Towards a politics for the earth : rethinking IR in the Anthropocene

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2022

Authors

Pereira, Joana Castro (Author) FLUP

Book

Title: International relations in the Anthropocene : new agendas, new agencies and new approaches

Pages: 21-37

ISBN: 978-3-030-53013-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-53014-3

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Indexing

Google Scholar

Crossref

Other information

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-53014-3_2

Abstract (EN): Home International Relations in the Anthropocene Chapter Towards a Politics for the Earth: Rethinking IR in the Anthropocene Joana Castro Pereira Chapter First Online: 21 April 2021 1112 Accesses 2 Citations Abstract This chapter discusses the multiple ways in which the emergence of the Anthropocene challenges International Relations’s (IR’s) dominant structures and practices as both a field of knowledge and institutional practice. It identifies the intellectual and organisational limits that prevent IR from effectively 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 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 non-linearity and uncertainty; the nature-society dichotomy, a core dogma of the prevailing scholarship and politics; and anthropocentrism, which ignores the entanglement of human and non-human life. The cases of climate tipping points and the water and biodiversity crises 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.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific