Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.
Harm does not happen to humans in isolation, but rather to worlds composed of diverse beings. This article asks how worlds and the conditions of worldliness should be framed as 'subjects of security'. It explores three possible pathways: rejecting anthropocentrism; expanding existing ethical categories; and adopting 'new materialist' ontology and ethics. Ultimately, it argues for a fusion of the key elements of each of these pathways. This offers the basis for a new concept of harm ('mundicide') specifically intended to reflect harms to worlds and the conditions of worldliness. The value of this concept is demonstrated in the light of an empirical example: the 'Rainforest Chernobyl' case. The article concludes that a worldly approach is necessary if we are to capture the full enormity of the harms confronted by international security.
Current discourses about the everyday in relation to international peace interventions focus on two main aspects. First, the perceived quality or qualities of everyday life tend to be attributed to 'local' organisations or actors and assessed positively. Second, the control of life (including bio-political control and governance) tends to be associated with 'international' actors and viewed negatively. This article challenges these key assumptions by contextualising them in social and political theories of the everyday and in two key examples: 'affective' peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and 'threatworks' in Northern Ireland. It also calls for an approach to the 'everyday' in international interventions which moves beyond local/international power dynamics and is attentive to the pluralities of power and practice that emerge in these settings.
The dominant paradigm of liberal peacebuilding is often applied in developing states even where such processes of mobilization are practically implausible and intellectually or culturally alien. Inevitably, each peace intervention is contested, resisted, re-shaped/shaped and responded to—hybridized—by local actors and forms of agency that are unique to each setting. This article explores these processes in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Bosnia, Mozambique, Namibia, and Liberia, in order to assess how far “subsistence peacebuilding” agency is able to affect the liberal peacebuilding framework.
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