This article is a collective response to Anthony Burke et al's 'Planet Politics', published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a 'Manifesto from the end of IR'. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al reproduce an already failed and discredited liberal cosmopolitan framework through the advocacy of managerialism rather than transformation; the top-down coercive approach of international law; and use of abstract modernist political categories. In the closing sections of the article, we discuss the possibility of different approaches, which, taking the Anthropocene as both an epistemological and ontological break with modernist assumptions, could take us beyond IR's disciplinary confines.
The term 'new materialism' has recently gained saliency as a descriptor for an eclectic range of positions that question the human centred and human exclusive focus of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In turn these emerging perspectives have been subject to critique by those writing in the established materialist tradition who argue that new materialism ignores the unique specificity of human agency and the transformatory capabilities of our species. Our previous interventions have endorsed a particular account of posthumanism that draws together complexity influenced systems theory with elements of political ecologism that have incorporated aspects of established materialist and humanist thinking. This article rejects the old materialist critique that denies the emancipatory potential of posthumanist thinking, and explores the potential for an emancipatory posthumanism.
Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and 'things'. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of international politics. By posthuman, we mean an analysis that is based on complexity theory, rejects Newtonian social sciences, and decentres the human as the object of study. We argue for a decentring of 'the human' in our scholarship as imperative to understanding the complexity of the world. However, this approach also has a political incentive, which we describe as 'complex ecologism'.
Erika Cudworth
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