Another Geopolitics? International Relations and the Boundaries of World Order

Abstract

Geopolitics has become a key site for articulating the limits of existing theories of international relations and exploring possibilities for alternative political formations that respond to the challenges posed by massive ecological change and global patterns of violence and inequality. This essay addresses three recent books on geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene: Simon Dalby's Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (2020), Jairus Victor Grove's Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019), and Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018). The review outlines and compares how these authors pose contemporary geopolitics as a problem and offer political ecology as the ground for an alternative geopolitics. The essay considers these books in the context of critiques of world politics in international relations to shed light on both the contributions and the limits of political ecological theories of global politics. I argue that the books under review encounter problems and solutions posed in Kant's critical and political writings in relation to the concepts of epigenesis and teleology. These provoke questions about the ontological conceptions of order that enable claims to world political authority in the form of a global international system coextensive with the earth's surface.

Limits to the Anthropocene: geopolitical conflict or cooperative governance?

“…Geopolitics has always been linked to the exploitation of natural resources which in the Anthropocene are in growing demand, especially through investments in land across national borders. With global heating and renewable energy, territoriality is becoming a new target in geopolitics (Burles, 2021). Climate change is creating new high-risk zones (hot spots) on world maps of vulnerability.…”