Bringing the climate into existence

Abstract

This special issue takes up the problem of how, where and through what methodological means the study of international relations, and ourselves as scholars, may be brought into closer connection to climate change and contribute to the social and political change critical to responding to global environmental degradation. In the introduction, I begin from where I became aware of the absence of climate change in how I studied and analysed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I came to look back on and understand this absence through a journey that I was taken on by collaboration and with writers of and from other worlds. This provides a starting point to explore where the articles and commentaries take us as they chart their own journeys through the discipline of IR in the study of climate change. Each article articulates particular dimensions of the challenge that the special issue grapples with as it sets out to examine how, where and through what means the study of international relations may be re-rooted in closer relation to the Earth.

It may be obvious that the climate now exists as a critical issue in the study of International Relations and that its presence and visibility continue to grow, as evidenced through a range of markers. ¹ However, I want to suggest that a relationship to a changing climate can still remain absent from how international relations is thought, as I illustrate through re-examining how I studied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This special issue was motivated by a shared sense that while climate change has got its grip on international relations (ir); International Relations (IR) as a field of study has not quite got to grips with climate change, which is impacting the discipline’s capacity to contribute to the necessary system level social, political and economic transformation. The articles and commentaries were built from conversations initiated at a virtual roundtable at ISA 2021, continued across a series of virtual presentations from September 2022 to February 2023, and culminated in a 2-day workshop held at Aberystwyth in June 2023. The discussions that have travelled from roundtable to reviewer back to author have circled problems of defining and determining the discipline of IR, the limits of knowing climate change through this disciplining, and how and where international relations in the name of addressing global environmental degradation is and could be known and practiced differently. ² The articles speak to and from the conversations had in these forums alongside authors’ scholarly trajectories and designated intervention points.

The special issue is less about what we already know about climate change in IR and more about grappling with new ground from which to know it differently. Sometimes such a task requires a bit of uprooting and stone turning by authors to take a good hard look at what is obscured beneath. Inevitably however, the accounts are particular, situated in the knowledges and literatures that have informed the authors understanding of the relationship between the study of international relations and climate change. ³ These accounts provide the basis from which authors offer possible new starting points and seeds for rooting the study of international relations more deeply in the earth. Being particular, they are also partial. Important contributions to the study of the environment will be missed and the huge personal and collective effort that scholars have made to advance the study of climate change in international relations may feel diminished. It is for this reason that from the outset I recognise that knowing IR through climate change and climate change through IR has been and is a scholarly effort that has been ongoing over 30 years. This special issue is one tributary into that stream.

To provide some common ground to journey into these articles, I will tell the story of how I became aware of the absence of climate change in my thinking, describe why I feel this matters, and chart a course through the articles and commentaries that may offer seeds for re-rooting the study of ir in closer relationship to the climate.

Where is the climate?

I was finishing the introduction to my book, writing about the journey I had taken in a decade long study of who has the power to determine the meaning of climate change through research of the IPCC. ⁴ There was one aspect of this research that always puzzled me, which was the seeming absence of the climate. Every so often, I looked up from what I was doing – interviewing, observing, writing – and realised that climate change was nowhere to be seen. How could I be doing a project about the relationship between knowledge and power in climate politics and environmental degradation be so far from view? It still puzzles me, but slowly I have gained some insight, which I feel matters for how international relations of the climate is studied.

I was re-writing the introduction. The paragraph was on Bourdieu’s notion of naming as an attempt to ‘fix forever’ a set of power relations ‘by enunciating and codifying’, ⁵ and it was here that the puzzling came to a head. I was trying to describe how the practice of naming climate change – what I label the IPCC’s practice of writing – inscribes particular ways of knowing and valuing the environment, which are reflective of the dominant cultural system that orders the social relations and underpins the activities that constitute the practice. However, no matter how I tried to arrange or rearrange the words, I could not write a sentence on how the relationship to the environment was valued within the culture that I had studied. In that moment, I realised I was experiencing what I had learned through many hours of conversation with Marcela Vecchione Gonçalves and was gaining a sense of from reading Indigenous and Black authors ⁶ : there is no relationship or conception of the relationship to a living world to speak of, at least there wasn’t in the social constructions of climate change that I had studied. In these ways of knowing, the environment is a separate system, and unless this relationship is converted to a social, political or economic value it simply does not exist in social organisation. And so, climate change came to not exist in my research either.

The analytical approach that I had developed for the book had no conception of vegetal relations (as referred to by Erzsébet Strausz in the special issue ⁷ ), and I could not write about how a cultural system valued the environment in an introduction where it had not been studied. I deleted the sentence and wrote the following instead: ‘The classificatory schemes that the book interrogates are the cultural systems that determine the values and distribution of social, scientific, political and economic resources, which imprint on and in the name of climate change’. ⁸ The physical environment, its changes and our individual and collective relationship to these are absent. This is not a way of thinking or studying international relations to address global environmental degradation that I can continue with. I want to contribute to a study of international relations where the value of the relationship between myself and a living world around me are at the centre. This special issue aims to identify and lay ground that can contribute to this re-rooting of the study of international relations in and for the climate.

I may have come to this realisation earlier had I started somewhere else – new materialism, for example, could have led me here this from the outset. ⁹ Reading the IPCC’s social relations through Latour’s actor-network theory, ¹⁰ Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizomes ¹¹ or Haraway’s cyborgs ¹² may have gotten me here quicker. But learning for myself has been powerful. It was enabled by being taken into worlds where relations are ordered differently to my own and looking back from there. ¹³ However, from this point of reflecting between worlds, I also know that having the Earth in my work is not enough. I would like to stop there; to only write about the non-existence of the climate, but it goes deeper than that. You see, I also do not exist. I was mopping the floor, mulling over the profound irony of spending a decade studying an organisation because I cared about the environment, only to find the climate was absent, and it dawned on me. I too am absent from my research. As a living, sentient being, I am absent in the same way the Earth is – our chemistry is the same. I write about what I think and what I have come to understand, but only part of my presence remains, in fact, only part of my being has ever been in my scholarship, which is the part of me that thinks. But I am not only thought; I am flesh, I am the feeling that is the connection between these parts and I am a point from which I reflect on this. I could continue to write these bits out, to not disturb the surface and remain hidden. However, I am afraid that if it is not collectively understood that the decrease of life on Earth and the partial existence of ourselves in dominant forms of knowledge are related, then there will only be more of the same in the political response to climate change and collective writing of this.

But why does my mind and my being – its particularity – matter to IR and the study of how collective relations are ordered in the name of addressing climate change? ¹⁴ I matter and you matter in IR because it is the collective reality that we hold or accept to be true – the way we think things are – that through our participation in the world (thinking, producing knowledge and acting on the world) that a world is brought into being and re-made day by day, thought by thought, action by action. ¹⁵ Addressing climate change, means addressing ourselves, even when studying international relations, because the climate is being made in our relations with ourselves, with each other and with all other beings, including the Earth. I am the ultimate climate reality maker, as are you. The purpose of this special issue is to offer ground to re-examine the climate relations that are held in IR, to further destabilise dominant ground and ultimately, to offer starting points rooted in different relations with the Earth and with and from different worlds that can contribute to allowing collective realities that live with and from a changing climate, and even thrive in it.

How has environmental study been rooted in IR?

Where to begin? When I teach climate politics, I start with the state, because when students come to me, that is what they know, and I like to start on seemingly solid ground so that together we can question the foundations that we stand on. It is with the state that my account of the special issue begins as well, as in this context too it remains productive for unravelling the taken for necessary and questioning, why the state? To which Alena Drieschova’s article immediately retorts, which state? It turns out, as scholarship on non-Western IR has highlighted, it is not only a relation to the environment that is obscured in how international relations is studied, but most of the world’s societies as well. ¹⁶

Drieschova draws on the concept of liminal to explore Central European States and their complex relationship with climate change and the environment more broadly. This space in-between recognised and named objects of study becomes an important theme across articles in the special issue, as authors reflect on what not being seen means and does for how international relations is known and studied. Looking through CEE countries, Drieschova suggests that ‘liminals want to be somewhere else’ and are frequently reminded through EU climate policy-making that they should be something and somewhere else. ¹⁷ This is an important observation, because as Drieschova indicates, ‘There needs to be room for critique, while also avoiding complete self-loathing’. ¹⁸ As we move into the space between worlds in later articles, authors highlight how this liminal space can be productive of this form of evaluation and reflection, a process that opens up space for individual and collective change. ¹⁹

It is the thought practice of looking to and through the state that has made security a central concept in exploring the meaning of climate change in the study of IR. As Matt McDonald documents through his review of the place of the environment and climate in IR, many scholars, and frequently students, begin here. ²⁰ It is through the lens of traditional security studies that McDonald reveals the tension in holding the state as both the threatened referent and the agent of action. McDonald highlights the work that critical security scholarship has undertaken to reveal the poor fit between state security apparatus both in addressing climate related threats and realising a collective response (through which the threat could be lessened). Scholars of global environmental politics might further highlight the productive role of the state in degradation and the entwined relationship between state legitimacy, economic growth and the narrowing of lifestyle choices. ²¹ While McDonald outlines the achievement of this scholarship in challenging accepted political institutions in thought and practice, new ground for building alternative political imaginations remains untested and the notion of liminal – somewhere lodged between the state and security – remains pertinent.

Tackling this issue head on, Peter Newell travels through Green thought to identify three interlinked pillars of IR – militarism, growthism and anthropocentrism – that as underlying assumption and taken for necessary starting point are productive of degrading human and environmental conditions. ²² Newell describes how each of these pillars is generative of key threats in world politics, including war and poverty and the ecological crisis, and points us to the fact that as a result, IR is a discipline focused on the forces of death rather than the conditions of life. It is from this uneasy account of where a scholar may find themselves located – subject to and producer of dominant forces in international relations – that it becomes necessary to pause and ask again, if not from here then where? Newell begins to unpack what thinking ecologically has and might entail and illuminates a tension between ‘environmentalism’ and ‘ecologism’, where the former sees a possibility of addressing issues within the current system and the latter, where the current economic system, dominant power relations and anthropocentrism are the root of the problem.

Steven Bernstein takes up this problem through his concern with how change is understood in disciplinary thinking and how it can be advanced to ensure IR’s contribution to social and political transformation for the climate. ²³ Bernstein brings the values and purposes that underpin and drive scholarship into view by introducing the term axiology, which again reveals a disciplinary tension between the aim of stabilising the current system versus destabilising a degrading order. Here Bernstein suggests that IR might learn from the journey that climate scholars have taken in coming to terms with and accepting the lack of control over the direction that change comes from and moves towards. Using the 1.5°C target and net zero, Bernstein illustrates the complexity created by the depth of political struggle over climate change and indicates that shifting ontologically to relational approaches can facilitate clearer accounts of ‘how changing experiences and relationships of the climate, assets, capitalism and survival’ play out in practice. ²⁴ In this context, the purpose of scholarship is ‘less about developing a theory of change than to encourage research strategies that are open to it’. Some readers may be left feeling inpatient and dissatisfied with a research strategy that leaves them as monitor to ‘unfolding trajectories over time’. ²⁵ However, complexity, acceptance for its messy contradictions and musing on how we might understand, analyse or simply learn to live with it again comes to the fore in the remaining special issues articles where authors are situated at spaces and sites between worlds.

Looking at climate relations between worlds

In her article on the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature (ITRN), Amaya Querejazu recreates for her reader a portal between worlds that she experienced as participant and observer at tribunal hearings. ²⁶ As she recounts the proceedings and identifies how sources of knowledge and input are bridged by both judges and witnesses, she reveals a critical juncture or portal that is easily overlooked as insignificant or absent altogether. The ITRN creates a meeting of worlds, however, to be recognised as a pluriverse demands something of the researcher. Querejazu identifies research strategies to see and (make) sense of life between worlds, that enables the ITRN to be viewed as it is by Indigenous participants and activists, who arrive prepared to intervene at a critical site in the politics of worldmaking. Drawing on Arturo Escobar’s sentipensar (feeling/thinking), ²⁷ she writes on the importance of attuning to emotions both as a strategy for bridging lifeworlds within the ITRN and as a research method for becoming cognizant of this unfolding interaction in the proceedings. It is for this that Querejazu concludes that ‘tribunals may be ecocentred, liberal and pluriversal at the same time, a relational both/and instead of an atomistic either/or’. ²⁸ As scholarship has been at pains to demonstrate, ontologies co-exist in IR too, and Querejazu’s article is revealing of how a discipline may think itself as a place or site where, as scholars, we co-exist with and alongside different ontologies and epistemologies that are productive of different worlds. ²⁹

This looking and living between worlds is further revealed by Veronica Gonçalves, Cristina Inoue, Juliana Lins and Thais Ribeiro when they follow the creation of Indigenous climate funds in the Amazon. ³⁰ This brings us squarely into the messy, complex and competing dynamics of climate finance and to new sources of funding that are based on values and rules for financial disbursement organised for and by Indigenous recipients in the Amazon. Based on observation at COP26 and an interview with a fund’s director, the authors speak of their fear of capture and co-option, bringing to the surface a powerful emotion and motivating force in the study of international relations. Gonçalves et al.’s research reveals however, that as in the case of the ITRN, it is neither a subsumption of worlds to serve the dominant economic interests or purely a realisation of organisation from Indigenous values and strategic engagement. It is a movement towards the realisation of a pluriverse – a climate justice in motion – as the authors term it, that is enabled through Indigenous justice claims and their attempts to re-negotiate the basis and ordering principles of climate finance. This brings to the fore that sites of friction, translation and resistance constitutive of these climate struggles and driven by actors frequently designated as at the margins, are places where international relations can and is being transformed.

The climate in the IR researcher and the IR researcher in the climate

The articles of the special issue write and speak to the reader from in-between spaces. This provides a view from distinct situations, often at meeting points between worlds, revealing things that aren’t always visible from the centre. This illuminates how forms of IR thinking can contain us within and reproduce through thought environmentally destructive relations. However, until this point, we have remained at a distance from the climate itself – the journey through international relations that each article has taken us through has barely touched or brought into view the atmosphere and ecosystems that we inhabit. Erzsébet Strausz changes this. ³¹ Strausz brings us in a relationship to vegetal life through her own experience of forming a relationship to a tree and reflecting on art form that captures the human in the tree and the tree in the human. By taking us through her journey with the 7000 HUMANS participatory project and contemplative practice informed through her reading of L. H. Ling’s Imagining World Politics, Strausz’s article brings us back to where we started. It is through embodied sense-making practices that Strausz takes on the epic task of forming a conscious relationship once more to the more-than-human world, and equally daunting, of navigating a way to write this into and as constituent of international relations. Feeling her way through this with the reader at her side, she reminds us that it is inner relations that offer the promise of enabling ‘new epistemologies and imaginative horizons of not only what could be done, but also who we might become in and through our relations’. ³²

It is here that are commentators, Audra Mitchell and Ronnie Lipschutz, remind us to stay cautious and ever attentive to the pennaceous nature of thinking International Relations. Lipschutz highlights two tensions in the collection. First, he reads a continued omnipresence of the state, even as foil. ³³ Second, he interprets the relational approach that is the basis of many of the articles as an alter-ontology, requiring of a different way of being. He highlights the difficulty of this through the re-inscription of the state that he reads in the articles. He also finds himself left wanting from authors in terms of clear guidance in achieving this ‘new being’ collectively, as well as preparation for its affect. Mitchell too asserts the structural violence of ‘colonialism, racism, ableism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, eugenics and alloys emerging from them’ embodied and multiplied in dominant knowledge forms in IR. However, she maintains hope in the possibility of re-rooting collective knowledge of international relations through greater embrace of earthly processes. Mitchell highlights the significance that generative decay, including of our thought structures, holds for decomposing, biodegrading and composting existing power relations for the purpose of releasing the energy and resources necessary for nourishing new ways of knowing and being in changing worlds.

Conclusion

I am not sure where I thought I would end up when we started our conversation on the place of climate change in IR and changing IR for the climate, but the journey and its final outcome feel unexpected. Rather than coursing through the middle, each of the articles has, in its own way, laid a path along the edge and between worlds, and at sites that may not have been considered significant places for climate politics at all. In doing so, the authors reveal that change is and has taken place in how international relations is known and practiced in the name of responding to environmental degradation already. ³⁴ This is most evident when Amaya Querejazu, Veronica Gonçalves, et al. take us into the world of the ITRN and the creation of Indigenous climate finance. However, it is also present in the review of dominant concepts and starting points in IR. When Alena Drieschova revealed the view from ‘liminal’ states, Matt McDonald toured the concept of climate security, Peter Newell looked to and through green political theory and Steven Bernstein recounted key struggles in climate politics a record of how thinking has changed with the climate in IR is documented, as is, how far there remains to travel.

These articles point to the importance of becoming aware and attentive to the processes and locales where change is in the making even if it is not what might be considered the right kind of change, significant enough or in sufficient form as deemed by particular ways of thinking international relations. This makes apparent that while this change is happening, has happened and will continue, it is easily missed and overlooked, despite of (and perhaps because of) scholarly certainties about what change is and where it takes place. What also becomes clear through the journeys authors chart through climate relations is that in IR we are all writers of worlds of international relations. The enormity of power invested in writing of worlds makes scholarly modes of engagement as significant as modes of thought. Here, Erzsebet Strausz’s account of relating with trees reminds us that it is easy to be quick, to carry on the same and to not change direction of thought. In contrast, to know differently takes space and attention to detail – detail that is invisible and space that is erased in haste. It is in looking again, sitting with something a while longer, attuning ourselves to something that feels different, waiting for understanding to settle that as a scholar and as a human, we may see and write ourselves and international relations differently. This points to the fact, that this journey for change is as much a journey within as it is in the world. ³⁵ The world is already different to what I thought it was, as am I, I only have to see it as such.