, 428, 434, 436

477

Prometheanism, 334, 342 Property regimes, 442 Provincialize Europe, 86 Psychoanalytic theory, 449 Q

Quantitative and qualitative methods, 13 Quantum theory, 163, 356 Queer, 6, 229, 257, 259, 413 Queer Feminist Theory (QFT), 359 Queerfeminist, 228, 229, 251–266 Quijano, Anibal, 6, 260 R

Racial conflicts, 399 Racism, 82, 84, 87, 259, 412, 417 Racist, 87, 258, 413 Radical democratic, 230, 293 Radioactive waste, 69 Radioactivity, 69, 420 Rational choice, 7 Rationalist, 6, 12, 18, 20, 22, 25, 96, 101, 102, 107, 158, 164, 319, 350 Realism, 2, 8, 9, 11, 159, 160, 368 Realist, 3, 7, 44, 104, 156, 195, 338, 435 Realist IR, 103 Relational constitution of selves, 446 Realpolitik, 6, 40, 50 Reconceptualizing agency, 162 Reflexivity, 203, 230, 302, 321, 322, 363 Regimes, 6, 24, 100–102, 104, 107, 222, 223, 228, 243, 253, 260, 294, 298, 299, 301, 323, 331–333, 342, 395, 431, 442, 454 Regional security, 4

478 Index

Regulation, 105, 117, 144, 227, 228, 252, 256, 257, 275, 293, 315, 332 Relational, 2, 12, 17, 83, 89, 135, 164, 168, 174, 177, 211, 212, 214, 259, 351, 352, 361, 394, 409, 442, 444–446, 448, 450, 452–455 entangled, 40 ontology, 89, 164, 223, 443, 454 Relationality, 31, 217, 223, 258, 272, 349–351, 373, 382, 441–455 Religious discourse, 395 Renewable Energy Directive, 105 Reopening the future, 90 Re-politicisation, 13 Repression, 397 Research, 13, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 29, 39–45, 49–53, 64, 66, 95, 96, 98–102, 104, 114, 115, 117, 119, 123, 159, 183, 221, 245, 261, 293, 294, 303, 316, 332, 349, 373, 378, 379, 383, 384, 408, 437 design, 373 paradigms, 252 Resilience, 134, 135, 229, 230 of ecosystems, 135, 192, 198, 205 strategies, 173 Resilience Alliance, 177, 320 Resilient communities and societies, 5 Resistance, 229, 256, 261, 263, 266, 300, 317, 426 Resonance, 265, 362, 363, 451 Resource depletion, 65, 89, 135, 175, 177, 184 Responsibility to Protect, 196 Revelation, 235, 392, 393, 401, 430 Rights of Nature, 448 Right “tools,” 122 Rio de Janeiro, 430 Rio Declaration, 202 Rio ‘Earth’ Summit, 294, 299

Rising sea levels, 4, 67, 80, 139–141, 146, 194, 195, 230, 279, 389 Risk, 39, 44, 45, 69, 80, 81, 84, 85, 89, 96, 100, 102, 104–107, 135, 165, 174, 180, 181, 183, 184, 193, 197, 210, 216, 238, 259, 261, 277–279, 281, 283, 298, 323, 332, 334, 336–340, 342, 350, 359, 377, 382, 383, 386, 391, 392, 396, 401, 448 management, 341 society, 10, 165 Ritual practice, 379, 380, 382 Rivalries among states, 13, 133, 140 Robust relationality, 442, 455 Rockefeller Foundation, 176, 183, 336, 338 Rockström, Johan, 43, 44, 49, 162, 251, 255, 301, 314, 318, 334 Ruins of empire, 83 Rule of law, 6 “Rules of formation,” 116 Runaway world, 10 Russell, Bertrand, 65 Russia, 63 S

Safe operating space, 13, 43, 48, 51, 52, 251, 255, 318, 319, 331–334, 343 Sagan, Carl, 66 Sahara Desert, 81 Salvation, 333, 395 Satellite-based mapping, 135, 175 Satellite Earth observation, 13 Satellites, 117, 120, 123, 430, 431 Scenarios, 11, 26, 30, 32, 51, 66, 85, 88, 96–99, 102, 105, 121, 195, 392, 394, 431 workshops, 340 Schell, Jonathan, 66, 67

 Index 

Schmidt, J., 90, 180 Science and Technology Studies (STS), 115, 165, 350, 354 Science-fiction (SF), 351 Sciences of modernity, 6 Scientific plausibility, 426 Sea, 32, 81, 102, 145, 181, 237, 336, 341, 417 levels, 4, 60, 67, 80, 83, 99, 113, 139–141, 146, 278, 279, 338, 341, 389 Second coming of Christ, 389 Securitization, 45, 48, 134, 156, 160–168, 193, 416 of climate change, 103 theory, 156, 161, 162, 166, 167 Security, 4, 18, 21, 39, 60, 81, 100, 117, 133–136, 155–168, 173–186, 191–205, 209–223, 252, 279, 293, 336, 350, 391 approaches, 161, 163, 173, 176, 180, 185, 426 challenges, 156–162, 195, 196 dilemma, 7, 65, 103, 105, 160 discourse, 133, 156, 157, 160, 162, 166–168, 186, 196, 197, 200 logics, 18, 39, 41, 44, 45, 52, 157, 165, 167, 168, 210, 216, 221 prism approach, 18, 41 ‘referent,’ 4 strategy, 185, 192 studies, 18, 39–41, 44, 45, 49–51, 53, 59, 61, 134, 156–159, 163, 164, 168, 195, 216, 217, 223 Self-governance, 13, 280, 383 Sense-making, 361 Separation, 2, 39, 41, 50, 52, 62, 70, 156, 168, 176, 177, 192, 197, 198, 202, 239, 240, 259, 317, 337, 392, 393, 396, 441–443, 447–450, 452, 454 of human and nature, 135, 197, 202, 351

479

September 11, 2001, 339 Serres, Michel, 5 SF blockbuster films, 426, 435 Shadow of consumption, 143 Shanghai, 430 Sharpe, Christina, 412–414 Sheikh, F., 81 Sidaway, J., 79 Sierra Leone, 350, 373–375, 379, 383, 385 Silicon Valley, 122 Simpson, L., 444 Simpson, M., 114, 115 Singapore, 144, 284 Singular ‘humanity,’ 106 Sink, 48, 97, 99, 106 Sixth mass extinction event, 32 Slavery, 79, 85, 351, 358, 408, 412–415 Sloterdijk, Peter, 63 Small farmers, 394, 400 Social antagonisms, 398 change, 143, 315, 349 contract, 5, 7, 9, 193 inequality, 88, 336, 394, 434 metabolism, 106, 107 natures, 317 sciences, 11, 39, 41, 80, 90, 157, 233, 239, 240, 246, 302, 303, 320, 349, 389, 397 Social-ecological systems, 321, 337, 341 Socio-ecological resilience, 320 Sociotechnical imaginaries, 98 Solar Geoengineering Research Programme at Harvard University, 418 Solar radiation management (SRM), 48, 98–102, 104, 107, 108, 200 Somalia, 81 South Africa, 149, 263, 264, 382

480 Index

Sovereignty, 7, 22–24, 60, 88, 194, 219, 265, 281, 313, 377 Space and missile technology, 61 Space-travel, 435 SpaceX, 435 Species, 3–5, 13, 29, 32, 33, 59, 60, 65, 67, 70, 89, 90, 137, 138, 140–142, 144, 156, 157, 162, 166, 168, 179, 191, 197, 202, 204, 209, 215, 222, 223, 234–237, 240–246, 291, 292, 306, 311, 332, 411, 417, 427, 429, 432–434, 446, 447, 453, 455 difference, 446 effects, 5 loss, 453 Speculation, 240, 341, 351, 399, 408–410, 420, 425 Speculative future, 409 Spherical thinking, 124 Spivak, Gayatri, 85, 91, 275 notion of planetarity, 19, 85, 91 Star Trek, 428 State-centric, 8, 9, 22, 24, 255, 256, 401 State-centrism, 21, 23, 34, 306 State of nature, 7, 301 Steam engines, 143, 273, 298 Stefan à Wengen, 354, 362 Steffen, W., 23, 25, 27, 41–44, 48, 49, 51, 52, 60, 61, 77, 98, 145, 162, 166, 251, 255, 301, 314, 316, 318, 334 Stengers, I., 176, 258, 262, 263, 336, 357 Stereotype, 87 Stoermer, E., 59, 114, 176, 235, 244, 273 Stoler, A. L., 81, 83 Storms, 134, 139, 141, 146, 148, 150, 338, 389, 429, 436 Storytelling, 14

Stratigraphic marker, 59 Stratospheric, 104, 106 aerosol injection, 96, 99–103 ozone depletion, 334 Structural violence, 217, 412 Subaltern, 83, 86, 256, 260, 261, 263, 275, 297, 350 Subalternist cosmopolitics, 87 Subject-object divides, 407 Subject of knowledge, 374, 375, 377, 378, 384, 385 Sublime, 361, 364 Sudan, 81 Sundberg, J., 85, 86 Surveillance, 342 Survival, 19, 21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 40, 52, 64–67, 70, 78, 79, 82, 85, 138, 142, 157, 162, 165, 182, 211, 242, 252, 256, 262, 263, 265, 266, 301, 319, 432 Sontag, Susan, 436 Sustainable development, 3, 9, 24, 90, 139, 148, 174, 179, 181, 184, 302, 323 Sustainability, 28, 87, 88, 126, 176, 178, 184, 230, 279, 282, 321, 323–325, 337, 338 Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 217–218, 351, 394 Syria, 81 System, 7, 20, 22, 39–53, 61, 77, 95, 113, 133, 138, 157, 174, 227–229, 231, 237, 251, 271, 293, 311, 331, 365, 377, 391, 407, 426, 444 thinking, 12, 17, 123, 124, 337, 342 theories, 120, 121, 173 T

Tamed, 6, 150, 254 Techno-digital algorithms, 315

 Index 

Techno-fix, 182, 227, 432 Technological progress, 426, 434, 436 Technological solutions, 320, 447 Technologies/technology, 12, 13, 17, 20, 61, 65, 67, 79, 80, 96–100, 103, 104, 107, 108, 115, 117, 118, 120–128, 133, 135, 136, 138, 140, 143, 145, 147–149, 151, 165–167, 173–175, 178, 181–183, 211, 238, 243, 245, 264, 282, 318–320, 325, 331, 332, 338–343, 354, 361, 414, 418–420, 426–428, 431, 433, 434, 436, 437 of governance, 342 of prevarication, 96 Techno-managerial, 67 Technosphere, 144–147, 151, 418 Tele-coupled systems, 316 Teleological views of progress, 396 Temne ontologies, 378–380 Temporalities/temporality, 14, 87, 314, 315, 324, 349, 350, 365, 375, 376, 384–386, 397, 429, 436, 449, 450 Termination shock, 99 Test Ban Treaty, 61 Thanatocene, 62 Thermonuclear, 65 Thermonuclear age, 60 Thinking-with-materials, 410 Threat, 2–4, 18, 28, 29, 39–41, 43, 45, 48, 50, 52, 60, 66, 67, 70, 78, 80, 81, 84, 89, 90, 103, 104, 126, 134–136, 146, 155–162, 165, 167, 168, 174, 184, 192–197, 199–202, 205, 210, 211, 230, 278, 280, 281, 295, 301, 306, 337, 391, 392, 425, 426 Tipping point (s), 2, 22, 27, 30, 34, 43, 44, 52, 98, 174, 177, 178, 254, 333, 342, 343, 392, 430, 431

481

Todd, Z., 62, 67, 85, 87, 185, 280, 375, 377, 383, 385, 399 Tokyo, 430 Top-down techniques of control and regulation, 332 Total environment, 64 Total war, 64, 65 Tourism, 32, 253, 341, 419 Toxicity, 63, 419, 420 Traditional security, 44, 157, 159, 161, 185, 186, 210, 211, 223, 426 Tragedy of liberal environmentalism, 449 Transatlantic slavery, 351, 408, 413, 414 Transborder flows, 10 Trans-disciplinarity/transdisciplinary, 22, 26, 265, 303, 355 Transhumanism, 236 Transnational capitalism, 376 social movements, 261, 296, 299, 400 Transparency, 229, 294, 295, 297, 299 Transportation systems, 143, 337 Tronto, Joan, 211, 212, 221 Trump, D., 140, 145, 195, 242, 244 Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), 68 Tsing, Anna, 77, 78, 88, 177, 180, 335, 338, 342, 365, 409 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 377, 383, 384 Tuvalu, 146, 147, 278 U

Ubuntu, 89, 220 Ukraine, 147 Uncertainty, 18, 229, 231, 279, 301, 305, 315, 322, 333, 416, 419 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 277

482 Index

United Arab Emirates, 150 United Kingdom, 63 United Nations (UN), 68, 81, 103, 104, 140, 146, 148, 173, 174, 181, 185, 192, 196, 197, 210, 294, 295, 314, 333, 393, 447 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 24, 101, 102, 202, 278 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 41, 52, 80, 97, 98, 104, 105, 197, 209, 276, 278, 416 United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 32, 209 United States (US), 61–64, 67, 68, 81, 86, 102–104, 121, 122, 140, 141, 149, 195, 196, 203, 242–244, 273, 299, 300, 338, 341, 390, 411, 414, 419, 429, 430, 432, 435 United States Atomic Energy Commission, 68 Universality, 219, 271–284, 398 Unpredictability, 25, 235, 240, 243, 302 Unrecognized exploitation, 173 Uranium, 63 Urban infrastructures, 333, 337 Urbanization, 32, 343 Urban laboratories, 335 Urban planning, 231, 337, 340 Urban resilience, 331, 333, 335–338, 341, 343 Urban risk governance, 340 Urban security, 336, 340 US Department of Defense, 62, 411 US Environmental Protection Agency, 62

US foreign policy, 428 Usher, Mark, 10 US Military, 62, 63, 141, 299, 411 US Secretary of State, 430 Utopia, 351, 427 Utopian, 78 V

Venezuela, 147 Viet Cong, 63 Vietnam, 80, 242, 275, 277 View of Earth from the outside, 120 Violence, 29, 31, 40, 44, 45, 50–52, 60, 69, 70, 78, 79, 81, 138, 139, 141, 148, 159, 196, 210–213, 216, 217, 219, 222, 259–261, 275, 280, 351, 376, 377, 382, 383, 385, 386, 411, 412, 414, 419, 452 Violent conflicts, 159, 217, 313 Visualisations, 321, 361 Vogt, William, 65, 67 Road to Survival, 65 von Humboldt, Alexander, 41 Vulnerable, 29, 31, 33, 44, 70, 135, 147, 174, 175, 183, 185, 186, 191–205, 229, 271, 275, 277, 278, 283, 294, 295, 304, 321, 337, 342 Vulnerability/ies, 6, 31, 84, 87, 91, 147, 185, 197, 199, 202, 214, 221, 229, 245, 246, 259, 261, 276–279, 281, 284, 337 W

War, 7, 11, 18, 50–52, 60–65, 70, 138, 146, 159, 216–218, 241–243, 292, 313, 366, 395, 397 and peace, 7, 8, 350, 359 Warfare, 19, 60 Warming war, 146, 147

 Index 

Waste, 13, 63, 69, 102, 146, 349, 433 disposal, 82 Water cycle, 30 scarcity, 30, 81, 316 wars, 431 Watson, M., 87 Ways of knowing, 31, 181, 313, 350, 373–384, 386 Weapons of everyday life, 147 Weather, 13, 63, 97, 103, 107, 140, 143, 146, 218, 277, 349, 351, 407–420, 430, 451 Weather Conditions, 277 We Have Never Been Modern, 6, 238, 239 Weather events, 2, 4, 174, 409, 444 Web of life, 221, 451 Web of relations, 237, 444 Weizman, E., 81, 364 Weltanschauung, 79 West African countries, 380 West Antarctic ice sheet, 430 Western Anthropocene, 261 Western Man, 386 Western modes of consumption and production, 173 Western societies, 182, 448 Western thought, 85, 91, 375

483

Western tradition, 390, 396, 443 Whiteness, 88, 412, 414 White supremacy, 383 Whole Earth Catalog, 119, 122–125 Whole Earth movement, 20, 114, 120–128 Whyte, Kyle Powys, 219, 220 Wicked problems, 337 Wiener, Norbert, 122 Wight, Martin, 7 Wildfire, 140, 147, 148, 210, 300 World Commission on Environment and Development, 139 Worldview/worldviews, 44, 124, 228, 229, 252–254, 257, 263–266, 275, 280–283, 333, 378, 383, 431, 441, 448, 449 World Water Development Report, 30 Wynter, Sylvia, 6, 414 Y

Yemen, 147 Yussof, Kathryn, 77, 79, 260, 375, 417 Z

Zapatista, 86 Zones of translation, 118, 127