Critiquing Latour’s Explanation of Climate Change Denial: Moving Beyond the Modernity/Anthropocene Binary

Abstract

The concept of the Anthropocene has reintroduced politics of denial at the centre of critical studies of international relations. This article interrogates Bruno Latour’s explanation of climate change denial with reference to an ontological difference between Modernity and the Anthropocene, together with his advocacy for a new language beyond the Modern gaze. Our aims are twofold: to disclose how Latour’s posthuman critique risk reproducing prevalent forms of climate change denial in the global North, and to question what falls outside Latour’s dualistic frame: the heterogenous ways through which climate change and the Anthropocene is met across the globe; the ambiguous relation with nature through which modernity was formed; the modernist genealogy of Anthropocene discourse, and lastly how discourses of global governance have absorbed posthumanist critique in its attempt to naturalise postcolonial power relations. At stake, we argue, is critical theory’s paradoxical complicity in the denialism it seeks to critique.

Seeing the ecosystem in the international: Ecological thinking as relational thinking

“…Critical International Relations seldom likes to recognize what we owe Waltz, who is often seen to be part of the problem – part of the hyper-individualistic, rationalist canon that foreclosed the relationality of international relations from view from the onset. ‘The international’ emerged as a critical term; it tends to denote what we need to recover from an atomistic mainstream (see Blaney and Tickner, 2017; Edkins and Zehfuss, 2005). I too will engage in such an undertaking in closing this essay.…”

“…On account of these destructions, our times are marked by a diffuse nostalgic desire, in IR and beyond, for a new language ‘that would attune ourselves more correctly to the world’, as Wrangel and Causevic (2021, 11) correctly diagnose (see also Epstein and Wæver). 10 The language of life is one such language.…”

“…The ideal of autonomy is of course part of the problem; part of what has led modernity (and not just IR) astray from being able to recognize our existential dependencies (see Braidotti, 2013) 13 . But the baby ought not be thrown out with the bathwater, as it has been in much materialistic thinking.…”

“…Rendering this contingency visible, as opposed to further obfuscating it, and thereby further entrenching the power relations invested in the status quo, is what differentiates a critical from an uncritical or ‘problem-solving’ IR (Cox 1981). ‘The international’ becomes especially apt for this critical task, once it is understood, not merely as a discrete level of political action and analysis, but as the space that lies beyond the sovereign determination, hence the space of indeterminacy itself (see Edkins and Zehfuss, 2005). The international is the space of politics par excellence that beckons the work of critique to draw out the contingency underwriting politics, at all levels.…”

“…Around the same time, another disciplinary event, Vandana Shiva’s keynote address to the 2021 Pan-European Conference of the European International Studies Association, took me back to my work on global environmental activism (Epstein, 2005, 2006, 2008). Suddenly the new/old language that I was looking for to engage with the question of relationality returned to me.…”