Concluding Discussion: The planetary is not the end of the international

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearch

Drawing on chapters of this book as well as wider literatures, in this concluding chapter I first situate the relative invisibility of non-human nature in IR, pointing to the demise of geopolitics around the Second World War as part of a wider bifurcation of knowledge into “social” and “natural” sciences. Secondly, I argue that current attempts to take account of non-human nature have tended to bring with them globalist framings that underplay or even obscure the importance of the international. Thirdly, I outline an outlook that does not feature prominently in the rest of this book, but which might provide an additional way of further developing its goals, allowing a theorisation of society that has the non-human at its core to form the building block for a materialist theory of the international. The overall aim is to take stock of attempts to grasp how the metabolism between humans and non-human nature is itself multiple, intrinsically bound up with and marked by relations between societies—separate yet coexisting socio-ecological entities.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNonhuman Nature and World Politics : Theory and Practice
EditorsJoana Pereira, André Saramago
Number of pages16
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer
Publication date27 Aug 2020
Pages337-352
Chapter16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Aug 2020
SeriesFrontiers in International Relations
ISSN2662-9429

ID: 247507822