I was fascinated by a brilliantly written, and well-thought out, guest post here on Duck, by Hannes Peltonen, posted over the weekend. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you won’t be disappointed. Peltonen presents an argument that digs into recent debates about the seemingly ubiquitous “anthropocene” and its relationship to world politics—and particularly the ways that IR theory should approach issues relating to humankind’s interconnectedness with natural/planetary processes.
I’d like to take the opportunity to engage with Peltonen’s argument, with an eye toward extending the discussion into a few new directions. Specifically, I think the issue of the anthropocene paints an even grimmer picture for the future of IR.
Peltonen’s argument draws on previous critiques of IR theory’s inability to constitute itself as a discipline with a “big idea” (drawing on arguments by Justin Rosenberg about IR wedding itself too closely to political science), sticking IR in a sort of purgatory of borrowing from other disciplines, while having little cross-disciplinary import on its own. Peltonen then takes this critique as a starting point for thinking about IR’s big idea as centering on a “planet politics.” He writes:
“Planet Politics is an effort to re-think the starting premises of IR and to draw attention to the relations between human and non-human.”
While I think Peltonen is on to something here regarding a new avenue for future research—especially in the ways that a politics of nature/anthropocene/capitalocene/planet/etc might help us understand international/transnational processes—I have a much bleaker outlook on what these processes mean for the future of IR theory as an enterprise.
First, I am not so sure that IR has been inattentive to humankind’s intertwining with nature. Early deterrence theory, and its critics, delved deeply into the implications of nuclear weapons and the human potential to author its own Armageddon.
Two examples are illustrative.
Thomas Schelling on nuclear weapons:
“Man has, it is said, for the first time in history enough military power to eliminate his species from the earth […]” (p. 18, Arms and Influence).
Schelling notes that the scale of death is maybe not new, but speed is.
And, Hedley Bull, in talking about order vs. justice, notes that these kind of debates are ubiquitous in IR (and he was writing in the 1970s):
“[i]t is not uncommon to speak of a general nuclear war as not simply a disaster for the society of states and an infringement on individual human rights, but also as a threat to human life or human civilization as such.” (p. 81, The Anarchical Society).
He continues on the same page:
“In discussions of ecological or environmental questions the basic appeal that is being made is not to co-operation among states or to individual human rights and duties, but to solidarity of all human beings in facing certain ecological or environmental challenges that face them as human beings.”
The recognition of a planet politics is there in classic IR texts, and—to some extent—post-nuclear revolution security studies is a planet politics project. The problem, however, is precisely the critique that scholars like Robert Cox raised decades ago about IR as “problem-solving” theory—its real legacy from political science. What did we learn from this first wave of planet politics? That mutually assured destruction (MAD) could save us from Armageddon? That finding the right strategies to managing conflict escalation can prevent nuclear war? The planet’s future hanging on the promises of political science.
Second, I’m not as optimistic as Peltonen about the future of an IR based on planet politics. What IR theory has shown is that most of its practitioners are interested in trying to explain, or give policy prescriptions, for political issues. What IR has yet to do (or rather, has done only on the margins) is help us understand how to live in the context of human-caused environmental changes. Other work outside IR on this idea of post-human relations has approached this issue from a variety of angles with more success. Donna Haraway’s new book, for example, urging us to focus on a “making-with” approach to relating to a dying earth, focuses less on “solving” the problem than on living in it.
The problem of the anthropocene for IR is not, therefore, in regards to reconstituting a “big idea.” The anthropocene has shown that IR is a dying field: when we recognize paradigm changing processes, like climate change, it is in an effort to “control” them, or to bring them under the frame of problem-solving theory. IR cannot do that in an age where humankind’s mastery of nature is an illusion, and may—in fact—be leading us down the road to a literal “end of history.”
That is not to say that alleviating the effects of climate change is a lost cause. On the contrary, we should devote a lot of energy to it. But, there’s no going back to a pre-anthropocene era (and maybe humans never existed in such an era). The study of global processes, largely, needs to move beyond IR. Maybe even leaving it behind. This is a hard pill to swallow. Many of us work in political science departments teaching IR, and find great fulfillment in doing so. There’s a political economy of IR that is very real for many of us. However, if our goal is the study of global processes under the specter of mass extinction, maybe we need to look elsewhere for an intellectual center-point.
In short, rather than trying to adapt IR to a planet politics, maybe (to borrow phraseology from Roy Scranton) it’s time for IR to learn how to die in the anthropocene.
Thanks for the great reply!
As a quick reply to your reading of my argument, I believe we have more common points than first appears from your reply. To point out two things I say at the end of my text, please see these quotes:
1) “Planet Politics might be IR’s disciplinary big idea, of interest to
other disciplines, but simultaneously, the more it is embraced, the less
such disciplinary “ownership” matters. Although it may have been introduced in IR, it seems to contain a seed for the relative irrelevance of disciplines.”
2) “It could be, however, that IR will borrow from Planet Politics at some point in the future.”
This is off the topic of planet politics and also off the main argument of the post, so apologies. However, re Schelling: he does observe, as you mention, that a key difference between bayonets and nuclear weapons is the speed of the latter. Then, on p.21 of Arms and Influence (which was published in 1966), there’s a passage that has a particular poignancy given that the Vietnam War was going to continue for almost another decade after this passage was published:
“There is no guarantee, of course, that a slower war [i.e., slower than a nuclear war] would not persist. The First World War could have stopped at any time after the Battle of the Marne. There was plenty of time to think about war aims, to consult the long-range national interest, to reflect on costs and casualties already incurred and the prospect of more to come, and to discuss terms of cessation with the enemy. The gruesome business continued as mechanically as if it had been in the hands of computers (or worse: computers might have been programmed to learn more quickly from experience).”
Historians might object that the passage overlooks, e.g., the nationalist passions that World War One exacerbated and that tended to work, at least for a while, against an early termination. Plus the force of ‘irrationality’ in general. But the sentence about computers is kind of striking. That there is also a connection — albeit a somewhat complicated one — between certain of Schelling’s ideas and the Johnson administration’s bombing campaign vs. North Vietnam adds perhaps a further irony. (The connection has been discussed by others, sometimes at length, so I won’t go into it.)
P.s. Nice to see classics like ‘Arms and Influence’ and ‘The Anarchical Society’ being quoted on Duck of M., even in a post arguing that IR theory is doomed (cf. the posts here several years ago debating ‘the end of IR theory’, about which debate I don’t remember all that much, frankly; it was a connected to a symposium in Eur. Journal of IR, as I recall).