Power, World Politics, and Thing-Systems in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Power is widely understood to have both a constitutive and generative force in the political. Particular concepts of power-especially those organized around the idea of power politics and the figure of state sovereignty-have had a profound constitutive effect on the practice of (world) politics and in political theory (Bially Mattern 2008). They work to generate both knowledge about politics and actual institutional structures, effects and modes of behavior. What they do not do, however, is capture the complex actuality of power relations in international society when we consider the relationship between humanity and planet Earth that can be called "global social nature" (Dalby 2009, 6). This term is central to our materialist understanding of the Anthropocene and is a key conceptual marker in our earlier publication, "Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR" . It expresses the complex causal interpenetration of political, social, industrial, and ecological processes and change, along with the constant "translation" (as Bruno Latour names it) between the human and non-human, such that nowhere on earth does "nature" exist outside of human social impacts or human society exist separate from "nature." At the same time, ecosystems and nonhuman communities have their own rhythms, agencies and purposes pursued without regard for human ends. What results is a global social\nature that turns back on human institutions and living arrangements in ever more unpredictable and violent forms.Theories of power in International Relations do not capture this interplay between humans and nonhumans, but rather fix an image of a static mode of relations, one that works to explain particular instantiations of power within state and human-centered systems while silencing and disallowing other understandings and realities. These static images reflect a larger commitment within International Relations to state-centric understandings of world order. Major political and International Relations theories believe themselves to have accounts of political and state power that are settled and steadfast, expressing universal and continuing truths about human behavior and contestation that should rarely, if ever, be revisited. This demonstrates the ideological function of power itself; it reflects its instantiation within how International Relations, as a discipline, would understand its subjects of study: their location and ability to exercise power in a space understood as "international politics."In this chapter, we contend that the time has come to fundamentally revisit many of these founding tenets of power in the light of the Anthropocene, both in International Relations as a disciplinary field, and in global politics as a set of institutions and regimes. We develop an alternative theory of power exercised in complex and distributed ways across "thing-systems" that ineluctably connect society and nature. We do not argue that traditional state-based notions of power have no continuing salience or value-at least within restricted, Ant...

The politics of adaptiveness in agroecosystems and its role in transformations to sustainable food systems

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Accountability in the Anthropocene: Activating responsible agents of reform or futile finger‐pointing?

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