Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.
Maybe the [task] nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to . .. get rid of the political "doublebind," which is the simultaneous individualization and totaliza tion of modern power structures. . . . The political, ethical, so cial, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state's institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of indi vidualisation which is linked to the state.-Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power"What does it mean to be secure? Should we even need to ask? Surely we know. We know that security is one of the most funda mental human needs: an irrefutable guarantee of safety and wellbeing, economic assurance and possibility, sociability and order; of a life lived freely without fear or hardship. That security is a uni versal good available to all, and a solemn pledge between citizens and their political leaders, to whom their people's security is "the first duty," the overriding goal of domestic and international policy making. As such it has been able to trace a powerful path between subject and world, state and citizen, to promise simultaneously a solution to the inchoate fears and insecurities of everyday life and the enormous^ spatial, cultural, economic, and geopolitical com plexities of government. In short, security remains one of moder nity's most stubborn and enduring dreams. However, I believe that, more than ever, we do need to ask what it is to be secure. Surely we no longer know what security isin that Platonic sense. Surely more than ten years after the end of the Cold War, after the Clinton Doctrine and the destruction of the Twin Towers, after humanitarian and policy disasters in Indochina, Africa, East Timor, the Middle East, and Central America, and after a growing body of humanist and critical scholarship has questioned
Cosmopolitanism in international affairs is a body of thinking and practice committed to building a more just and sustainable international order, but it has never been systematically applied to the question or practice of security. This article argues that both a range of transnational (event-based and systemic) insecurities, and state abuses of security discourse to compromise rights and cause insecurity, create a compelling normative and empirical case for a new security paradigm: security cosmopolitanism. It would aim to critique and reform both national and collective security policies and processes: to put better norms and ends to them, redefine their ontological foundations, and generate guiding ethical principles. It does so in the service of a distinctive understanding of global security as a universal good: one in which the security of all states and all human beings is of equal weight, in which causal chains and processes spread widely across space and through time, and in which security actors bear a responsibility to consider the global impact of their choices.This article lays out the key ontological and ethical frameworks for security cosmopolitanism. These challenge the dominant ontological foundations of national security (and international society) anchored in the social contract between citizen and state. Security cosmopolitanism argues that states cannot contain and immunize the national social body from external threats; rather, insecurity arises in a borderless way from the very histories, choices, powers, and systems of modernity. This generates both a new analytical model for global security and a different -relational, networked, and futureoriented -ethic of responsibility.Cosmopolitanism in international affairs is a body of thinking and practice committed to building a more just, inclusive, accountable, peaceful, equitable, and sustainable international order, one based on progressive rules, laws, and norms that will enhance human dignity and harmony with the planetary environment (Brown and Held 2010; Shapcott 2010, 16). Yet it has rarely been applied to the question or practice of security, and maintains a minority presence in a security studies field that has otherwise undergone substantial expansion and diversification. This article sets out a project to extend and innovate that body of thinking to the problem of security from serious threats to human survival, flourishing, and peace at the global level. It contends that a cosmopolitan approach could provide an improved framework for understanding, reducing, and responding to such threats, both by creating and improving transnational norms and institutions, and by directing obligations to nation-states to participate in the solution of global security problems, and to improve their own practices of governance, identity, and foreign policy in profound ways. *
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