This article is a collective response to Anthony Burke et al's 'Planet Politics', published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a 'Manifesto from the end of IR'. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al reproduce an already failed and discredited liberal cosmopolitan framework through the advocacy of managerialism rather than transformation; the top-down coercive approach of international law; and use of abstract modernist political categories. In the closing sections of the article, we discuss the possibility of different approaches, which, taking the Anthropocene as both an epistemological and ontological break with modernist assumptions, could take us beyond IR's disciplinary confines.
Since Posthuman International Relations (Zed, 2011) our adventures with the posthuman have led us along various trails. Some of the places we have been and things we have said feature here in various states of revision and (re)composition.The 2012 Millennium Conference at the LSE, with a focus on new materialism in International Relations, was a starting point for us when we first gave the paper on posthumanism and agency that became 'Of Parts and Wholes: International Relations Beyond the Human' (2013, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 41, 3: 430-450). Arguments made here appear in Chapters 3 and 6, in discussions of non-human animal agency. It was here that we were inspired by the interest in new materialist approaches and also engaged (face-to-face!) with some critics. These include David Chandler, who took our rather full-on response to the critique he made in Millennium 41 --'Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old materialism, new materialism and the challenge of an emancipatory posthumanism' (2015, Globalizations, 12, 1: 134-148) --with characteristic grace and good humour.That paper features across the book (particularly in Chapters 1 and 3) and was the inspiration for this book project. Our thanks are also due here to Chris Rossdale, for including the paper in the special edition of Globalizations that he complied. We would like to thank David for his continued engagement with our work and for prompting us to respond with him to the problem with liberal framings of responses to the existential crises we face in "Are we all just prisoners here, of our own device?' A response to 5 Burke et al's Planet Politics' (forthcoming). The arguments made here feature in the final chapter, where we present a rather different 'Manifesto'.In thinking about 'creatureliness' in Chapter 6, we rework some of the material from 'Civilization and the Animal' (2014 Millennium Journal of International Studies, 42, 2: 746-766), and this also pops up in Chapter 1. In thinking about the future in chapters 6, 7 and 8, ideas from various other papers appear, such as 'The Posthuman Way of War ' (2015 Security Dialogue. 46, 6: 513-529) and 'Anarchism's Posthuman Future' (forthcoming in Anarchist Studies 2017/8). Here our ideas have benefitted from the engagement of Claudia Aradau, Beate Jahn and Ruth Kinna, as well as anonymous reviewers.We would also like to thank our respective partners, teenagers and other critters-in-the-home, for putting up with more writing.
The term 'new materialism' has recently gained saliency as a descriptor for an eclectic range of positions that question the human centred and human exclusive focus of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In turn these emerging perspectives have been subject to critique by those writing in the established materialist tradition who argue that new materialism ignores the unique specificity of human agency and the transformatory capabilities of our species. Our previous interventions have endorsed a particular account of posthumanism that draws together complexity influenced systems theory with elements of political ecologism that have incorporated aspects of established materialist and humanist thinking. This article rejects the old materialist critique that denies the emancipatory potential of posthumanist thinking, and explores the potential for an emancipatory posthumanism.
Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and 'things'. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of international politics. By posthuman, we mean an analysis that is based on complexity theory, rejects Newtonian social sciences, and decentres the human as the object of study. We argue for a decentring of 'the human' in our scholarship as imperative to understanding the complexity of the world. However, this approach also has a political incentive, which we describe as 'complex ecologism'. Erika Cudworth
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