International Relations in the

Anthropocene: New Agendas, New

Agencies and New Approaches David
Chandler
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 INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS IN THE
ANTHROPOCENE
New Agendas, New Agencies
and New Approaches

Edited by
DAVID CHANDLER
FRANZISKA MÜLLER
DELF ROTHE
International Relations in the Anthropocene
 David Chandler • Franziska Müller
Delf Rothe
Editors

International Relations
in the Anthropocene
New Agendas, New Agencies and New
Approaches
Editors
David Chandler Franziska Müller
Department of Politics and International Department of Social Sciences
Relations University of Hamburg
University of Westminster Hamburg, Germany
London, UK

Delf Rothe
Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy
University of Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-53013-6    ISBN 978-3-030-53014-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3

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 Contents

1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene  1

Delf Rothe, Franziska Müller, and David Chandler

Part I The Anthropocene: From the Global to the Planetary  17

2 Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the

Anthropocene 21
Joana Castro Pereira

3 Encounters between Security and Earth System Sciences:

Planetary Boundaries and Hothouse Earth 39
Judith Nora Hardt

4 The Nuclear Origins of the Anthropocene 59

Rens van Munster

5 Decolonizing the Anthropocene 77

Cheryl McEwan

6 Geoengineering: A New Arena of International Politics 95

Olaf Corry and Nikolaj Kornbech

7 Genealogies of the Anthropocene and How to Study Them113

Delf Rothe and Ann-Kathrin Benner

v
vi Contents

Part II The Challenge of Security 133

8 Environmental Security and the Geopolitics of the

Anthropocene137
Simon Dalby

9 Security in the Anthropocene155

Maria Julia Trombetta

10 Security Through Resilience: Contemporary Challenges in the

Anthropocene173
David Chandler

11 Protecting the Vulnerable: Towards an Ecological Approach to

Security191
Matt McDonald

12 Caring for the World: Security in the Anthropocene209

Cameron Harrington

Part III Governance and Agency 227

13 Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecology and

Global Politics233
Erika Cudworth and Steve Hobden

14 Agency in More-than-Human, Queerfeminist and Decolonial

Perspectives251
Franziska Müller

15 Disrupting the Universality of the Anthropocene with

Perspectives from the Asia Pacific271
Dahlia Simangan

16 Challenges to Democracy in the Anthropocene291

Ayşem Mert
 Contents vii

17 Environmental Governance in the Anthropocene: Challenges,

Approaches and Critical Perspectives311
Basil Bornemann

18 Experimental Government in the Anthropocene331

Stephanie Wakefield

Part IV Methods and Approaches: Beyond the Human/Nature

Divide 349

19 Collaging as a Method for IR in the Anthropocene353

Anna Leander

20 Knowing of Ontologies: Map-Making to ‘See’ Worlds of

Relations373
Caitlin Ryan

21 Spatializing the Environmental Apocalypse389

Suvi Alt

22 The Weather Is Always a Method407

Harshavardhan Bhat

23 Thought Experiment as Method: Science-­Fiction and

International Relations in the Anthropocene425
Isabella Hermann

24 Disrupting Anthropocentrism Through Relationality441

Jarrad Reddekop and Tamara Trownsell

Index459
 Notes on Contributors

Suvi Alt is Assistant Professor of History and Theory of International

Relations at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research is
situated at the intersections of international political theory and critical per-
spectives on development and environmental politics. Her work has been
published in several journals and edited volumes in the fields of International
Relations, political theory, and cultural studies.

Ann-Kathrin Benner is a doctoral researcher within the German Research

Foundation (DFG)-funded project ‘The Knowledge Politics of Security in the
Anthropocene’ at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the
University of Hamburg.

Harshavardhan Bhat is a doctoral research fellow with the Monsoon

Assemblages project (2017–2021) at the University of Westminster, London,
UK. His doctoral research is an interdisciplinary study on the politics of the
monsoon.

Basil Bornemann is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Sustainability

Research Group, University of Basel, Switzerland. He has an interdisciplinary
study background in environmental sciences and holds a doctoral degree in
political science. His research focuses on sustainability-oriented governance
transformations and their democratic implications in different fields of study,
such as energy and food. He is further interested in principles and practices of
transformative sustainability science.

ix
x Notes on Contributors

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of

Westminster, London, UK. His recent monographs include Becoming
Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (with Julian Reid,
2019), Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing
and Hacking (2018), International Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis,
1997–2017 (2017), The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and
Vulnerability (with Julian Reid, 2016), and Resilience: The Governance of
Complexity (2014).

Olaf Corry is Professor of Global Security Challenges at the University of

Leeds, UK. He teaches international relations and studies the international
politics of climate change. He is a co-principle investigator on the project
‘International Security Politics of Climate Engineering’ based at the University
of Copenhagen. He has published on international theory, environmental
politics, risk and security logics, and social movements and climate change.

Erika Cudworth works in the School of Applied Social Sciences at De

Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Her research encompasses human/animal
studies, gender, the environment, and posthumanism. Her published work
includes Developing Ecofeminist Theory (2005) and Social Lives with Other
Animals (2011) and, with Steve Hobden, Posthuman International
Relations (2011) and The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism (2018). She is
working on a new book project looking at relationships between people and
dog companions and their everyday practices.

Simon Dalby is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at

Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, where he teaches in the Balsillie
School of International Affairs, and senior fellow at the Centre for International
Governance Innovation. He is co-editor of Achieving the Sustainable
Development Goals (2019) and author of Anthropocene Geopolitics (2020).

Judith Nora Hardt leads the project ‘Climate change in security percep-
tions, conceptions and practice at the United Nations Security Council’ at the
Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH), University of
Hamburg, Germany, and works as a postdoctoral researcher with the Centre
Marc Bloch in Berlin on ‘the economic challenges of globalization of the
European Union’. She is part of the research group ‘Climate Change and
Security’ at the University of Hamburg and is active in the network ‘Scientists
for Future’.
 Notes on Contributors xi

Cameron Harrington is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the

School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, UK. His
research focuses on the theories and practices of environmental security, par-
ticularly water conflict and cooperation in the Anthropocene. He is the co-
author of Security in the Anthropocene: Reflections on Safety and Care, with
Clifford Shearing (2017).

Isabella Hermann is a political scientist by training and a science-fiction fan

by passion. She holds a PhD in International Relations and investigates how
science-fiction presents technological progress, what effects technology has on
the socio-political structures we are familiar with, and what this tells us about
our present. She is a research coordinator of the interdisciplinary research
group ‘Responsibility: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence’ at the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin.

Stephen Hobden is Reader in International Relations at the University of

East London, UK, where he teaches courses on international relations theory.
Together with Erika Cudworth, he is the author of The Emancipatory Project
of Posthumanism (2017) and Posthuman International Relations (2011).

Nikolaj Kornbech is a research assistant at the Department of Political

Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has worked in environ-
mental policy as a civil society advocate and is a research assistant on the
‘International Security Politics and Climate Engineering’ project.

Anna Leander is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate

Institute in Geneva with affiliations at Pontifical Catholic University (PUC),
Rio de Janeiro, and the Copenhagen Business School. She is best known for
work on practice theoretical approaches and methodologies and for her work
on commercial security. Her research focuses on the politics of digital design.

Matt McDonald is a reader in the School of Political Science and International

Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research is in the area
of critical theoretical approaches to security and their application to issues
such as environmental change—especially climate change—and Australian
foreign and security policy. He has published on these themes in a range of
journals and is the author of Security, the Environment and Emancipation
(2012) and co-author of Ethics and Global Security (2014).
xii Notes on Contributors

Cheryl McEwan is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University,

UK, and author of Postcolonialism, Decoloniality and Development (2019).
Her research includes projects on Sustainable Food Consumption in the
Global South (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC))
and Creative Arts, Livelihoods and HIV/AIDS Prevention in Sub-Saharan
Africa (funded by Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)).

Ayşem Mert is an associate senior lecturer at the Department of Political

Science, Stockholm University, Sweden, and a research fellow at the Earth
System Governance Research Programme. Her research focuses on discourses
of democracy and environment at transnational and global levels, political
storytelling, public–private cooperation, and the imaginaries of the
Anthropocene. She is the author of Environmental Governance Through
Partnerships: A Discourse Theoretical Study (2015) and has published various
articles on environmental politics and governance.

Franziska Müller is Assistant Professor of Globalization and Climate

Governance at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg,
Germany, and leader of a research group on African energy transitions. Her
research covers global climate and energy governance as well as postcolonial
and poststructuralist approaches towards international relations. Co-editor of
Beyond the Master’s Tools? Decolonizing Knowledge Orders, Research Methods
and Teaching (2020), she has published on REDD+ governmentalities and on
energy justice (Journal of Political Ecology and Energy Research and Social
Science).

Joana Castro Pereira is a postdoctoral researcher at the Portuguese Institute

of International Relations, NOVA University of Lisbon. Between January
2017 and April 2018, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of
International Relations of the University of Brasília. Her research focuses on
the governance of climate change and biodiversity in the Amazon. She is co-­
editor of Non-Human Nature in World Politics: Theory and Practice (forthcom-
ing) and has published in journals such as Global Policy, Water Alternatives,
Global Environmental Politics, and Journal of Latin American Studies. She has
also collaborated with the European Union Institute for Security Studies
(EUISS), the EU-LAC Foundation, and the Global Challenges Foundation.

Jarrad Reddekop is Instructor of Indigenous Studies at Camosun College in

Victoria, Canada, and a research associate at the Universidad San Francisco de
 Notes on Contributors xiii

Quito, Ecuador. His research and fieldwork focuses on ontology and ethics,
political thought, and Indigenous philosophy.

Delf Rothe is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Peace Research

and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH), Germany, and
leader of the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded project ‘The
Knowledge Politics of Security in the Anthropocene’. Rothe has published
widely on issues such as climate change and security discourse, visual security,
resilience, and environmental migration. He is the author of Securitizing
Global Warming: A Climate of Complexity (2016).

Caitlin Ryan is Assistant Professor of International Security at the University

of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her work focuses on feminist and postcolo-
nial security studies, the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and post-­war
women’s empowerment. She works on large-scale land deals and land reform
in Sierra Leone and Liberia through considering the relations of power bound
up in land. She has published recent articles in the Journal of Intervention and
Statebuilding, Third World Quarterly, and the European Journal of International
Relations.

Dahlia Simangan is an assistant professor at the Network for Education and

Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) and Graduate School of
Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University in Japan. She holds
a PhD in International Relations from the Australian National University and
is a former Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral
Research Fellow at United Nations University in Tokyo. Her research interest
in peace and conflict studies includes topics on peacebuilding, international
relations in the Anthropocene, and human rights issues in the Philippines.

Maria Julia Trombetta is an associate professor at the University of

Nottingham Ningbo China. Working from a critical security studies perspec-
tive, she is interested in the securitization of the environment and of energy,
with a focus on Europe and China, and in the transformations of security
discourses and practices. Co-editor of the International Handbook of Energy
Security (2013), her work has appeared in the Cambridge Review of International
Affairs, Asian Perspective, and Critical Studies on Security.

Tamara Trownsell is Associate Professor of International Relations at the

Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include
ontology, Andean philosophy, and alternative ways of being in the world.
xiv Notes on Contributors

Rens van Munster is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for

International Studies (DIIS). His research explores the multiple and often
surprising links between the Cold War, nuclear weapons, and the age of the
Anthropocene, with a specific focus on US nuclear testing in the Marshall
Islands. His most recent book is Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought
During the Thermonuclear Revolution, with Casper Sylvest (2016).

Stephanie Wakefield is Director and Assistant Professor of the Human

Ecology Program, Department of Natural Sciences, Life University, Marietta,
Georgia, and also an Urban Studies Foundation International Postdoctoral
Research Fellow based at Florida International University in the Department
of Global and Sociocultural Studies and Institute of Environment. Her books
include Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space
(Open Humanities Press, 2020) and the co-edited Resilience in the Anthropocene:
Governance and Politics at the End of the World (Routledge, 2020). She fre-
quently publishes articles in academic and cultural journals including Political
Geography, Geography Compass, Geoforum, Environment and Planning E:
Nature and Place, and e-flux architecture.
 List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 The rise of the Anthropocene concept in scientific debates

since 2000. (Source: Authors based on Web of Science data) 115
Fig. 7.2 NASA’s iconic blue marble image. (Source: Space Science
and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
and NASA) 121
Fig. 7.3 Cover of the last Whole Earth Catalog, June 1975.
(Published under CC2.0 license, original by Akos Kokai,
available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Whole_Earth_Catalog_(1975)_(15604607615).jpg)125
Fig. 7.4 Seeds of the good Anthropocenes webpage. (Source: Screenshot
captured from: https://goodanthropocenes.net [31 March 2020]) 126
Fig. 15.1 Cumulative CO2 emissions by world region 272
Fig. 15.2 Annual share of global CO2 emissions, 2017 274
Fig. 15.3 CO2 emissions per capita 274
Fig. 19.1 Rosana Paulino, “Assentamento” [The Settlement].
Mixed media and video. Dimension variable. 2013,
Artist collection. (Image taken at MAR – Museu de
Arte do Rio de Janeiro)  358
Fig. 19.2 Stefan à Wengen, “The Mission VIII”, 2007; 185 x 265 cm;
Acrylic on Canvas; Private Collection, Courtesy:
Beck & Eggeling, Düsseldorf 362
Fig. 19.3 Tatiana Bilbao, “Ways of Life”, (image used for advertising
the exhibition dedicated to Bilbao at the Louisiana Museum,
Denmark [2017]) 366

xv
 List of Boxes

Box 2.1 Climate Tipping Points 27

Box 2.2 Water Shortages and the Focus on Supply 30
Box 2.3 The Sixth Mass Extinction 32
Box 3.1 Evolution of Earth System Sciences. Source: Elaborated by the
Author on the Basis of Steffen et al. (2020, 55) 42
Box 3.2 The Security Prism. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the
Basis of Abdus Sabur (2009, 1006) and Hardt (2018, 89–108) 46
Box 3.3 ESS Reports: References to (Classical) Security Concepts,
Categories, and Discourse. Source: Elaborated by the Author 47
Box 3.4 Earth System Security. Source: Elaborated by the Author on the
Basis of Hardt (2018, 89–108, 2019), Lenton et al. (2019),
Steffen et al. (2015, 2020), and Rockström et al. (2009) 49
Box 4.1 The Great Nuclear Acceleration 60
Box 4.2 The United States and Nuclear Colonialism 68
Box 5.1 Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Conception of the Human as a Geophysical
Force84
Box 5.2 Gayatri Spivak’s Notion of ‘Planetarity’ 85
Box 5.3 African Philosophies and the Anthropocene 89
Box 6.1 Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage 98
Box 6.2 Stratospheric Aerosol Injection 99
Box 6.3 The UN Environment Assembly, Nairobi, 2019: The First
International Negotiations over Geoengineering 104
Box 7.1 What Is a Discourse? 116
Box 7.2 Analytical Categories and Related Research Strategies 119
Box 7.3 The Whole Earth Catalog122

xvii
xviii List of Boxes

Box 8.1 The US Military: Insecurity Twice Over 141

Box 8.2 Divestment/Investment 146
Box 8.3 La Paz, Bolivia: Adaptation in Action 149
Box 9.1 Environmental Conflict 159
Box 9.2 Energy Security 160
Box 9.3 Securitization 161
Box 10.1 Coerced Resilience 178
Box 10.2 Community Knowledge Approaches to Resilience 181
Box 10.3 Big Data Approaches to Resilience 183
Box 11.1 National Security and Climate-Induced Displacement 195
Box 11.2 Mitigation and Ecological Security 200
Box 11.3 Extinction Rebellion and Ecological Security 203
Box 12.1 Karin Fierke on Care and the Role of Memory: The Case of
Palestine and Israel 213
Box 12.2 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault 217
Box 12.3 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Posthuman Care 221
Box 13.1 Donna Haraway: Cyborgs and Companion Species 236
Box 13.2 The Posthuman Way of War 242
Box 14.1 The ‘Orbis Spike’ as Alternative Start-Date of the Anthropocene 260
Box 14.2 Dissident Approaches to IR in the Anthropocene 262
Box 14.3 African Anthropocene: Fossil Dependency and Decarbonization
in South Africa 264
Box 15.1 The Asia Pacific’s Contribution to Global CO2 Emissions 273
Box 15.2 The Pacific Islands in Climate Change Negotiations 278
Box 15.3 Examples of Ecologically Aligned Values and Practices
in the Asia Pacific 282
Box 16.1 Moves that Can Increase the Degree of Democracy
in the System 296
Box 16.2 Asking New Questions: Whither Democracy in a
Time of Endings? 300
Box 17.1 Holocene Governance 313
Box 17.2 Earth System Governance 320
Box 17.3 Ecological Reflexivity 321
Box 18.1 Living Infrastructure 338
Box 18.2 Miami Beach 341
Box 19.1 Rosana Paulino 358
Box 19.2 Stefan à Wengen 362
Box 19.3 Tatiana Bilbao 365
Box 20.1 Can the River Speak? 381
Box 20.2 Decolonizing Methodologies 383
Box 21.1 What Is Eschatology? 391
 List of Boxes xix

Box 21.2 The Doomsday Vault 394

Box 21.3 Seed-Saving at the End of the World 400
Box 22.1 Clouds of Industrial Agriculture 412
Box 22.2 Monuments 415
Box 22.3 Cloud Seeding 419
Box 23.1 Climate-Fiction 427
Box 23.2 Missions to Mars 435
Box 24.1 Relational, Non-anthropocentric Conceptions of the
Human: An Amazonian Example 446
Box 24.2 Ayni as Mutual Nurturing450
 1
Introduction: International Relations
in the Anthropocene
Delf Rothe, Franziska Müller, and David Chandler

Introduction
In December 2020 the United Nations published its annual Human
Development Report, declaring that international politics had entered a new
‘age of humans’, the Anthropocene, an age ‘in which the dominant risk to our
survival is ourselves’ (UN 2020, iii). The Anthropocene has rapidly become a
major thematic for students of international politics and one that, for many
authors, fundamentally destabilises much of the traditional disciplinary con-
cerns and assumptions. While there is growing interest in the Anthropocene
in the discipline of International Relations (IR) and cognate areas of Global
Politics, International Political Sociology, International Security, International
Development and Environmental Politics, there is, as yet, no textbook that

D. Rothe (*)
Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, University of Hamburg,
Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: rothe@ifsh.de
F. Müller
Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
e-mail: franziska.mueller@uni-hamburg.de
D. Chandler
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster,
London, UK
e-mail: D.Chandler@westminster.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_1
2 D. Rothe et al.

introduces undergraduate and postgraduate students to the range of thinking

developing in this area and enables them to explore the ways in which it
impacts upon their work. This edited collection provides an introduction to
this emerging field, divided into a number of broad areas in which the
Anthropocene has impacted thinking within the discipline and cognate disci-
plines of Political Science and Human Geography.
While the 1990s and 2000s saw International Relations scholarship moving
away from the ‘realism’ of inter-state relations towards the ‘liberal’ framings of
global politics, the 2010s marked a shift away from universal, modernist or
‘linear’ understandings of power and agency. In a world, construed as more
complex, contingent and relational and replete with crises and unpredicted
‘tipping points’—from inter-species transmission leading to global pandem-
ics like COVID-19 to feedback effects of melting polar ice and rising sea-­
levels—traditional assumptions are up-ended, and unintended consequences
seem more relevant than ‘good intentions’. Concomitantly, the methodological
focus has switched away from understanding the essence of entities and towards
privileging the analysis of relations, networks and contexts. Key to this has
been debates focused around climate change and global warming which explic-
itly cast policy problems not as external threats to the ‘good life’ (that requires
securing) but as instead questioning the starting assumptions of separations
between inside/outside, humanity/nature, solutions/problems and
referents/threats. This elicits a very different way of thinking, the implications
of which may not always be easy for students (and their lecturers) to grasp
immediately. This book seeks to provide a much-needed basis for engaging
students in this exciting and growing field, which will fundamentally influence
their approach to the politics and problems of International Relations.
This book contains relatively short (6500-word) chapters written in acces-
sible ways and designed to clarify what is at stake in the chapter areas. Each
explains the topic’s relevance to students of International Relations and related
disciplines and why it can be seen to be particularly disruptive or elicit possi-
bilities which readers may not have thought about before being introduced to
the Anthropocene. The book is organised in four clearly distinct parts. There
are separate introductions to each of the parts as a guide to the chapters and
of particular use to readers new to the topic area.
This introductory chapter is organised into three sections. The first section
introduces the concept of the Anthropocene. In this edited collection, we
refer to the Anthropocene as a condition that we are in rather than as an exter-
nal set of problems which we are confronted with. Thus, the Anthropocene is not
merely a question of new or more pressing problems, such as climate change
and extreme weather events, but also a matter of the tools and understandings
 1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene 3

that are available to us: in other words, it is a matter of how we know—of

epistemology—and also of what we understand the world to consist of—that
is, questions of ontology. The second section provides some background to
the disciplinary history of International Relations. Here, we seek to briefly
flag up the importance of thinking the Anthropocene in relation to the his-
tory of the discipline, which could be understood as moving from an ‘inter-­
national’ or state-centred focus during the Cold War to a global set of much
broader concerns from the 1980s to the 2000s. This shift is then intensified by
an increased interest in the Anthropocene, understood as a ‘planetary’ chal-
lenge to the liberal universal assumptions that followed the decline of ‘realist’
hegemony. The third section explains the contents of the book, on the basis of
the distinct parts and chapters, and highlights the pedagogic aspects which are
included uniformly across the chapters.

The Anthropocene Condition

The Anthropocene has been declared to be a new geological epoch, so-named
because humanity—aka ‘anthropos’—has profoundly impacted our planetary
conditions so much so that our species has become a geological force in its
own right (Chakrabarty 2009). The importance of such a geological distinc-
tion has been advocated in order to bring home to people across the world the
fact that climate change is not just something that we experience as a fact of
‘nature’ but is anthropogenic—that is, caused by the action of humans. In
which case, humans have the power to change the ways in which we impact
the world and how we experience our environment: things could be other-
wise. Nature is not ‘natural’. The environment is not just something that we
are in, like space and time, but something that we are responsible for shaping
and conserving. The expected results of catastrophic climate change could be
ameliorated, slowed or even reversed, depending upon the view taken of the
latest statistics and of the capacities for scientific innovation, human ingenu-
ity and political leadership. So far so good, interesting, hopefully, and, more
than that, already making the Anthropocene a vital issue for scholars and
practitioners of International Relations.
However, the Anthropocene is not merely a new problem or threat that
necessitates new thinking about international collaboration and policy action
for environmental governance (Hickmann et al. 2019). It is not just one
more thing for the ‘to do’ list of international problem-solvers, lobbyists and
activists. The Anthropocene is much more than a discussion of the impact of
climate change and global warming on the prospects for sustainable
4 D. Rothe et al.

development, regional security or international collaboration. We argue that

the Anthropocene would be better understood, not as a problem which we
are confronted with but rather as a condition which we are in. Contributors
to this edited collection, while focusing on different themes and approaches,
all share the view that, for scholars of International Relations, the
Anthropocene era indeed changes everything. Understanding the
Anthropocene as a condition—taking seriously the fact that nature is not
‘natural’ and that the environment is not a container for our human dramas
but part and parcel of the performance—enables us to rethink and recon-
sider our assumptions of human exceptionalism and the problematic view
that we could think of politics and international relations as somehow oper-
ating in a separate or distinct sphere from other agencies and concerns (Burke
et al. 2016).
Understood as a condition which we are in, rather than merely a set of strate-
gic and tactical problems which we confront, the Anthropocene enables us to go
beyond the traditional binaries of our disciplinary tradition. Consider, for
example, the conventional understanding of security as the protection of a val-
ued referent against external threats. The condition of the Anthropocene chal-
lenges such a notion of security. The Anthropocene as a condition problematises
easy assumptions about ‘us’ as the security ‘referent’—as the object to be secured.
The problematisation of ‘us’—the privileged gaze of the Western policymaking
subject—opens up a substantial set of problems which deeply impact the disci-
plinary assumptions of International Relations. This is expressed, for example,
in Bruno Latour’s concept of earthbound people, that is, an imaginary collective
of people who consider themselves sensitive and responsive, due to being bound
by and to the Earth (Latour 2017, 251–253). We are the problem as much as
the solution, the ‘them’ as much as the ‘us’, the ‘enemy’ as much as the ‘friend’
(Hamilton 2017). On one hand, we are ‘insiders’ and on the other, we are ‘out-
siders’ when it comes to the crucial questions which are posed to policy actors
and academics in the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2018).
We are ‘insiders’ when it comes to grasping the Anthropocene in terms of
problems to be addressed or responded to, under the rubrics of climate change
and environmental governance, that is, as questions of governing and policy-
making (McDonald 2018; Dalby 2014). There are many ways of engaging
with the Anthropocene as a materialisation of human impacts on the environ-
ment and as a causal factor in rising sea levels, ocean acidification, extreme
weather events and mass species extinction. These tend to range from human-­
centred approaches of the ‘good Anthropocene’ (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015)
with geoengineering on a planetary scale to more human-humbling approaches
which focus on adaptation and mitigation, often in terms of mobilising the
 1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene 5

widely distributed agency of resilient communities and societies (Chandler

et al. 2020; Neyrat 2019; Rothe 2020). Yet, we are ‘outsiders’ when it comes
to reflecting upon what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) argues are the ‘species’
effects of human activity on a planetary scale. When we are the problem rather
than the problem-solvers, the Anthropocene raises the question of whether
the Anthropocene is a product of human reason and awareness.
For those who argue that the Anthropocene condition has not suddenly
emerged, by accident or behind our backs, but is the consequence of the
actions and agency of powerful states and interests, keen to dismiss the long
history of environmental warnings and developmental alternatives on offer
(Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016), the discipline of International Relations appears
to be merely the handmaiden of power and destructive elite interests. For
many critical theorists of the Anthropocene, the condition created by climate
change and global warming reveals that the modes of living and the knowl-
edge practices of governance which IR scholarship sought to secure and sus-
tain are part of the problem rather than the solution. This is quite a critique,
however, there is also perhaps a more powerful alternative framing of the
problem. If the Anthropocene, as a condition, did, in fact, arise behind the
backs or consciousness of Western leaders and governments, then this sug-
gests a much more fundamental problem at stake in our disciplinary assump-
tions—the problem of the modernist episteme itself.
If natural processes can no longer be separated from the historical impact
of human development and are no longer merely the backdrop to a purely
human drama of domestic and international political contestation (Serres
1995), then the modernist understanding of the nature/culture divide, sepa-
rating social and natural science, no longer holds. Nature can no longer be
understood as operating on fixed or natural laws, while politics and culture
can no longer be understood as operating in a separate sphere of autonomy
and freedom (Dalby 2014). These assumptions, in both spheres, were central
to modernist constructions of Enlightenment progress, which is now seen to
no longer exist or to have always been problematic. As Michel Serres noted,
the founding moments of political and international theory—the myth of the
social contract, the Declaration of the Rights of Man—now have lost their
standing: in constructing a world with merely human contests, they made the
mistake of ‘leaving the world on the sidelines, an enormous collection of
things reduced to the status of passive objects to be appropriated … Exclusively
social, our contract is becoming poisonous for the perpetuation of the species’
(1995, 36).
This brings into view an alternative ‘good Anthropocene’—not one that is
focused on new levels of planetary power and control—but one which views
6 D. Rothe et al.

the crisis of the modernist episteme as a vital catalyst for rethinking the disci-
plinary assumptions of International Relations and of the political and social
thought of modernity in toto. We can see this in two disciplinary forms, the
first, long highlighted by Bruno Latour, is the provocation of ‘We Have Never
Been Modern’ (1993)—that rather than climate change being the harbinger
of the end of modernity, contemporary problems merely reveal that moder-
nity itself was a fictional narrative of limited use in confronting the contem-
porary problems of the world. Feminist, queer and decolonial thinkers have
also seen the Anthropocene as a catalyst opening up the space for a range of
alternative epistemologies and ontologies obscured by the hegemony of mod-
ernist thought (Grusin 2017). As Donna Haraway and others have noted, it
is also the case that ‘we have never been Human’ (Haraway 2007; Gane 2006).
For scholars of International Relations, the work of decolonial scholars such
as Sylvia Wynter (2003, 1995) and Anibal Quijano (2000, 2007) importantly
links the modernist ‘overrepresentation of Man’ as Eurocentric, white and
elite, with the colonial explorations which created a global ‘world’ and the
birth of the secular sciences of modernity (Jackson 2020).

International Relations
The Anthropocene as a new epoch brings into question the traditional modes
of conceptualising International Relations. We believe that it does this by
forcing students and practitioners of IR to think through how the discipline
works as a set of ideas and practices, in fact, as a way of understanding the
nature of problems and policymaking per se. As a discipline, International
Relations is particularly sensitive to the questioning of the Enlightenment
problematic of human exceptionalism, rationalist problem-solving and liberal
modernist imaginaries of progress, which have shaped the agendas of interna-
tional peace, development and democracy. Beyond the dark days of the Cold
War, when International Relations was essentially a strategic exercise of
Realpolitik, the discipline has staked a lot on the basis that Enlightenment
liberalism is the universal panacea to human ills and that irrational structures
or agencies can be civilised or tamed to further the interests of humanity, both
in national or global regimes of good governance and in the rule of law.
It was, perhaps ironically, the transformations of the late 1980s and 1990s,
in opening up the discipline, that have led to this vulnerability. In liberal
modernity, the discipline of International Relations was for a long time, very
much a niche area of study, concerned with the interaction of liberal
 1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene 7

modernist subjects forever resigned to the State of Nature or to living in

Anarchy: this world was an impoverished one intellectually. The world in
which, as English School theorist Martin Wight (1960) famously stated,
‘there is no international theory’. International Relations was defined by what
was absent or lacking, rather than what was present.
What social and political theorists have referred to as the ‘human/nature
divide’ was at the heart of the discipline’s founding assumptions. The human/
nature divide—the idea that the world of Man was separate from the world of
Nature—was what enabled the divide between the international and the
domestic: the divide between international theory and politics. Politics was
about a liberal world of progress, ethics, law and communities—international
theory concerned another world; one in which these aspects were lacking. The
world before the social contract: the world in which, according to sovereignty
theorist Thomas Hobbes, it was a war of ‘all-against-all’, where ‘the life of
man, was solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Hobbes [1651] 2017).
International relations was argued to be analogous to the life of autonomous
individuals in the State of Nature, but these autonomous individuals were
states—banding together for self-defence (described in the realist problemat-
ics of ‘security dilemmas’, ‘the balance-of-power’ or of ‘free-rider’ problems)
but unable to constitute political communities to escape the contingencies of
ever-possible conflict (Suganami 1989).
International Relations was a minor disciplinary area of study. Firstly,
International Relations was understood as an elite or ‘top-down’ discipline,
narrowly preoccupied with ‘high politics’—affairs of state—it was concerned
with top-level policymaking, the actions and concerns of ‘sovereigns’ and
‘Princes’. Not only were the actors and agencies few but even these were
reduced to abstractions (ignoring the huge inequalities of ongoing colonial
legacies) to undifferentiated ‘states’ placed in rational choice games and dilem-
mas or seen to interact in systems like ‘billiard balls’, with their domestic make
up and concerns ‘black boxed’ as irrelevant to the rules and laws of their
systemic-­interaction. Secondly, the disciplinary concerns revolved around the
seemingly timeless questions of war and peace, addressed through essentially
Anglo-American disciplinary concerns with the protection and promotion of
Western security and ‘national interests’. The key concerns were strategic, as
Ken Booth notes, after Thomas Carlyle, International Relations was a dark
and ‘dismal science’, ethno-centric and hide-bound in its concerns of nuclear
strategic one-upmanship (with the gender and zero-sum connotations to the
fore) (1994, 16). The ‘world’ of International Relations was very small, very
white, very male and very elitist.
8 D. Rothe et al.

Thus, as a sub-field of Political Science, International Relations was an

impoverished discipline. Until the 1980s, there were very few undergraduate
or postgraduate degrees in the area, International Relations was perhaps taken
as an optional module. All this was to change as the discipline transitioned
with what we can now perhaps understand as the early tremors that were to
herald the disciplinary upheaval of the Anthropocene. Discussed under the
label of globalisation, the emergence of unbounded, globally interconnected
problems questioned the binary divides separating International Relations
from Politics and then gradually other disciplinary divisions of the modern
epoch which enabled the discipline to distinguish itself from others. At first,
the seismic shifts were understood in purely internal or disciplinary ways—
crudely understood as the rise of ‘liberalism’ at the expense of ‘realism’. Global
problems required global solutions, or so it seemed, and thus multilateral
cooperation and political integration through a kind of ‘forced cosmopolitan-
ism’ (Beck 2004), political learning and normative transfer. The state-centric
view of the international sphere began to wane as sociological, economic and
political conceptions increasingly influenced thinking in the academy. New
concerns and new actors appeared as International Relations began to over-
come its banishment from the seemingly liberal and modern world.
From the late 1980s and into the early 2000s, the explosion of interest in
the discipline of International Relations has been closely linked with the ero-
sion of the state-centred world and the imaginaries and possibilities of globali-
sation. From this perspective, the ‘liberalisation’ of the discipline with the
forces of globalisation, meant the expansion to the world, beyond purely
abstract or strategic inter-state concerns of war and peace. The context in
which the discipline was situated was poorly grasped by those working within
it. Ironically, rather than understanding the erosion of state-centred thinking
and the international and domestic politics of left and right as problematising
the disciplines’ founding assumptions, it was assumed that liberal modernist
frameworks were in the ascendancy. In parallel to the rise of global governance
concepts, International Relations was imagined to be in the process of becom-
ing a field of political, social and ethical theory on a global scale. From the
1980s through to today, the discipline blossomed and diversified.
Constructivist, poststructuralist, feminist and neo-Marxist approaches to
global politics are now regularly featured in introductory IR textbooks, with
approaches such as postcolonial studies, critical geography or political ecology
also entering the discipline. While some see this as a ‘fragmentation’ of the
discipline, others point to the merits of pluralist thought, resulting in multi-
ple ‘campfires’ rather than ‘theory schools’ (Kristensen 2018). Today,
International Relations commonly appears as a major in undergraduate degree
 1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene 9

programmes around the world and the numbers of conferences and journals
have grown exponentially, reversing the discipline’s previously subordinate
relation with political theory and politics.
We, as editors of this textbook on International Relations in the Anthropocene,
would not have written this Introduction and you the reader would not be
reading it if the story of the rise and success of International Relations ended
on this high note: the world of globalisation finally realising the dream of
International Relations and overcoming its banishment to the sidelines. At
last, so the dream would have it, liberal universal imaginaries of ethics, prog-
ress, politics and law are in the process of transforming the international
sphere towards a global state writ large, making International Relations the
home of political theory and progress and consigning narrow state-based poli-
tics to the past. From the vantage point of today, it is clear that this internal
disciplinary understanding of the shift from state-centred approaches to the
concerns of global politics—highlighted in debates on human rights, human-
itarian intervention, sustainable development, cosmopolitan democracy,
global governance, global civil society, liberal internationalism, climate change
and global warming—as a shift from ‘realism’ to ‘liberalism’ was misleading
and one-sided. Critiques of this dominant imaginary (and alternatives to it)
remain siloed in competing disciplinary camps (Kristensen 2018). The long-­
praised diversification of the discipline has left it highly fragmented, which
might help to explain why it has taken IR longer than other disciplines to
open up to the new challenges and possibilities of the Anthropocene.
Rather than there being a shift to the global—understood in liberal, mod-
ernist, 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. From the perspective of the Anthropocene, understanding this shift as
one from a state-centric to a global International Relations entirely misses the
point—this would not be a shift at all. Keeping to the terminology of the
national and the global constructs a framing that remains squarely within the
liberal modernist framing of thought. This framing is stamped by the imagi-
nary of the social contract and the assumption that both states and individuals
are autonomous actors pursuing self-interest in a world in which humans are
separate from nature. In such an imaginary, the world is conceived as a ‘one
10 D. Rothe et al.

world world’ (Law 2015)—that is: a world which is amenable to universal

understandings and capable of human direction and control.
In this way, we suggest that globalisation and moves to think beyond the
nation-state can be retrospectively seen as a transitional moment which prob-
lematised the assumptions of liberal modernity rather than realising them.
This process did not actually scale up the territorial state to a global level.
Rather, it deterritorialised the understanding of politics: territorial divides
were increasingly less important as global flows of information enabled new
imaginary communities of inter-connection (Scholte 2005). As Mark Usher
(2019) notes, the International Relations’ focus on transborder flows and
interconnections undermined the political binaries so central to the modern-
ist imaginary: both those of inside and outside the territory of the state and
those separating the formal sphere of politics and law from the informal rela-
tions of the economic and social sphere. States and ‘state interests’—the bread
and butter of International Relations—were increasingly seen as constructs,
simplifying reductions of a complex reality, rather than as materially impor-
tant. The grounds of modernist governance were being removed, rather than
constructed on ever higher levels of the global.
The problems which globalisation was storing up for International
Relations, or perhaps rehearsing, appeared particularly clearly in the work of
global sociologists, such as Ulrich Beck (1992) and Anthony Giddens (1999),
who theorised globalisation in terms of ‘risk society’ or a ‘runaway world’,
exceeding the control, direction and understanding of modernist framings of
power, agency and knowledge. Whereas International Relations could only
grasp the global in new discourses of management and control—of the mod-
ern Leviathan writ large—in less hide-bound disciplines, modernity itself was
already in question. For the sociologists of the global, the expansion of human
action was responsible for removing the divide between humanity and nature.
In other words, there was no ‘outside’ that could be known and discovered to
enable the liberal imaginary of development and progress. Time and space
were no longer considered as open containers for human expansion but were
now ‘compressed’ making governance ‘recursive’ rather than ‘linear’.
In simple terms, the human as agent was no longer the initiator of the pro-
cess; the problems being addressed were in part caused by earlier human
action so governance was recursive: following rather than initiating, adaptive
rather than controlling. We were governing the unforeseen consequences of
previous attempts to govern or to ‘problem-solve’. Governance was therefore
working at the level of ‘effects’—contingent outcomes of previous actions—
rather than at the level of ‘causes’—as if the world stood empty or passive
before us. The implication of these studies was that globalisation was not a
 1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene 11

matter of scaling up the state from the domestic to the global level but rather
a matter of needing to think beyond state-based understandings insofar as
they were part of a much broader modern episteme. At stake in globalisation
was therefore not just the scale of politics and the range of actors and concerns
but the problem of knowledge itself (epistemology) and fundamental ques-
tions about the entities and relations of which the world consisted (ontology).
The rise of scenario analysis, the focus on monitoring and mapping instru-
ments and the turn towards predictive concepts such as ‘anticipatory gover-
nance’ illustrate the attempts to still maintain means of power and control,
even under unclear circumstances.
In International Relations, we tend to have an insular understanding of the
rise and fall of the global imaginaries of the 1990s and early 2000s. The self-­
understanding within the discipline largely remains that of the ontology of the
international and the global: that is the same problem on a different scale and
the assumption that problems and problem-solving strategies are in essence
scalable. If one seems more prominent, for example, if states act in contested
ways people take out their crib-sheets on ‘realism’, and if there is international
consensus on an issue, then the theory to-hand is ‘liberalism’. In which case,
we swing from the ‘realism’ of the Cold War to the ‘liberalism’ of global con-
cerns and ethics of human rights, then back to ‘realism’ for the post-9/11 ‘war
on terror’. The crisis of liberal modernity, already rehearsed in other disci-
plines, often seems to hardly impact us, through the fog and excitement of
whatever the diplomatic disagreements or potential crises are in today’s head-
lines. The slowness of International Relations to react to the seismic shifts
heralded by the Anthropocene has been highlighted by a number of authors in
recent years (Harrington 2016; Mitchell 2017; Fagan 2017; Simangan 2020).
In the 2020s, International Relations scholarship appears set to catch up
with cognate disciplines in the humanities and social sciences in realising the
importance of the Anthropocene. Globalisation could be integrated fairly eas-
ily into the discipline of International Relations and in fact, as described
above, was welcomed as enlarging the disciplinary field and influence. The
crisis in modernist thinking of governance and politics, which comes to the
fore in the Anthropocene, cannot for much longer pass International Relations
by. Up until now, the Anthropocene has often been denuded of its critical and
radical potential (as globalisation was) and reduced to the security and national
interest concerns of climate change and global warming and put in the box of
global ‘issues’ that the world’s policymakers need to unite around. However,
for growing numbers of scholars and policy advocates, it is no longer sustain-
able that the answer to the crises of the Anthropocene is more of the same
approaches to knowledge and policy-practice that have brought us to the level
of planetary destruction itself (Grove 2019; Latour 2018; Neyrat 2019;
12 D. Rothe et al.

Connolly 2017; Mbembe 2019). If, as we believe, the Anthropocene does

pose questions of the grounding assumptions of the discipline, in ways which
make these increasingly difficult to ignore, then our frameworks need to take
in the methodological and disciplinary concerns not just of the national and
the global but also of the planetary.

 he Contents of the Book: New Agendas, New

T
Agencies and New Approaches
in the Anthropocene
The book is divided into four parts. Part I, ‘The Anthropocene: From the
Global to the Planetary’, contains six chapters which highlight the impor-
tance of the Anthropocene as a challenge to traditional frameworks of think-
ing in the discipline of International Relations. Focusing on different
themes—including postcolonial thought, nuclear weaponry, geoengineering
technologies, cybernetic and whole-system thinking and Earth System
Science—they draw attention to the distinction between international, global
and planetary approaches to the discipline. Traditional IR approaches under-
stand the world of international relations in ‘one world’ or global terms, which
assume rationalist understandings—locating the human as a knowing and
governing subject—these come under pressure in contemporary debates. In
contrast, more contemporary approaches assume the importance of a shift
towards planetary understandings, which problematise the world of rational
actors and linear causality and move in directions that begin to emphasise dif-
ference, relational context and the plurality of ‘worlds’. This shift disrupts the
modernist or ‘Holocene’ human/nature divide which assumes nature or the
environment as a stable ‘backdrop’ to human conflicts and grants humans
exceptional status, underestimating the extent to which we are entangled in
relations and interdependencies with the non-human world.
Part II contains five chapters which discuss the challenges of security in an
entangled and interdependent world. In the Anthropocene, the importance of
environmental security comes to the fore in ways which challenge the tradi-
tional categories and approaches of International Relations. Traditionally IR
has assumed the existence of separate states in a stable world where human
impacts on the natural world can simply be ignored. However, the point
about the Anthropocene is precisely that human actions and impacts are dra-
matically altering how the world works and are doing so in potentially very
dangerous ways for the future well-being of peoples and ecosystems across the
planet. In terms of International Relations, this is especially complicated
 1 Introduction: International Relations in the Anthropocene 13

because the industrial production systems that are key to the military rivalries
between states are mostly based on fossil fuels, and modern armed forces burn
huge amounts of petroleum products. Environmental insecurity is being
increased precisely because states are trying to extend their power using tech-
nologies that are changing how the earth system works. Rivalries among states
and attempts by them to extend their power and influence, the traditional
themes of geopolitics, are frequently thwarting efforts to grapple with climate
change and contributing to the rapid elimination of many plant and animal
species too.
Part III, ‘Governance and Agency’, contains six chapters which discuss
modes of Anthropocene governance and their policy tools and instruments
with specific respect to questions of agency, democratic qualities, (the lack of )
normative foundations and strategies for re-politicisation. The Anthropocene
can be read as a rallying cry for different modes of governance that aim to
keep the Earth within its ‘safe operating space’. While approaches such as the
‘planetary boundaries’ concept are driven by a top-down logic, other
approaches promote ever closer global/local interaction and resilient ‘self-­
governance’, which is facilitated by instruments like carbon budgeting or
inter-communal policy learning. Another feature of Anthropocene gover-
nance is the reliance on emerging technologies, such as geoengineering, satel-
lite Earth observation or the creation of environmental Big Data. Anthropocene
governance, therefore, may go as far as to replace the political sphere by tech-
nological means. Critical voices highlight the built-in depoliticising and ‘post-­
social’ qualities of these approaches. They underline the need to integrate the
socio-ecological dimension and to replace top-down governance by a multi-
plicity of localised approaches. The chapters also consider possibilities of alter-
native forms of Anthropocene governance—ones that open up to non-Western
knowledges, reimagine democratic practice through creativity and experi-
mentation, and allow for contestation as well as multiplicity.
Part IV, the final section of the book, ‘Methods and Approaches: Beyond
the Human/Nature Divide’, uses the Anthropocene as a starting point to
rethink how we study international politics and discusses a range of method-
ologies which are important for exploring the Anthropocene condition.
Contributors examine the need for alternative approaches that extend the
classical role of the researcher towards one that is ‘situated’ in the respective
research context and engages in the co-production of knowledge. In the
Anthropocene, this may refer to ontologies, which take ‘the weather’, ‘the
ocean’, ‘mining’ or ‘waste’ as viewpoints from which Anthropocene entangle-
ments can be understood in a different way, moving beyond anthropocen-
tric boundaries. The six chapters go beyond the established canon of
quantitative and qualitative methods in the discipline, suggesting alternative
14 D. Rothe et al.

ontologies, epistemologies, temporalities and research ethics. The authors

elaborate on how art can help to make sense of the contemporary global polit-
ical condition. They use storytelling as a technique of speculating about our
planetary futures and use ethnographic approaches to follow the objects and
artefacts that populate the Anthropocene. Using examples from their recent
research, the authors illustrate how students and researchers can use these dif-
ferent approaches in their own work on international politics.

How to Use This Book

This book provides a starting point for a broader disciplinary discussion of the
challenges and opportunities which the Anthropocene enables for the disci-
pline of International Relations. The book may be read in the traditional
manner, from front to back, and to do so would enable the reader to follow
through a line of argumentation from the background to the Anthropocene
and more traditional concerns of International Relations, such as governance
and security, towards an increasing focus on new agencies and new approaches.
At the same time, each of the chapters in this volume can be approached as a
stand-alone publication and understood without having read the previous
parts of the book. This allows those more familiar with discussions about the
Anthropocene in International Relations, or non-International Relations spe-
cialists, to dip in and to use this book as a handbook or teaching resource to
focus on particular interests and concerns. Short introductions to all four of
the major parts are provided to give an overview of the chapters and help to
identify content of interest. By following the cross-references or using the
index, readers can also create their own reading pathways through the book.
Each chapter contains pedagogic features as aids to teaching and comprehen-
sion; these include a range of callout boxes with key concepts or paradigmatic
examples, a summary of key points, some essential questions raised by each
chapter, both as a recap and for future thinking, and a short list of key readings.

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Suganami, H. 1989. The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals. Cambridge:
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 Part I
The Anthropocene: From the Global
to the Planetary

Introduction
The first section of this book introduces the concept of the Anthropocene.
The six chapters in this section highlight the importance of the Anthropocene
as a challenge to traditional frameworks of thinking in the discipline of
International Relations (IR). Focusing on different themes—including post-
colonial thought, nuclear weaponry, geoengineering technologies, cybernetic
and whole system thinking and Earth System Science—they draw attention
to the distinction between international, global and planetary approaches to
the discipline. Traditional IR approaches understand the world of interna-
tional relations in ‘one world’ or global terms, which assume rationalist under-
standings—locating the human as a knowing and governing subject. These
come under pressure in contemporary debates. In contrast, more contempo-
rary approaches assume the importance of a shift towards planetary under-
standings, which problematize the world of rational actors and linear causality
and move in directions that begin to emphasize difference, relational context
and the plurality of ‘worlds’. This shift disrupts the modernist or ‘Holocene’
human/nature divide which assumes nature or the environment as a stable
‘backdrop’ to human conflicts and grants humans exceptional status, under-
estimating the extent to which we are entangled in relations and interdepen-
dencies with the non-human world.
The section opens with Joana Castro Pereira’s chapter ‘Towards a Politics
for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene’. It identifies the intellec-
tual and organizational limits that prevent IR from effectively addressing the
planet’s new geological conditions and highlights the urgency of developing a
18 The Anthropocene: From the Global to the Planetary

politics for the Earth, suggesting possible pathways for the future. Four major
limitations are addressed: namely, IR’s state-centrism, which precludes it from
building the necessary planetary picture of reality; positivist and rationalist
paradigms, whose assumptions of a stable and predictable world hinder the
field and policymakers’ capacity to recognize the non-linearity and uncer-
tainty of the Earth system’s processes, as well as the lack of true interdisciplin-
ary or transdisciplinary work, which prevents IR from capturing the highly
complex essence of the planetary ecological crisis; nature-society dichotomy, a
core dogma of the prevailing scholarship and politics that disregards the
unbreakable link between the natural and social worlds, and the urgent need
for transforming the current development paradigm; and anthropocentrism,
which ignores the entanglement of human and non-human life, and the fact
that harm caused to nature and other living beings does not happen in isola-
tion, thus also negatively affecting, and risking, humanity’s well-being, secu-
rity, and survival.
The second chapter, ‘Encounters with Earth System Sciences: Planetary
Boundaries and Hothouse Earth’ by Judith Nora Hardt, analyses how Earth
System Science (ESS) relates to IR’s security logics and discusses how ESS
might enable the development of a new conceptualization of security—one
which embraces the socio-ecological entanglements and the new quality of
existential threat in the Anthropocene. While taking on board the concerns of
Earth System Science is vital to reshaping IR, the chapter analyses how a less
human-centred and linear approach could be followed in both fields of
research to grasp threats to security at a planetary scale. The analysis highlights
the limits of security logics that deploy clearly defined fixed concepts and
forwards the alternative approach of ‘security prism’ as a research tool. The
chapter is structured in three sections: first, providing a description of the
evolution, basic assumptions and central concepts of Earth System Science;
second, analysing ESS security logics through the examination of recent
research reports to draw out the key concepts and their interrelation; and
third, advocating that the research communities that both engage ‘hard’
(political and social) sciences engage in common research, outlining some
future challenges and pathways that arise at the nexus between ESS and IR
approaches to security.
‘The Nuclear origins of the Anthropocene’, the next chapter, by Rens van
Munster, argues that the planetary concerns at the forefront of the
Anthropocene have deep roots in the Cold War nuclear arms race and the
militarization of the planet. The prevention of nuclear war has been a central
concern of the disciplines of IR and security studies; however, few theorists
have analysed the intimate links between the military, war and the
 The Anthropocene: From the Global to the Planetary 19

environment. One of the reasons for this neglect may be that most
Anthropocene-­interested IR theorists have been keen to stress that our entry
into the Anthropocene represents a sharp break with the past. This chapter
emphasizes the importance of history in enabling our theoretical and political
imagination, not least because many of the central issues we discuss today
under the heading of the Anthropocene share important features with earlier
debates about nuclear weapons. Such overlapping concerns include the com-
plex relation between warfare, colonialism and global ecology; the importance
of theorizing (human) extinction as a distinct political category; and the pos-
sibilities and limits associated with attuning or up-scaling politics and ethics
to a planetary level. Historical engagements with these issues can serve as
inspiration—or, at the very minimum, provide caution—to a critical IR
scholarship adamant on finding possibilities for a new politics in the
Anthropocene age.
Cheryl McEwan authors the fourth chapter in this section, ‘Decolonizing
the Anthropocene discourse’, and discusses the importance of the
Anthropocene for bringing decolonial approaches to the centre of IR and, at
the same time, for the scaling up of these approaches to the planetary level.
The chapter discusses the ways in which postcolonial theory problematizes the
Eurocentrism and the epistemic violence created by framing the Anthropocene
as a universalizing and silencing concept. The Anthropocene requires decolo-
nizing theory and praxis to theorize human and non-human futures at the
planetary scale. The invitation opened by Spivak’s notion of ‘planetarity’ pro-
vides one example of the search for critical and creative tools for collaborative
survival in the Anthropocene. Planetarity, and what is seen as the collapse of
the modernist universe, creates unique possibilities to decolonize interna-
tional relations, to reflect again on who counts as human, to become attuned
to the needs of non-humans and to engage with and learn from non-Western
indigenous cosmologies.
‘Geoengineering: A New Arena of International Politics’, the fifth chapter,
by Olaf Corry and Nikolaj Kornbech, introduces geoengineering as a new
arena of international politics and explains why technical explorations of
alternative climate strategies have not properly factored in the international.
The chapter engages with how international politics might affect the potential
development and deployment of geoengineering techniques and conversely
how the emergence of these new techniques could change the international
system itself, introducing new dilemmas and modes of interaction character-
istic of the Anthropocene. The authors draw on high-profile areas of geoengi-
neering research, to illustrate some of the issues that geoengineering poses for
IR, both in theory and in practice. Known collectively as ‘geoengineering’ or
20 The Anthropocene: From the Global to the Planetary

‘climate engineering’, these interventions are conceived to act after excess

emissions have accumulated into the atmosphere, rather than as tools to pre-
vent or adapt to such emissions emerging. The international politics of geoen-
gineering appears to share some of the problems of existing climate politics
while also generating new ones. Not only are there potential unwanted and
unknown environmental side effects, some technologies may also generate
new international climate dilemmas. Given this Anthropocene dilemma, the
authors suggest the standard rationalist approach to climate change in IR is
not sufficient.
The final chapter in this section, ‘Genealogies of the Anthropocene and
How to Study Them’ by Delf Rothe and Ann-Kathrin Benner, takes a closer
look at the conceptual roots of the Anthropocene. They focus upon the condi-
tions in which contemporary forms of planetary understandings emerged,
building upon and rearticulating earlier political rationalities and discourses.
The chapter provides a set of genealogical tools for tracing the history of the
Anthropocene concept, helping to explain how certain political imaginaries
have found their way into new forms of Anthropocene governance. Just like
conceptual history, genealogy is interested in how contemporary ideas and
discourses evolved. However, it understands such a history of knowledge as a
discontinuous, fractured and contradictory process. A genealogical approach
holds that the production of discourses is inherently tied to forms of political
power. The chapter starts with a summary of the debate on the origins and
historical predecessors of the Anthropocene concept. The second section
introduces Foucault’s concept of genealogy and outlines an analytical frame-
work to operationalize it. The third section illustrates one way of using this
approach in practice, by taking a closer look at the Whole Earth movement in
the late 1960s. They highlight how a creative recombination of heterogeneous
discourses and technologies, including information theory, cybernetics;, pop-
ulation biology and Californian counterculture, led to an entirely new under-
standing of the Earth and the ‘environment’ as a planetary system to be
managed or ‘steered’.
 2
Towards a Politics for the Earth:
Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene
Joana Castro Pereira

Introduction
As a discipline explicitly devoted to global security and survival, International
Relations (IR) would be expected to place the planetary ecological crisis and
the challenges presented by the Anthropocene at the centre of its research
agenda. However, environmental issues remain at the margins of the disci-
pline (Green and Hale 2017; Pereira 2017). IR’s ecological blindness is, nev-
ertheless, unsurprising. The very nature of the crisis facing the Earth and the
essence of the Anthropocene both disturb and question the discipline’s con-
ventional structures and mainstream theories, which were constructed in and
for a world very different from the one in which humanity currently lives.
This introductory chapter discusses the multiple ways in which the emer-
gence of the Anthropocene challenges IR’s dominant structures and practices
as both a field of knowledge and institutional practice (Burke et al. 2016). It
identifies the intellectual and organizational limits that prevent IR from effec-
tively addressing the planet’s new geological conditions and highlights the
urgency of developing a politics for the Earth, suggesting possible pathways
for the future. Four major limitations are addressed, namely IR’s

1. state-centrism, which precludes it from building the necessary planetary

picture of reality;

J. C. Pereira (*)
Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI-NOVA), Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: mail@joanacastropereira.com

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 21

D. Chandler et al. (eds.), International Relations in the Anthropocene,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_2
22 J. C. Pereira

2. positivist and rationalist paradigms, whose assumptions of a stable and

predictable world hinder the field and policymakers’ capacity to recognize
the non-linearity and uncertainty of the Earth system’s processes, as well as
lack of true interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work, which prevents it
from capturing the highly complex essence of the planetary ecologi-
cal crisis;
3. nature-society dichotomy, a core dogma of the prevailing scholarship and
politics that disregards the unbreakable link between the natural and social
worlds, and the urgent need for transforming the current develop-
ment paradigm;
4. and anthropocentrism, which ignores the entanglement of human and
non-human life, and the fact that harm caused to nature and other living
beings does not happen in isolation, thus also negatively affecting, and
risking, humanity’s well-being, security, and survival.

Each of the four main sections in which this chapter is divided suggests a
condition for overcoming IR’s limitations and building a politics for the
Earth. The cases of climate tipping points and the water and biodiversity cri-
ses are used to illustrate the Anthropocene’s distinctive character and the
urgency of rethinking and transforming IR’s prevailing beliefs and practices,
so that they match the planetary real.

Moving Beyond the State, Embracing the Earth

Despite efforts to move away from its mainstream framing, IR remains a
state-centric field of knowledge that studies power politics in an anarchic and
competitive international system divided by territorial borders, the main
driver of which is the predominant narrow national interest and sovereign
features of the main state powers within the system (Hutchings 2001; Nair
2011; Walker 1993). This is IR and our political institutions’ fundamental
image of reality. As a result, IR’s established paradigms and research pro-
grammes continue to focus on—and tend to privilege—the study of inter-­
state relations and the forms of international organization allowed by states.
In this Westphalian inter-state system, diplomatic practices in general, and
international environmental agreements resulting from diplomatic bargaining
in particular, favour and are designed to ensure national sovereignty and self-­
interest. However, in an epoch in which human impact on the Earth system
is so significant that it is risking ecological collapse, building a planetary pic-
ture of reality—and acting according to that image—is a sine qua non
 2 Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene 23

condition for effectively responding to the severity of the challenges of the

Anthropocene.
The international system’s territorial structure does not match the ecologi-
cal map of the Earth. Ecological problems are transboundary or global in
nature (e.g., water pollution can cross a national frontier and climate change
affects all countries in the world, crossing all borders). In other words, ecosys-
tems do not coincide with the political boundaries drawn between states.
There is an ecological link, binding different human communities and human-
ity as a whole, that demands a shift in focus from the international system to
the ecosystem and the planet. This means that traditional understandings of
state, citizen, and sovereignty are profoundly defied by the ecological context
(Dyer 2017). These ideas are reinforced by the recognition of the anthropo-
genic subversion of the Earth system’s fundamental processes implicit in the
Anthropocene concept, as it evidences that humanity’s existence transcends
the international or even the global—humanity’s existence is also, and increas-
ingly, planetary. Simply put, human actions and the globalization of eco-
nomic, social, and political affairs are not only impacting the social world—that
is, having repercussions that affect most societies and the lives of most people
(e.g., the societal and individual consequences of a global financial crisis)—
but also transforming the natural, physical framework that regulates the func-
tioning of the Earth System’s major processes. Essentially,

the human enterprise is now a fully coupled, interacting component of the

Earth System itself. (…) A human-inclusive Earth System implies that global-­
scale social and economic processes are now becoming significant features in the
functioning of the System, like atmospheric and oceanic circulation (Steffen
et al. 2011, 740).

Accordingly, the focus can no longer be on inter-state relations or globaliza-

tion processes and their global social impacts, but on “the collective human
interaction with the biosphere” (Burke et al. 2016, 501). The necessary plan-
etary picture of reality for effectively navigating the Anthropocene is one that
recognizes humanity’s (and its global-scale economic and social processes)
embeddedness in the Earth System.
Nevertheless, obsessed with inter-state power politics, IR is failing to see the
Anthropocene and its dangers. It is overlooking a new, massive type of power—
humanity’s power to transform the Earth and dominant role in driving plan-
etary ecological change as well as the dire consequences arising from it, which
cannot be addressed merely by the use of state power, but whose mitigation or
prevention demands a radical change in human values and behaviour, as shall
be seen later in this chapter. In addition, IR’s state-centrism limits the
24 J. C. Pereira

discipline’s capacity to notice other actors influencing reality and to integrate

them into its analyses. In the Anthropocene, humanity is transforming the
planet, and the planet is interfering in human affairs, breaking down the bar-
riers that (artificially) separate the human and natural realms (or society and
nature). Human and natural forces are intertwined. In the world of the
Anthropocene, events are then the result of the multiple, complex interactions
between humans, non-humans, and biophysical elements (Harrington 2016).
Therefore, agency is not restricted to states or even humans (Salter 2015). This
fact is neglected both within the discipline and in international politics.
Finally, responding to the ecological challenges of the Anthropocene
requires moving to a broader notion of self-interest interconnected with the
interest of humanity and the planet as a whole. Nevertheless, in a state-centric
system built to preserve sovereignty and strict national interest, multilateral
environmental regimes such as the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) suffer from several limitations to their effec-
tiveness. For example, the UNFCCC’s decision-making process is based on
consensus and reflects the lowest common denominator, allowing progress to
be blocked by reluctant parties (Keohane and Oppenheimer 2016). Moreover,
the regime still keeps the voices of key actors such as scientists, civil society
environmental groups, and indigenous communities on the margins; fails to
harmonize the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustain-
able development; and does not represent ecosystems and non-human forms
of life, which are, and will continue to be, deeply affected by climate change
(Burke et al. 2016). It is thus not surprising that after three decades of multi-
lateral climate negotiations, the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in
the atmosphere has increased significantly, global temperatures have risen
beyond projections, and climate change has worsened substantially.
Building a planetary image of the world is a necessary step not only for
capturing the essence of the Anthropocene, but also for developing a new
system of environmental law and governance at all levels, capable of ade-
quately responding to the gravity of the ecological crisis.

 ecognizing Instability, Uncertainty,

R
and Complexity
As a discipline, IR emerged under the relatively stable environmental condi-
tions of the Holocene. The environment is thus predominantly perceived as
simply the background in which states pursue their interests, and human
 2 Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene 25

events and conflicts take place (Dalby 2014). In addition, in an attempt to

make work in the field more robust and reliable, scholars have adopted mod-
els from the natural sciences and Newton’s assumption of a “closed system”
penetrated IR. A closed system has no interaction with its external environ-
ment, which means that it is not affected by outside agents or elements.
Consequently, it is possible to more easily isolate variables and observe causal
consistencies (Wight 2015). It is a linear and predictable system. Accordingly,
IR’s influential positivist and rationalist paradigms assume the existence of a
static world outside that can be fully assimilated and anticipated. Analyses
and explanations are generally rooted in the conviction that changes are grad-
ual and phenomena follow linear trajectories (Kavalski 2015). However, the
Anthropocene—unstable, uncertain, and dangerous—defies such premises.
Moreover, IR’s agenda often reflects a reductionist understanding of the field’s
appropriate ontologies, epistemologies, methods, and practices, despite
attempts at expanding and renewing the discipline by opening IR to new
modes of thinking and acting, and to other fields of knowledge (Pereira 2017).
The complexity of the Anthropocene, nevertheless, makes the prevailing
restrictive assumptions within the discipline obsolete.
First, severe, unprecedented human-induced changes to the physical frame-
work that regulates the stability and resilience of the Earth system are risking
irreversible ecological damage and the safe environmental conditions upon
which modern societies depend. The ecological limits within which humanity
can safely operate are being pushed to the point where positive feedback
effects (i.e., processes that reinforce an initial action) may be initiated and
abrupt environmental changes triggered, threatening a cascade of effects that
would potentially lead the Earth to a completely different, unsafe state (Rocha
et al. 2018; Steffen et al. 2015, 2018) (see Box 2.1). Under the geological
conditions of the Anthropocene, the prospect of an event capable of disrupt-
ing the entire international system cannot be disregarded. Nevertheless, schol-
ars and decision-makers usually think in terms of high-probability but low
impact and low-probability but high impact events, ignoring the fact that
massive anthropogenic interference with the Earth system is significantly
increasing the probability of a high impact event (Mabey et al. 2011). In fact,
given the long-term interval between causes and results in the complex Earth
system, there are certainly transformation processes already in progress that
cannot be stopped and whose consequences may be severe. Unexpected
change is intrinsic to the Earth’s new geological epoch.
Second, the socio-ecological system is an open one where phenomena are
the result of multiple causal structures, mechanisms, processes, and fields, and
unpredictability is the norm (Reyers et al. 2018). As had been seen, the
26 J. C. Pereira

Anthropocene is characterized by long-term effects, complex interactions, and

uncertainties, making the future a highly unstable object of study. Within this
context, imagining and preparing for multiple alternative scenarios, develop-
ing skills for dealing with different possible situations, and providing iterative
responses are crucial. However, IR’s naïve assumption that phenomena are
linear and predictable prevents it from assuming the existence of different
possible futures, a necessary condition for truly informing human action in
the Anthropocene (Pereira 2017). Developed under the same assumptions,
our political-legal system—designed to address short-term, structured, direct
cause and effect issues—is profoundly limited in its capacity to constructively
deal with the challenges arising from the Earth’s new geological conditions.
Simple solutions that produce immediate effects are no longer viable (Pereira
and Viola 2018).
Third, the Anthropocene, as a complex geological epoch in which human
actions play a central role in subverting the Earth system’s major processes,
evidences that the destinies of nature and humanity are inextricable—as seen
above—and breaks with the divided discourses between the natural, social,
and human sciences. In a world where socio-ecological interconnections are
increasingly complex and intense, fragmented and isolated analyses fail to
capture the essence of the crisis facing the planet and prevent scholars and
decision-makers from keeping pace with the unprecedented challenges of our
time. True interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work is a fundamental condi-
tion for effectively addressing the magnitude of contemporary transforma-
tions. Embracing the knowledge, theories, and methods from other disciplines
and fields is, therefore, a step that IR needs to take if it is to overcome reduc-
tionist analyses and provide the necessary holistic picture of reality, without
which any response to the crisis will be unsuccessful (Pereira and Freitas
2017). Only close collaboration among natural and social scientists and
humanists will be able to deliver the adequate solutions for the collective
problems that are risking life on Earth. Ensuring security and survival on a
global scale demands an approach that combines the knowledge that Earth
system science is producing about the planet and the ecological crisis with an
ethical, ontological, and practical discourse capable of aligning our politics
and policies, institutions, diplomacy, values, beliefs, and lifestyles with the
planetary real (Burke et al. 2016), as shall be seen in the next subsections.
Recognizing the instability, uncertainty, and complexity of the Anthropocene
is thus essential if IR is to maintain its relevance.
 2 Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene 27

Box 2.1 Climate Tipping Points

The Earth’s climate system is formed by large-scale components characterized by
a threshold behaviour known as tipping elements. In other words, climate tip-
ping elements are supra-regional scale constituents of the Earth’s climate system
that may pass a tipping point (Lenton et al. 2008). Examples of tipping elements
include the Greenland ice sheet, boreal forests, and the Amazon rainforest. A
tipping point is the threshold at which a small perturbation in a system triggers
abrupt changes driven by feedback effects that inevitably alter, often irrevers-
ibly, the state of the system (Milkoreit et al. 2018).
Comparing them with the human body, tipping elements could be defined as
vital organs that, in the absence of certain requirements (e.g., sufficient oxygen
supply), radically alter or cease their normal function (PIK 2017), and begin to
seriously affect other organs, which, in turn, further affects those which suffered
a change in the first place, thus creating a “cascading collapse” leading to the
destabilization or failure of the entire organism. In the case of large forest
biomes that store massive amounts of carbon, such a process would imply
increasing levels of forest degradation (tree mortality and biomass loss) as a
result of climate change and/or deforestation activities leading to the release of
carbon into the atmosphere and to the aggravation of global warming, which
would, in turn, further affect the forest ecosystem, causing it to collapse and
emit huge amounts of carbon that, by worsening climate change, would affect
the functioning of other tipping elements of the system, generating additional
positive feedback loops (Pereira and Viola 2019). In short, once tipped, these self-­
reinforcing processes can continue without additional forcing. Moving past tip-
ping points could thus precipitate a global catastrophe.
Considering the complex and uncertain nature of the system, it is nearly impos-
sible to identify clearly where the tipping points stand. However, the latest sci-
ence suggests that humanity may have already crossed the boundary below
which the danger of destabilization of the planet’s climate is likely to remain low
(Steffen et al. 2015)—which means that temperatures will most likely increase
more sharply than predicted over the next decades. A rise of 2 °C in the global
mean temperature could potentially trigger tipping points that would move the
Earth towards a global climate catastrophe (Steffen et al. 2018). The planet has
already warmed by 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels and the pledges that coun-
tries have made under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement thus far are highly
insufficient to achieve the treaty’s aim of limiting global warming to “well below
2 °C”. Tipping points are, nevertheless, highly overlooked in political climate
change debates (Pereira and Viola 2018).

 reaking with the Nature-Society Dichotomy

B
to Forge a New Development Paradigm
As seen in the previous sections, the Anthropocene evidences that humanity
and nature are intertwined. It thus breaks with a central belief of modernity—
the nature-society dichotomy, or the idea that nature and society are separate
28 J. C. Pereira

domains of reality (Inoue 2018). It was discussed how this belief has pre-
vented IR from recognizing agency beyond the state and the human, and
from engaging in the necessary dialogue with other fields of knowledge. This
section concentrates on a broader—and perhaps the most important—impli-
cation of this core dogma at the heart of prevailing scholarship and politics.
In IR, the key concept of security was formulated assuming that threats are
limited to outside agents—the “enemy” is the other and the other is “out
there”—and the existence of an “external environment” (Mitchell 2014;
McDonald 2018). Security thinking in IR is dominated by the idea of states
securing or protecting their territories and populations from threats external
to their own societies. However, by reshaping the planet, humans are “pro-
ducing” the environment in which they live and the conditions of their exis-
tence; human actions are risking an ecological catastrophe, which means that
the “enemy” is “here” in our production and consumption patterns, lifestyles,
beliefs, and values (Cudworth and Hobden 2015; Dalby 2017). In other
words, nature is not external to human politics, economy, and culture; the
threat lies in the current human development paradigm, which recognizes
only rhetorically the importance of ecological conservation. Accordingly, a
fundamental change in the manner in which we think and act in relation to
nature—that is, the reorienting of human activities—is an imperative condi-
tion for ensuring security and survival on a planetary scale.
The ecological crisis is the result of human, political choices; mitigating its
effects and averting its most catastrophic consequences is essentially a matter
of making and implementing new political decisions guided by ethical, moral,
and ontological principles aligned with the planetary real. Nevertheless,
actions continue to focus on how to allow our unsustainable practices to grow
(mainly through technological fixes), rather than on transforming our hab-
its—perpetuating the logic that has given rise to the Anthropocene in the first
place—in a dangerous attempt to sustain the unsustainable (see Box 2.2). The
Anthropocene forces us to recognize the ecological limits to human freedom
and the fact that our growth-dependent global market economy is not built
to achieve ecological sustainability. It forces us to question capitalism’s pursuit
of profit at any cost and logic of unlimited growth and accumulation—to
which nature conservation is an impediment—and the associated short-term
political interests.
Although having provided unprecedented material development, the global
market economy has done so with uneven benefits, oppression, and severe
ecological damage. Challenging existing political, economic, and social struc-
tures—and ultimately human values—in light of social justice and ecological
imperatives is thus critical. However, there seems to be little effort to think
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 Kapitänleutnant
v. Möllers letzte Fahrt
Alle Rechte, auch das der Übersetzung, vorbehalten.
Copyright 1917 by August Scherl G. m. b. H., Berlin.
 Kapitänleutnant
v. Möllers letzte Fahrt

Von

K. E. Selow-Serman

1 . b i s 1 0 0 . Ta u s e n d

Druck und Verlag von August Scherl G. m. b. H.

Berlin
 Inhalt

Seite
Tsingtau-Lied 7
Auf dem Hsikiang 9
Hochwasser 20
Krieg 40
Nach Manila 50
Interniert 66
Weddigen 76
Wieder interniert 85
Im Mauritius-Orlan 94
In die Wüste 111
Kapitänleutnant v. Möllers letzte Fahrt
 Tsingtau-Lied

Verfaßt von Kapitänleutnant v. Möller

In Hongkong die Winde,

Sie wechseln geschwinde,
Mal lau und gelinde,
Mal heftig, mal rauh.
Umgeben von Riffen,
Von Bojen und Schiffen,
Ein bißchen bekniffen,
Da liegt die Tsingtau.

Der Pik, der schaut munter

Auf dies Kunterbunter
Von oben herunter,
Auf glitzerndes Blau.
Die Wolken, sie schweben
Am Pik, bleiben kleben
Und unten bleibt eben
Allein die Tsingtau.

Im Delta da fahren
Die Dschunken zu Paaren,
Die Zampans in Scharen
Und machen Radau,
Doch leis und bedächtig,
So grau und so prächtig,
Bewaffnet und mächtig
Erscheint die Tsingtau.

Im Westfluß, da fährt sie,

Viel Freude beschert sie,
Viel Wasser begehrt sie
Bis rauf nach Lungtschau.
Und jeder verehrt sie,
Den Handel vermehrt sie,
Doch Kohlen verzehrt sie,
Die kleine Tsingtau.

Man lebt auf dem Lande,

Man badet am Strande,
Man schwimmt auf dem Sande,
Man trinkt auch Kakau.
Man dreht die Maschinen,
Man spielt Mandolinen,
Das ganze heißt dienen
An Bord der Tsingtau.

Wo Deutsche auch wohnen,

Da zeigt man Kanonen,
Besucht die Missionen,
Die Zeiten sind mau,
Wenn bei den Chinesen
Ein Totschlag gewesen,
Dann schrei’n Kantonesen:
Wo bleibt die Tsingtau?

Die Zeit geht behende,

Sie ist bald zuende,
Adieu liebe Sände,
Adieu mein Tsingtau,
Zur Heimat geht’s wieder,
Zu Mutter und Brüder,
Wir kehren nicht wieder
Zurück zur Tsingtau.
 Kapitänleutnant v. Möller †
Kommandant S. M. S. „Tsingtau“
 Auf dem Hsikiang

Ein leichtes Knirschen unter dem Schiffsboden ... einige kurze

Stöße ... ein scharfer Ruck ... „S. M. S. Tsingtau“ sitzt auf einer
Sandbank fest.
„Beide Maschinen Stopp!“
Braunes Wasser quirlt zu beiden Seiten und am Heck auf, ganze
Lehm- und Schlickklumpen kommen hoch. Das Schiff ist
festgekommen. Bisher war die Reise, seit der Abfahrt von
Kongmoon, wo Schießübungen abgehalten wurden, glatt verlaufen.
„Eine verteufelte Geschichte!“ wendet sich der Kommandant,
Kapitänleutnant v. Möller, an seinen neben ihm auf der Brücke
stehenden Wachtoffizier, Leutnant z. D. v. Wenckstern. „Wenn das
Wasser nicht bald steigt, sehe ich schwarz für unsere Ankunft in
Wutschau!“
Am Bug, am Heck und an den Seiten sind ein Dutzend Leute
damit beschäftigt, mit gemarkten Stangen die Wassertiefe zu
messen und festzustellen, wo das Schiff aufsitzt. Vorne weist das
Wasser schon wieder zwei Meter Tiefe auf. Die Sandbank, die nach
Steuerbordseite abfällt, beginnt in der Höhe der Brücke. Vom
Schornstein bis fast zum Heck muß „Tsingtau“ festsitzen: keine 90
Zentimeter Wasser! Während auf der Brücke nach den Peilungen
überlegt wird, wie das Schiff loskommen kann, klingt’s von unten in
unverfälschtem Hamburger Platt herauf: „Du Koarl, willt wi beid’ mol
öwer Board jumpen unn ein losschuwen?“ Prompt kommt die
Antwort zurück: „Tja Hein, denn will ick öwer erst min Boadeanzug
antrekken!“
Ein leises Schmunzeln oben auf der Brücke.
 „Steuerbord 10, beide Maschinen Äußerste!“
Wieder färbt sich der Strom unter dem dunkelbraunen Sand und
Schlick, den der Schraubenwirbel vom Grunde hochjagt; keine
Bewegung aber kommt in das Schiff. Schwer lastet „Tsingtau“ auf
dem Sande, die Landmarken bleiben unverändert.
„Stopp! Beide Maschinen große Fahrt rückwärts!“ Eine halbe,
eine ganze Minute peitschen die Schrauben das Wasser.
„Stopp! Beide Maschinen äußerste Kraft voraus!“ Da! Ein leises,
kaum merkbares Zittern. Das Schiff neigt sich nach Steuerbord über,
knirschend rutscht es von der Sandbank herunter, liegt grade, ist frei!
Mit halber Fahrt, äußerst vorsichtig, wird der Weg stromaufwärts
fortgesetzt.
Das in Südchina stationierte Flußkanonenboot „Tsingtau“ ist am
16. Mai 1914 von Kongmoon in der Mündung des Hsikiang
(Westfluß) abgegangen, um von Wutschau aus Erkundungsfahrten
in unbekannte Flußgebiete der Provinz Kwangsi vorzunehmen und
die deutsche Kriegsflagge dort zu zeigen. Eine für Offiziere und
Mannschaften des kleinen Fahrzeugs äußerst interessante, aber
keineswegs leichte Aufgabe. Der älteste Mann an Bord ist kaum
Mitte der Dreißig, allen wohnt der Drang, der in jedem Deutschen
sitzt, inne, Fremdes zu schauen, Neues, Ungewohntes zu erleben.
Jeder freut sich der kommenden Tage, die sicherlich Zwischenfälle
der mannigfachsten Art bringen werden. Nur wenige größere Städte
weist die Karte auf, was dazwischenliegt, ist unbekanntes Land. Die
kühnsten Hoffnungen werden an die Fahrt geknüpft: Jagdabenteuer,
Fischerei, Zusammentreffen mit Piraten, Erwerb echt chinesischer
Raritäten; je nach Liebhaberei.
Langsam gleitet „S. M. S. Tsingtau“ gegen die Strömung an. Vom
Löß, dem chinesischen Lehm gefärbt, wälzen sich die gelben Fluten
in schnellem Laufe dem Meere zu. Voraus kommt eine Dschunke in
Sicht. Das riesige, gezackte, braune Segel leuchtet im hellen
Sonnenschein schon von weitem herüber. Zwei ungeheure
Glotzaugen sind in grellen Farben zu beiden Seiten des Bugs
aufgemalt. Fast unheimlich ist der Eindruck, als schöbe sich
irgendein phantastisches Seeungeheuer herauf. Bis unter das Segel
türmt sich die Ladung, die aus Ballen getrockneter Häute besteht.
Stumpfsinnig hockt die Mannschaft an Deck herum. Eine
unheimliche Gesellschaft, mit der man im Anfang so gar nichts
anzufangen weiß, weil sie sich gleichen, wie ein Ei dem andern. Alle
scheinen die gleichen starren Gesichter zu haben, auf denen nicht
die geringste Regung eines eigenen Innenlebens zu erkennen ist.
Alle tragen sie das blaue, billige Nankingzeug. Erst wenn man sie
länger kennt, lernt man sie unterscheiden.
Gleichgültig schweifen nüchterne Augen von drüben über das
Kriegsschiff hinweg ins Leere. Auf hohem achteren Aufbau steht der
Mann am Steuer. Schnell rauscht die Dschunke mit dem Strom
vorbei, wie ein Bild aus längst entschwundenen Jahrtausenden
anmutend. Kein Laut, keine Bewegung an Bord, als seien es nicht
lebende Menschen.
Zu beiden Seiten gleitet das Ufer entlang. Bis zu fünfzehn Metern
hebt es sich stellenweise, kommt näher bald, um wieder weiter
zurückzutreten. Aus bläulichem Dunste leuchten in der Ferne
Bergzüge herüber, von deren Spitzen der kahle Fels im
Sonnenglanze schimmert, wie ewiger Schnee. Die Gegend ist
ziemlich belebt, reger Verkehr herrscht. Wie eine endlose Flut
dehnen sich gelbe Reisfelder bis an den Horizont, wo die Berge
ragen. Zwischen schlankem, grünbelaubtem Bambus glänzen helle
Mauern einzelner Gehöfte, über denen sich Schilfdächer wölben. Als
Ansteuerungsmarken und gleichzeitig als Wahrzeichen der Gegend
dienen die eigentümlich geformten Pagoden, die sich auf kleinen
Anhöhen erheben. In strahlendem Sonnenschein liegt die Gegend.
Auf den Feldern arbeiten Leute, auf den Wegen ziehen ungefüge
einräderige Karren langsam dahin.
In einer stillen, schilfumstandenen Bucht sielen sich
Wasserbüffel. Bis an den Hals stecken sie in ihrem geliebten
Schlamme, nur der wild anmutende zottige Schädel mit den großen
gutmütigen Augen sieht aus dem Wasser hervor. Ruhig, gleichmäßig
dösen sie, kaum daß der Kopf sich dahin wendet, wo eben das
deutsche Schiff vorbeizieht. Oben am Ufer steht ein altes Tier, das
erstaunt nach dem schnaubenden Ungetüm herüberäugt. Ein
kleiner, kaum vierjähriger Chinesenjunge, der mit Wasser wohl kaum
noch während seiner kurzen Erdenlaufbahn Bekanntschaft gemacht
hat, so dreckig ist er, sitzt auf seinem Rücken. Auch ihn läßt das
Schiff völlig kalt. Eine sture Gesellschaft! Fremd in ihren Ansichten
und der Auffassung vom Leben. Viele Jahrzehnte gehören wohl
dazu, sie aus ihrer unheimlichen Ruhe aufzustören!
Der Fluß verbreitert sich, die hier niedrigen Ufer treten zurück.
Die Strömung wird geringer, die Gefahr des Festkommens steigt
durch die Verflachung. Dauernd peilen die Leute von Deck aus die
Wassertiefen. Mit geringer Geschwindigkeit, äußerst vorsichtig setzt
„Tsingtau“ ihren Weg fort.
Weit voraus sind die Segel zweier Dschunken zu sehen, die quer
zum Strom fahren. Auf der oberhalb liegenden flammt ein Blitz,
starker Pulverqualm wälzt sich am niedrigen Bug auf, ein schwacher
Knall kommt herüber. Eine Kriegsdschunke, die soeben einen
Piraten gefaßt hat. Daß der Flußräuber selbst an der Arbeit ist,
scheint ausgeschlossen, da ihm das herankommende Kriegsschiff,
dessen charakteristische Formen ihm wohlbekannt sind, bei der
Ausübung seines Handwerks etwas unheimlich sein dürfte.
„Geschütze und Maschinengewehre klar!“ Ein eiliges Hasten an
Deck, Munition wird gemannt, die Geschütze werden geladen,
Patronengurte in die Maschinengewehre eingezogen.
Drüben geht die Jagd weiter. Vergebens versucht der Pirat das
Ufer zu erreichen, die schnellere Kriegsdschunke kneift ihm den
Weg ab. Einen Augenblick darauf scheint er seine Absicht geändert
zu haben, will stromabwärts entkommen. Einen Augenblick nur.
Weiß er doch zu genau, daß das ihm entgegenkommende
Kriegsschiff ein viel gefährlicherer Gegner ist als der bisherige
Verfolger. Wieder blitzt es auf der Kriegsdschunke auf, von der jetzt
zwei bunte chinesische Flaggen wehen. Ein Treffer. Die Vollkugel
fährt aus dem uralten Vorderlader und reißt einen erheblichen
Fetzen aus dem Segel des Räubers, dessen Geschwindigkeit sich
mehr und mehr verlangsamt. Rasch nähern sich die beiden
Dschunken. Aufgeregt hetzt die Mannschaft an Deck des zuerst
herankommenden Piraten herum. Der Mann am Steuer wirft sich mit
voller Wucht gegen die Pinne, laute Kommandorufe, Schreien,
Fluchen tönt herüber. Weit mehr Leute scheinen an Bord, als zur
Bedienung des Fahrzeuges erforderlich sind. Alle in dem blauen
Nankinganzug mit nacktem Oberkörper. Geradezu verboten sehen
sie aus. Einige versuchen, auf dem achteren kleinen Mast ein Segel
zu hissen, andere wieder laufen mit Flinten eines anscheinend
uralten Systems nach dem hohen Aufbau und beginnen nach dem
Verfolger hinüberzuschießen, der das Feuer sofort erwidert. Ein
wildes Geknalle hebt an, bald hier, bald da ein Schuß, dann wieder
eine ganze Salve. Schon jetzt ist zu sehen, daß die Kriegsdschunke
überlegen, ein Eingreifen der „Tsingtau“ also unnötig ist.
Wieder saust eine Kugel heran, trifft auf Deck, mitten in den
Knäuel der zusammengedrängten Piraten, und schlägt ein halbes
Dutzend Leute zu Boden. Vierkant drehen sie auf Land zu, um
wenigstens das nackte Leben noch zu retten. Zu spät! Das zerfetzte
Segel gibt dem Schiff keine Geschwindigkeit mehr, näher und näher
rauscht der Verfolger, ununterbrochen feuernd, heran. In Todesangst
— wissen sie doch, was ihrer harrt — springt ein Teil der Leute über
Bord. Die Strömung faßt sie, wirbelt sie herum und entführt sie
abwärts. Jetzt ist die Kriegsdschunke heran, geht am Piraten
längsseit und macht fest. Mit Säbeln und Pistolen springen Soldaten
herüber, bereit, jeden Widerstand zu ersticken. Im Handumdrehen ist
das Werk getan. Wer noch lebt, wird gefesselt, daß er auch nicht ein
Glied rühren kann, und wie ein gefüllter Sack an Bord der
Kriegsdschunke geworfen. Die meisten freilich sind vorher schon
unter den Kugeln gefallen oder ertrunken. Dann wird das erbeutete
Fahrzeug in Schlepp genommen und nach Wutschau zugehalten,
wohin auch S. M. S. „Tsingtau“ ihren Weg fortsetzt.
Eine riesige, zinnengekrönte Mauer umgibt die Stadt, aus deren
Mitte sich eine Anhöhe erhebt. Ein Gewimmel alter, halbverfallener
Häuser, schmaler, winkeliger Gassen und Gäßchen, aus denen nur
selten ansehnlichere Gebäude, die Sitze der Regierungsbehörden,
ragen. Besseren Eindruck macht des Geschäftsviertel zwischen der
Mauer und dem Fluß. Die Straßen sind reinlicher und breiter, die
Häuser ansehnlich. Längs des Ufers ist auf dem gelben Schlick die
Kaimauer aufgeführt. Einige Hulks europäischer Firmen, die