On the way to planet politics: from disciplinary demise to cosmopolitical coordination

Abstract

From climatic chaos to mass extinction, from ‘geoengineering’ to unprecedented urbanisation, world politics has, in recent decades, become inescapably planetary. Recent discussions concerning ‘Planet Politics’ are, therefore, timely. However, the debate, to date, has been limited by a number of conceptual and political problems. In particular, an apparent disinclination to address serious differences as regards the authority of natural scientific knowledge with respect to collective ontologies raises the question of what is truly political in planetary politics. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘planetarity’ and Isabelle Stengers’ ‘cosmopolitics’, this intervention consists of a diagnosis, a method and an alternative. The diagnosis is that this debate has yet to constitute a workable starting point for the very thought processes, and political processes, that those involved demand. The method is simultaneously ‘forensic’ and ‘diplomatic’ – that is, it focuses on bringing undisclosed and semi-disclosed conflicts into the open while, furthermore, ‘thinking through the middle’ of established polemical positions, enabling new possibilities. The alternative, then, proposes to distinguish a cosmo politan agenda of global connectedness from a cosmo political process of situated coordination. Finally, it is argued that adding ‘planetary’ to our politics aptly, if counterintuitively, encapsulates the condition of ‘political multiplicity’. However, rather than lending weight to disciplinary consolidation, this encapsulation should serve to forge connections with problems of multiplicity of all sorts. That is, the purpose of planetary politics, as conceived herein, would be that of inventing speculative practices that maintain the possibility of unlikely alliances between disparate powers, and not only those of the nation state.

Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene

“…Rather than there being a shift to the global-understood in liberal, modernist, universalist terms-we would suggest that the shift can be better grasped as one from a state-centred or 'classical' approach to International Relations to a 'planetary' one (Burke et al 2016;Conway 2020;Rothe 2020;Müller 2019;Latour 2016). We want to suggest that a planetary approach differs in very important ways from the disciplinary assumptions of liberal modernist political theory that has informed International Relations up until now.…”

International Relations in the Anthropocene

“…En lugar de afirmar que haya habido un giro hacia lo global, entendido en términos liberales, modernistas y universalistas, sugeriríamos que el cambio se habría producido desde un enfoque estatocéntrico o clásico, hacia uno "planetario" (Burke et al, 2016;Conway, 2020;Rothe, 2020a;Müller, 2019;Latour, 2016). Un enfoque planetario difiere fundamentalmente de los supuestos disciplinarios de la teoría liberal modernista que ha conformado las Relaciones Internacionales hasta la fecha.…”

Unsustainable Borders: Globalization in a Climate-Disrupted World

“…While the Paris Agreement operates on the basis of sovereign states making nationally determined contributions to the larger task of emissions reductions, it is noteworthy that this reassertion of the rights of territorial jurisdictions doesn't include an explicit mention of fossil fuels as the primary cause of climate change. Grappling with production decisions, and the political economy of fossil fuel investments in particular, can no longer be neglected in how planetary politics is considered and these matters do not fit well within the disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences (Conway 2020). Likewise in many ways the Paris Agreement and related high-profile international arrangements are empty agreements (Dimitrov 2020), incapable of effectively governing a world where the decisions that matter most are taken elsewhere, in corporate boardrooms and in the processes of drafting investment policies, while the governance focus remains on institutions, procedures and metrics, rather than on the causes of the dramatic material transformations of the planet.…”