Eva Lövbrand a, Malin Mobjörk b, Rickard Söder b

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2020.100051

Abstract

The Anthropocene is described as a dangerous and unpredictable era in which fossil-fueled ways of life undermine the planetary systems on which human societies depend. It speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks where neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways. In this paper we examine how debates on the Anthropocene unfold in global politics and how they challenge core assumptions in International Relations. Through a structured analysis of 52 peer-reviewed journal articles, we identify three Anthropocene discourses that speak of new environmental realities for global politics. These are referred to as the endangered world, the entangled world, and the extractivist world. While each discourse describes an increasingly interconnected and fragile world in which conventional binaries such as inside/outside, North/South and us/them can no longer be taken for granted, disagreement prevails over what needs to be secured and by whom.

1. Introduction

A new concept has entered the lexicon – the Anthropocene. The term was coined at the turn of the millennium to describe the profound and accelerating human imprint on the global environment (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Rising global temperatures, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, acidified oceans and irreversible species loss are some of the examples used to illustrate the dramatic shifts in the Earth’s biosphere caused by modern industrial civilization (IPCC, 2018). In contrast to the Holocene – the past 12 000 years of relative climate stability – the Anthropocene has been described as a dangerous and unpredictable era when fossil-fueled ways of life are undermining the planetary life-support systems upon which human societies depend (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2018). It refers to a new phase in planetary history, we are told, when humanity has become a major force of nature that is changing the dynamics and functioning of Earth itself.

The proposition that we now live in a world entirely of our own making is uncomfortable and perplexing. It suggests a fundamental and dangerous rupture in the Earth’s trajectory that calls for new ways of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature, ourselves and our collective existence (C. Hamilton, 2017; Scranton, 2015). By tying the fate of humanity to the fate of our planet, the Anthropocene concept has invited intense interdisciplinary conversations across scholarly fields as varied as Earth system science, geology, history, philosophy, and sociology (Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019; Hamilton et al., 2015; Steffen et al., 2011). In recent years the Anthropocene has also arrived at the study of global politics and prompted critical debates about some of the core assumptions upon which International Relations (IR) rest (Simangan, 2020). Harrington (2016, p. 493) describes the Anthropocene as a watershed moment for a discipline that found its voice in the midst of the Cold War when apocalyptic visions of nuclear war were commonplace. It is a concept that speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks in which neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways (Dalby, 2009). In a time when modern technology, trade and consumerism is disrupting the planet’s life-upholding systems in unprecedented ways, a growing IR scholarship is searching for a new security language that brings our changing climate, melting glaciers and polluted oceans to the forefront of global affairs (Burke et al., 2016; Harrington, 2016).

In this paper we trace how these Anthropocene debates are unfolding in the study of IR and ask how they may reconfigure Earth as political space. Just as geographical knowledge for long has been used by great powers to naturalize the exercise of power and control over distant places and people (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015), we examine how IR scholars now are drawing upon environmental knowledge to rethink nature as a stable ground for such global politics. While the profound material implications of a transformed global environment are central to this rethinking, we will in this paper primarily focus on the representational politics of contemporary Anthropocene debates. Informed by the critical geopolitics of scholars such as Gearoid O Tuathail (1996), John Agnew (1998) and Simon Dalby (2009), we approach the Anthropocene as a discursive event that is actively involved in the (re)writing of space for global politics. We thus ask how this new era in planetary history is staged as a geo-political drama. How is the Anthropocene written spatially and geographically? What risks and security concerns does it render visible? Who and what is endangered on this global scene? How are friends and enemies construed? What kinds of policy responses are deemed appropriate to meet the dangers of a transformed global environment?

Our study is based on a literature review of 52 peer-reviewed journal articles found in the database PROQUEST using the search words ‘Anthropocene’, ‘security’, ‘geopolitics’ and ‘politics’. The search was made in titles, abstracts and keywords of articles published during 2010–2018, and produced 143 results. As a first step, all articles were extracted into Excel and the abstracts were analyzed in view of how the Anthropocene is presented as a political problem. As a second step, we limited our sample to the articles that explicitly engage with the Anthropocene concept and its implications for global politics. These 52 articles were subject to thorough content analysis and sorted according to the analytical questions outlined above (for full list of articles, see appendix). From this analysis we identified reoccurring ontological claims, analytical themes and political concerns around which IR debates on the Anthropocene currently seem to circle. We used these categories to outline the contours of three discourses that we here call 1) the endangered world; 2) the entangled world and; 3) the extractivist world. In the following we present these discourses and compare how they stage our transforming Earth as political space. Although the Anthropocene debates drawn upon in this paper play out at the margins of mainstream IR,1 we find that they are actively confronting some of the spatial assumptions, meanings and orders upon which the latter rest. When engaging with the self-imposed dangers of a radically climate changed world, all three discourses project a world that is more interconnected and fragile than ever before and in which conventional binaries such as inside/outside, North/South, us/them no longer can be taken for granted. However, disagreement prevails over what needs to be secured and by whom in view of this new environmental reality.

2. The geopolitical imagination: imposing order and meaning on space

We live in confusing and troubled times. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful end to Cold War rivalry, scholars and practitioners of global politics are again searching for a language that describes how the world works and what challenges global politics face. The 1990s often signify the triumph of liberal democracy and new political possibilities arising from multilateral cooperation and free trade (Hewson and Sinclair, 1999). In the aftermath of the Cold War, economic globalization and transnational flows of information, finance and people effectively unsettled the geopolitical map and challenged binary conceptions of political space such as East and West, modern and backward (Ó Tuathail, 1998). In the new world of global flows, networks and relations, the spellbinding ‘big picture’ of geopolitics seemed decidedly out of fashion and place (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998). Instead global governance gained ground as a novel frame for understanding the character of global life (Latham, 1999). As outlined by James Rosenau in the first volume of the journal Global Governance, this new language signified an academic and political search for order, coherence and continuity in a time of disorder, contradiction and change. “To anticipate the prospects for global governance in the decades ahead”, Rosenau (1995, p. 13) suggested, “is to look for authorities that are obscure, boundaries that are in flux, and systems of rule that are emergent. And it is to experience hope embedded in despair.”

The rise of global environmental consciousness and governance belongs to this rethinking of global politics at the end of the 20th Century. Responding to a growing sense of ecological interdependence and urgency, state and non-state actors have since the mid-1990s engaged in a wide array of cooperative strategies and institutionalized forms of global governance. From the burgeoning field of global environmental governance studies, we have learned that these multilateral rule-systems today cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and public-private divides and hereby link actors and places in ways that defy conventional understandings of IR (Biermann, 2014; Bulkeley et al., 2014). In this new world of collaborative, networked and transnational forms of environmental governance, global politics no longer appears to be defined by international anarchy or the hierarchical authority of the state (Stripple and Bulkeley, 2013). As outlined by Biermann and Pattberg (2008) global life is instead characterized by new types of agency and actors, new mechanisms of governance that go beyond traditional forms of state led treaty-based regimes, and an increased segmentation and fragmentation of the overall governance system across levels and functional spheres.

While this largely liberal story of global politics has gained a powerful grip on the study of IR, we have recently experienced a revival of geopolitical thought and foreign policy practice. In response to the disorientation and identity crisis following the end of the Cold War, many foreign policy elites are again mobilizing allegedly objective geographical criteria to fix the role of the nation-state in world affairs and to keep ‘the Other’ out (Guzzini, 2012, p. 3). The new geographies of danger presented by melting glaciers, rising sea levels and more extreme weather feed into this re-territorialization of global affairs (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015) and have given rise to a new security language that accounts for the risks of climate-induced instability, conflict and displacement (Scheffran et al., 2012; van Baalen and Mobjörk, 2018). While some work in this field draws upon the human security concept to examine how climate change may multiply existing vulnerabilities and threaten the livelihood of the poor (O’Brien et al., 2010), the scaling up of climate fear has also given new energy to realist scripts of international relations and state-centric security frames (Brzoska, 2012).

In the following we draw upon critical geopolitics to examine how the Anthropocene concept is mobilized in this struggle to (re)define global space in view of new environmental realities. Critical geopolitics is a sub-discipline to political geography that emerged during the 1980s to liberate geographical knowledge from the imperial geopolitics of domination (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015, p. 5). It is a scholarship that invites us to consider how certain “spatializations of identity, nationhood and danger manifest themselves across the landscape of states and how certain political, social and physical geographies in turn enframe and incite certain conceptual, moral and/or aesthetic understandings of self and other, security and danger, proximity and distance, indifference and responsibility” (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998, p. 4). Hence, rather approaching the world as politically given, critical geopolitics critically interrogates the forms of knowledge and imaginations that underpin international politics and the cultural myths of the sovereign state (Agnew, 1998). A central assumption informing work in this field is that geographical representations of the world are far from innocent. As argued by Ó Tuathail (1996, p. 7), geographical knowledge constitutes a form of geo-power that is actively involved in the production, ordering and management of territorial space. Conscious and inspired by these insights, we here examine what forms of environmental knowledge that contemporary IR debates on the Anthropocene draw upon, and how they stage the future of world politics. In these unfolding debates we identify three discourses that we call the endangered world, the entangled world, and the extractivist world.

2.1. The endangered world: securing the future habitability of the planet

The endangered world is a discourse that draws energy from Earth system science and its proposition that humanity at the end of the 20th Century has become an Earth shaping agent that now rivals some of the great forces of nature (Brondizio et al., 2016; Steffen et al., 2011). The Anthropocene here marks a shift from the stable Holocene era within which human civilizations have developed and thrived. As outlined by Steffen et al. (2011), the ‘great acceleration’ in human population, economic exchange, technological development, material consumption and international mobility following the end of World War II has left an unprecedented imprint on the global environment and fundamentally altered humanity’s relationship to Earth. By degrading the planet’s ecological systems and eroding its capacity to absorb our wastes, humanity has dangerously disrupted the Earth system and pushed the planet into a more hostile state from which we cannot easily return (Pereira and Freitas, 2017; Steffen et al., 2011).

The endangered world presents a global scene where new environmental threats and dangers are causing socio-economic turbulence and gradually altering the geopolitical map. In the Arctic, for instance, Young (2012) finds that the interacting forces of climate change and globalization are transforming environments at unprecedented rates and opening up the region to outside forces. Non-linear shifts in sea ice and thawing permafrost have unleashed mounting interest in the region’s natural resources and invited Great Powers to enhance their commercial shipping, fossil fuel extraction and industrial fishing (Young, 2012). Similarly, Willcox (2016) outlines how climate change is posing a grave external threat to the self-determination of atoll island peoples in the Pacific region. As sea level rises and storms increase in frequency, states such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives are facing loss of habitable territory and relocation of entire populations (Willcox, 2016). In other parts of the world climate change is triggering vector-borne diseases, freshwater shortage, crop failure and food scarcity (Floyd, 2015). While these threats are most pressing in already fragile regions, they are multi-scalar, interconnected, and transboundary in nature and may therefore cause human insecurity and political instability in areas distant from their origin (Hommel and Murphy, 2013; DeFries et al., 2012; Pereira, 2015).

The endangered world is a discourse that challenges the modern spatialization of the world into a system of states with unquestionable political boundaries and mutually hostile armed camps (Agnew, 1998). As outlined by Pereira and Freitas (2017), many of the human-produced dangers of climate change have no parallel in history and work in complex, uncertain and unpredictable ways. The dangers are often diffuse, indirect and transnational and hereby make the world more interconnected and interdependent than ever imagined by IR. While this discourse recognizes that climate change may endanger the territories and populations of particular states, it is the global biosphere that is the primary referent object of security. The entire life-support system of the planet is under threat and the role of global politics is to regain control for the sake of human wellbeing and security (Floyd, 2015). As noted by Steffen at al. (2011, p. 749) the planetary nature of the challenge is unique and demands a global-scale response that transcends national boundaries and cultural divides. In order to avoid that large parts of the human population and modern society as a whole will collapse, humanity has to rise to the challenge and become a responsible steward of our own life-support system (Steffen et al., 2011). Geographical imbalances in human suffering and vulnerability form part of this new story for global politics (Biermann et al., 2016; Da Costa Ferreira and Barbi, 2016; O’Brien, 2011). However, in the endangered world it is the aggregated human effect on the Earth system that is the primary object of concern.

The endangered world draws energy from a long line of liberal institutionalist thinking to foster responsible Earth system stewardship. In order to gain control over the unfolding sustainability crisis and effectively govern the Anthropocene, this discourse insists that the world needs strong global institutions that can balance competing national interests and facilitate coordinated policy responses (Da Costa Ferreira and Barbi, 2016; Young, 2012). Hence, the liberal democratic order organized around the United Nations and its various treaty-regimes remains central to the vision of global politics advanced here. However, given the complex and dispersed nature of 21st century challenges, international policy responses need to rest upon multi-level governance approaches that respond to the varied role of people and places in causation and effect of global environmental changes (Biermann et al., 2016; Steffen et al., 2011). In order to build links across local, national and global scales, effective governance in the Anthropocene also hinges on integrated scientific assessments of critical Earth system processes and scenario planning that anticipates the systemic risks and security implications of ecosystem change (Hommel and Murphy, 2013; Steffen et al., 2011). As outlined by Dumaine and Mintzer (2015) traditional security thinking makes little analytical sense in a world bound together by complex, non-linear and closely coupled environmental risks. In the Anthropocene security analysts must move beyond the assumption that the main purpose of defense is to secure the nation against external, state-based, mainly military threats. In order to respond to the dangers of a radically transformed global environment, states need to cultivate a shared view about common threats and improve collective capacities for early warning, rapid response, and disaster mitigation (Dumaine and Mintzer, 2015).

2.2. The entangled world: securing peaceful co-existence

In parallel to the science-driven and liberal institutionalist imagination informing the endangered world, the Anthropocene has also given energy to a post-humanist IR discourse that confronts the grand narratives of modernity and the forms of global politics they give rise to. Similar to the endangered world, this parallel discourse describes the Anthropocene as a complex and unpredictable era when human and natural processes have become deeply intertwined. However, the Anthropocene is here not approached as a problem that can be reversed, resolved or governed (Johnson and Morehouse, 2014). As outlined by Harrington (2016, p. 481) it instead reflects a new reality where humans, nonhumans, things, and materials co-exist in complex relations of life and non-life. In this entangled universe, the Cartesian separation between nature and culture has broken down and the world as conceived by modernity has ended. Dualistic understandings of the active, progressive and morally countable human (subject) and the passive and static externality of nature (object) are replaced by much more contingent, fragile and unpredictable networks of relations (Fagan, 2017). In a world marked by melting ice caps, thawing permafrost, acidified oceans, accelerating deforestation, degraded agricultural lands and dramatic species loss, human activity and nature are so enmeshed that they are existentially indistinguishable. A complex but singular “social nature” is now the new planetary real, claim Burke et al. (2016, p. 510).

The entangled world is a discourse that draws upon the Anthropocene to destabilize and radically rethink the conceptual frameworks that underpin contemporary global politics. It confronts a state-centric world obsessed with bargaining, power and interests with the monumental risks, threats, and physical effects of a transformed global environment (Burke et al., 2016; Harrington, 2016). In a time when industrialized and profit-driven human societies are dangerously enmeshed with the biosphere, national security based on keeping ‘the Other’ out is failing the reality of the planet and portraying the wrong world picture. The magnitude and reach of contemporary environmental risks mean that “the Other is always already inside, so bound up with us in a common process that it no longer makes sense to speak of inside and outside” (Burke et al., 2016, p. 502). The dawning of the age of the human hereby challenges modern understandings of security at the most fundamental level. In the entangled world, the idea that we can secure humanity against external threats is precisely the problem that needs to be overcome (Chandler, 2018, p. 10). In the words of Hamilton (2017b, p. 586, italics in original), “(i)f humans are nature, and the Anthropocene demands the securing of humanity (and all life) from the unpredictable planetary conditions “we” are “making”, then the aim of security ultimately becomes that of securing oneself from oneself “.

The entangled world is as much a philosophical event as an environmental one that challenges modern conceptions of who we are as humans and how we relate to the world around us. Humans are conceived simultaneously as central and all-powerful, and fragmented and insignificant (Fagan, 2017). By reaching into deep geological time, the human-induced ecological crisis offers a new cosmological origin and ending story that alters today’s basic presuppositions of what the Earth and the ‘human condition’ are (Hamilton, 2018, p. 391). “Even in the study of deep time and geological shifts, we cannot escape ourselves” (Harrington, 2016, p. 479). Faced with humanity’s overwhelming Earth-shaping powers we appear adrift, claim Johnson and Morehouse (2014, p. 442), “alienated not only from a world that refuses to submit to long-held conceptual frameworks, but also alienated from ourselves in relation to this strange and allegedly destructive thing called ‘humanity’“. The entangled world hereby forces IR into an uncomfortable place where many of the discipline’s organizing categories break down: the logics of inclusion and exclusion; the idea of agency and a unified human subject; and the imagination of an intelligible world as a whole (Fagan, 2017, p. 294). In face of the ontological shift brought about by the Anthropocene, IR is called upon to rethink the narrow anthropocentric, state-led, economistic boundaries that solidify the bygone age of the Holocene (Harrington, 2016, p. 480).

The entangled world presents a global scene of complex interconnections and interdependencies that cut across conventional geographical and temporal scales and species boundaries. Security cannot be achieved by resolute actions grounded in expression of power targeting ‘external’ threats, but only by re-embedding modern humanity in the multi-species world that we now are remaking. As argued by Burke et al. (2016, p. 502) we cannot survive without accepting the cosmopolitan and enmeshed nature of this world. In a world of entangled relations security comes from being more connected, not less (ibid). Against this backdrop McClanahan and Brisman (2015) find proposals from the US security establishment to wage war on climate change deeply problematic. Militaristic assertions that we can win the fight against climate change reproduce the modern understanding of nature as exterior that we so desperately need to transcend. What the world needs is instead a new global political project that makes peace with Earth and hereby secures mutual co-existence (Burke et al., 2016; McClanahan and Brisman, 2015). Such a project is by necessity post-human, claim Cudworth and Hobden (2013). In order to move beyond human centrism and domination we must recognize that social and political life always is bound up with non-human beings and things. In the Anthropocene the environment is not ‘out there’, but always ‘with’ and ‘in here’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013, p. 654). To end human-caused extinctions, prevent dangerous climate change, save the oceans, support vulnerable multi-species populations, and restore social justice, the entangled world therefore demands a ‘worldly politics’ that brings our multi-species interrelations to the foreground of global affairs (Burke et al., 2016).

2.3. The extractivist world: securing socio-ecological justice in capitalist ruins

The third IR discourse found in our sample pulls Anthropocene debates in a more neo-Marxist direction. Here we are also confronted with a world in radical transformation defined by unprecedented ecological destruction and insecurity. However, the Anthropocene is not primarily understood as geological marker of time or the symptom of anthropocentric modernity. In the extractivist world the center of concern is instead the global capitalist system and the monumental damage and injustice done by its ceaseless need for expansion, accumulation and extraction. As outlined by Sassen (2016, p. 90) the development of capitalism has, since its origins, been marked by violence, destruction, and appropriation. By digging up and burning large reserves of fossilized carbon, industrialized economies have long done damage to the biosphere and people living on the edges of the Western world. However, the past three decades of petroleum-powered economic globalization have reorganized human-nature relations on the largest possible scale. The extraordinary growth in industrial production, commodity markets, technological innovation and consumerism is now remaking the entire ecological context for humanity. The global ecological crisis must therefore be understood as a problem of production, claims Dalby (2014, p. 7). Making things now also means remaking ecologies and reconstructing the very geo of global politics.

The extractivist world presents a highly unstable, uncertain and risky political landscape in which the speed and scale of destruction has ruined the biosphere’s capacity to recover. As argued by Stubblefield (2018, p. 15) “capitalism does not merely produce commodities and (re)shape nature, but feasts upon and produces death—as it consumes the fossilized energy of the dead buried for millennia; as it inevitably kills cultures, ecosystems, humans, and non-human animals”. Degraded lands, polluted waters, destroyed livelihoods, and massive species extinction are therefore the dark signatures of the Anthropocene. The widespread production of devastated life spaces suggests that it is the process of expanding capital, and not humanity as such, that is at odds with nature (Stubblefield, 2018). As noted by Dalby (2017) human insecurity is now a matter relating to the global economy, its economic entitlements, and the technological systems in which those are enmeshed. While granting the rich unfettered access to resources and goods, the capitalist order increases the stress of those already at risk and hereby perpetuates landscapes of structural vulnerability and social injustice (Ribot, 2014). Waves of pain and suffering are now hitting people living on the edges of capitalist society and forcing vulnerable communities to give up their dead lands and join a growing urban precariat of “warehoused, displaced and trafficked laboring bodies” (Sassen, 2016, p. 90).

The extractivist world is a discourse that breaks with universalized stories of our contemporary ecological crisis. Although no one is immune to the terraforming effects of carboniferous capitalism, this discourse forefronts the diversity of human relations with nature and the political systems under which these relations emerge (Stubblefield, 2018). Rather than presenting the Anthropocene as the aggregated effect of an undifferentiated humanity, the extractivist world directs blame and liability and hereby links ecological damage to social organization and stratification (Ribot, 2014). In the extractivist world the climate stressors that arch through the sky are by no means natural. They are produced by a global political economy that requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of vulnerable people and ecosystems (Daggett, 2018; Ribot, 2014). While this fossil-fueled capitalist system is the real danger in the Anthropocene, it is forcefully protected by powerful economic and political elites. As proposed by Daggett (2018), fossil capitalism catalyzes the liberal democratic freedoms enjoyed by Western middle classes and fuels the energy-intensive and consumption-heavy lifestyles that extend across the planet. Concerns about climate change threaten these liberal consumer lifestyles and the white patriarchal orders that profit from them. This ‘catastrophic convergence’ between climate change, a threatened fossil fuel system, and an increasingly fragile liberal and patriarchal order, argues Daggett (2018), explains the rise of authoritarian movements marked by racism, misogyny, and climate denial in many Western states.

In the extractivist world the dangerous transformations of the global biosphere are symptoms of a political economy that commodifies and exploits environments and people. Serious efforts to come to terms with the damage done must therefore break with marketized solutions such as emissions trading or carbon offsetting and search for security beyond the circuits of capital. Everything else would be to accept, or even facilitate, the awaiting crises, claims Stubblefield (2018). As argued by Dalby (2013, p. 45), the rich industrial proportion of humanity has taken the fate of Earth into its own hands and is now determining what kinds of lives that get to be lived. Grasping the totality of material transformations is the pressing priority for anyone who thinks seriously about the future of humanity and our political arrangements. Rather than fiddling at the edges of carboniferous capitalism, security in the Anthropocene thus entails rapid social change that makes decarbonization of the global economy possible (Dalby, 2014). To break capital’s hold over life, argue Swyngedouw and Ernston (2018), we need to move beyond the depoliticized language of Earth system science and post-human philosophy and confront the contradictions of capitalist eco-modernization head on. In the extractivist world, technological fixes such as nuclear energy, carbon dioxide removal techniques or large-scale expansion of renewable energy technologies will not save us from the unfolding ecological crisis. Political renewal and security are instead sought in transformative social movements and local experimentation with less material-intensive and more just socio-ecological relations and ways of life (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018).

3. Rewriting Earth as political space

The Anthropocene is a troubling concept for troubled times. It speaks of a complex, interconnected and unstable world marked by globalized and manufactured risks that now are threatening the very life-upholding systems upon which human civilizations rest. In contrast to the hopeful and reassuring concept of sustainable development that has guided international environmental cooperation since the early 1990s, the Anthropocene is wedded into a language of fear and sorrow in view of irreparable loss of Arctic ice sheets, mass species extinction, acidified oceans and degraded lands. It confronts us with the dangers of a transformed global environment and the apparent failure of the modern state-system to offer effective and peaceful responses to the same. While this new vocabulary has gained widespread circulation in recent years, the Anthropocene remains a contested and ambiguous formulation that points in many different political directions (Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019). Since first introduced in Earth system science circles in the late 1990s, the concept has stirred heated interdisciplinary debate and been challenged, rejected and reworked by an expanding scholarship.

In this paper we have traced how the Anthropocene is interpreted and acted upon in the study of international relations. When navigating through our sample of 52 journal articles we found growing alarm in view of the self-imposed threats and security implications of a radically climate changed world, and mounting frustration with the failure of traditional IR theories and concepts to make analytical sense of the same. However, we also found important differences in the interpretations of the Anthropocene, with significant implications for the future of world politics. In the discourse that we call the endangered world the entire life-support system of the planet is under threat and the role of world politics is to regain control for the sake of human wellbeing and security. Rather than directing blame, this discourse is concerned with the aggregated human effects on the Earth system and the possibility of bringing the planet back to a safe Holocene-like state. In the endangered world, integrated scientific assessments and international policy coordination are the means for responsible Earth system stewardship and governance. In order to gain control over the unfolding sustainability crisis and hereby secure the future of modern civilization, this discourse insists that the world needs strong global institutions that can balance competing national interests and facilitate coordinated policy responses.

In the entangled world, by contrast, the idea that we can effectively govern the Anthropocene and hereby secure humanity against external threats is precisely the problem that needs to be overcome. In this discourse the modern spatializations of the world into nature and culture, subject and object, inside and outside are replaced by much more contingent, fragile and unpredictable networks of interrelations. In order to secure peaceful co-existence in the multi-species world that we now are re-making, the entangled world insists that we recognize modern civilization as a philosophical and political dead-end and search for a worldly politics that extends beyond human centrism and domination. The Anthropocene here becomes an invitation to rethink our institutions, commitments and rules and to forge new forms of cooperation built upon participation, solidarity and justice beyond the state and indeed the human (Burke et al., 2016, 507). While the entangled world is a discourse that seeks to break free from state-centric forms of global governance, the search for political alternatives remains unfinished and includes liberal institutionalist ideas of cosmopolitan democracy as well as bottom-up politics of subversion and resistance (Chandler et al., 2018).

The final Anthropocene discourse presented in this paper centers around the global capitalist system and the monumental damage and injustice done by its ceaseless need for expansion, accumulation and extraction. In the extractivist world degraded lands, polluted waters, destroyed livelihoods, and massive species extinction are the dark signatures of a fossil-fueled political economy that grants the rich unfettered access to resources and goods at the expense of vulnerable people and environments. In order to address the damage done and hereby secure socio-ecological justice, this discourse calls for transformative politics that breaks with technical fixes and marketized solutions and searches for political renewal in grassroots experiments and social movements operating beyond the circuits of capital.

The results from this discursive cartography are by no means ubiquitous. The geopolitical discourses emerging from our material are heterogeneous, partly overlapping and thus difficult to neatly separate. The articles analyzed here draw inspiration from a long heritage of liberal institutionalist, post-humanist and neo-Marxist thinking, and often combine these intellectual resources in intricate ways to make sense of our problem-ridden Earth. While the articles included in our study offer competing stories of Anthropocene endangerment and security, they all present a new scene for global politics. The damage done to the global biosphere is of such magnitude, we are told, that nature no longer functions as a stable and passive ground for the human drama that we can rely on. By digging up and burning large reserves of fossilized carbon, modern industrial society has pushed many ecosystems beyond their Holocene comfort zones and hereby altered the material context or the very geo of global politics. This new world of humanity’s own making effectively unsettles the geographical assumptions and ‘rules of the game’ that underpin familiar scripts of international relations (both realist and liberal). In the articles reviewed here we learn about non-linear, transboundary and closely coupled risks that now are travelling across the planet and linking states, people and environments in complex, unexpected and potentially dangerous ways. In this highly interconnected and risky world, neither state-centric representations of global space nor traditional security thinking make analytical or political sense. The traditional geopolitical categories of inside and outside, domestic and foreign, friends and foe are deeply questioned, along with conceptions of state, security and sovereignty. In the Anthropocene the political boundaries that constituted the Holocene world are eroding, we are told, and our transformed global environment now plays an integral and active part of the global drama.

Where this rethinking of global politics will lead us is too early to tell. IR debates on the Anthropocene are still unfolding and contain a broad mix of dystopian scenarios, social critique, novel ethical claims and challenging ontological propositions. So far, the discourses outlined here are found at the margins of the IR literature, and primarily seem to involve a Northern environmental scholarship. While the grand philosophical gestures and structural critique found in these debates may frustrate those who are interested in developing policy solutions to the environmental challenges of our times, we note that the Anthropocene is a travelling concept that already is beginning to shape policy thinking and practice. In Angela Merkel’s speech to the Munich security conference in 2019, the profound traces of humankind on Earth’s biological systems was staged as a major threat that requires new security responses (Merkel, 2019). Merkel’s speech was not the first time the Anthropocene concept entered policy debates, but likely the most recognized. Two additional policy sites where the Anthropocene concept now circulates include the Planetary Security Conference in the Hague, hosted by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop knowledge and policies on climate-induced security risks (Chin and Kingham, 2016, p. 3), and the Centre for Climate and Security, a non-partisan security institute based in Washington DC (Werrell and Femia, 2017). Exactly how the Anthropocene vocabulary will influence direct frameworks, policies and decisions is of course difficult to tell, and given that the concept is debated, it will probably take time before its practical implications become clear. However, by challenging existing frameworks of thinking, we expect that the discursive scene of the Anthropocene will leave important marks on the study and practice of international relations in the years to come.

References

Appendix: Full list of reviewed journal articles

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