International Relations in the Anthropocene

Abstract

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 International Relations 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 problematics 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 the rule of law.

These dreams of liberal universal solutions appear to have run aground in the Anthropocene as the last decade has 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’, 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.

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, 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. These assumptions, central to modernist constructions of progress, are seen to no longer exist or to have always been problematic. 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 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 —i.e. questions of ontology.

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, i.e., an imaginary collective of people who consider themselves sensitive and responsive, due to being bound by and to the Earth. We are the problem as much as the solution, the ‘them’ as much as the ‘us’, the ‘enemy’ as much as the ‘friend’.

Accordingly, the Anthropocene condition calls for reflection upon —and ultimately transition away from— the idea of a separation between nature and humanity. To perform this shift in perspective, concepts such as “worldly” or “ecological security” have been proposed. Matt McDonald develops a notion “ecological security” through an engagement with existing discourses of climate security. According to him, established ways of thinking about climate security would reinforce a problematic nature-culture divide by either presenting climate change as an external threat to vulnerable human communities or, conversely, human actors as a threat to fragile nature in need of protection. Ecological security would instead focus on supporting and sustaining the long-term resilience of ecosystems —understood as entangled systems of both human and non-human elements. Ensuring that “ecosystems can continue to function in the face of current and future change” is accordingly, the only defensible approach to security in the condition of the Anthropocene. Similarly, a worldly approach to security stresses that threats such as war, major industrial accidents, or ecological collapse do not affect humans in isolation but rather endanger the common worlds co-constituted by humans and diverse nonhuman beings. Harrington and Shearing hold that security in the Anthropocene should become oriented towards an “ethics of care”. Care, according to them, 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. It allows one 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.

This article is organised in three sections. Firstly, we introduce the concept of the Anthropocene. 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. 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. 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, to 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 focuses on the implications of the Anthropocene for three key themes: knowledge, governance and security.