Back from the dead: the ecology of IR

Abstract

Rather than dealing in death, if IR is to retain relevance among the social sciences in seeking to both account for and change a world in the midst of a deepening ‘polycrisis’, it needs to recognise and take its place in the web of life. In this article, I firstly argue for the need to ‘choose life’ by de-centring three key (interrelated) pillars of the discipline: the normalisation of militarism as a means and end of foreign policy; economic growth as the means and end of industrial economies and anthropocentrism and its unstated ideology of human supremacy in world affairs. Secondly, I propose a series of conceptual and methodological innovations by which a more ecological view of IR might take hold in the discipline, as well as concrete political strategies for embedding it in the conduct of IR. I suggest that these moves form the basis of both an improved account of the underlying sources of key threats in world politics such as war, poverty and ecological crises and an alternative source of solutions focussed on transcending dominant features of the discipline through a more than human account of IR and a more global and pluriversal account of world politics and the relations which matter most within it.

Introduction

This paper represents a ‘what if?’ exercise. What if as IR scholars we thought about the pursuit of stability, prosperity and peace in a way that departs from an anthropocentric world view anchored in growth and militarism? This means consciously engaging with issues and questions ‘the’ discipline takes to be foundational: the preservation of order, prevention of war and the enhancement of human well-being, but in doing so suggesting both the limits of dominant approaches to achieving these aims and highlighting the existence of alternatives which could provide entry points for a more ecological conception and practice of IR. It is an exercise in simultaneously de-centring ecocidal orthodoxes while visibilising alternatives more consistent with the maintenance of life on earth. Hence it provides a more granular and applied account than general theorisations of IR in the Anthropocene and moves beyond critique to discussion of concrete political, theoretical and methodological intervention points to advance a more ecological IR which improves upon our understanding of both the causes of planetary disorder and solutions to them, furnished in particular by neglected strands of green political theory.

Though you would not know it from reading most literature in the discipline, IR does not stand side outside an intricate web of human and more than human life. Nature has always been there in IR of course. But traditionally it mainly appears as a structuring condition, a threat, part of the ‘state of nature’: a Hobbesian dystopia to be feared, which in IR takes the form of an anarchical society. ¹ The ‘law of the jungle’, or ‘nature unchecked’ as Kaplan called it in his seminal piece on ‘The Coming Anarchy’ ² is often posited as the state to be avoided, that which is to be tamed and contained through international institutions, law and diplomacy to bring order and control to global affairs. ‘Bio’ warfare, zoonotic diseases such as bird flu, swine flu and pandemics including Covid-19, seem to affirm ‘bio-anxieties’ ³ : the idea of nature as out of control, contagious, in need of containment . Eco-feminists have long posited the ways in which systems of oppression of women and nature are premised on this desire for control and subjugation to the imperatives of modern industrial and patriarchal systems. ⁴ But a sense in which dependence on nature for our survival might also constitute an opportunity to reinterpret and build a better world is often lacking from discussions in IR. A key purpose of this paper is to reclaim that sense by showing how critical strands of scholarship and activism can help to disrupt IR’s ecocidal tendencies and form the basis of a more ecological IR in which all worlds matter.

More narrowly defined of course, ‘the environment’ has secured for itself an established place on the agenda of world politics and within the study and practice of International Relations, despite explicit and ongoing efforts to keep it on the ‘periphery’ of the discipline. ⁵ A raft of multilateral environmental agreements is now in place, architectures of global environmental governance have been assembled and areas of ‘high politics’ such as security and trade have been forced (often reluctantly and belatedly) to respond to environmental concerns. To account for these developments, a vibrant body of scholarship now exists on global environmental politics and earth systems governance. ⁶ Despite its still predominantly liberal institutionalist focus on the emergence and evolution of international regimes governing issues such as climate change, biodiversity and ozone depletion, ⁷ there is also a critical body of work which draws from different strands of political economy to account for the structures of power which perpetuate environmental crises. ⁸ Nevertheless, insights from Green politics which locate these crises in dominant ways of organising the economy and politics, as opposed to generic disciplinary and existential anxieties proposed by the ‘Anthropocene provocation’, ⁹ are remarkably absent from discussions and debates in global politics and from academic enquiry about them. This is despite important, but scattered, contributions over a period of forty years from IR scholars ¹⁰ and before that the work of a small body of pioneering scholars from the 1960s to the early 1980s. ¹¹ Foregrounding insights from this body of work, I argue, serves to both disrupt key givens of the discipline of IR around speciesism, growth and militarism and propose alternative ways of organising global society.

In calling for ‘planet politics’ Burke et al justifiably ask, ‘If the biosphere is collapsing, and if International Relations has always presented itself as that discourse which takes the global as its point of departure, how is it that we – IR’s scholars, diplomats and leaders – have not engaged with the planetary real?’ ¹² The prerequisites for a sustainable society might be thought to include stability, order and peace which form central preoccupations for the discipline of IR. Yet as Laferièrre and Stoett suggest, ‘While structural realism has produced an interesting debate over the implications of shifts in Great Power parity, it has yet to seriously consider the shifts inherent in an even more fundamental context of human affairs- the biosphere itself’. ¹³ From an ecological point of view, stability and security pursued through strategies which give pride of place to state-based militarism, is illusory. Likewise, if the order to be preserved is based on the operations of a global capitalist economy, peace and sustainability will remain a distant prospect in a context of deepening social inequalities and environmental devastation.

IR has largely failed to seriously address the implications of thinking ecologically, preferring to treat the environment within traditional and dominant theoretical categories and perspectives. Hence even though ‘Ecology could provide a radical language that could alter the usual conceptions of peace/order/justice etc found in IR theory’, ¹⁴ IR theory continues to neglect the value of ecological thought to political theory. This is notwithstanding high levels of interest in mainstream IR in questions of geopolitics and how resource abundance and imbalances can reconfigure the balance of power or exacerbate war through scarcity ¹⁵ and growing attention to the Anthropocene, as noted above. Laferièrre and Stoett’s book International Relations and Ecological Thought published at the turn of the century broke important ground in showing how radical ecological thought in particular relates to key theories in IR of Realism, Liberalism and Critical theory. ¹⁶ Many of their critiques of the neglect of ecological thought in IR remain frustratingly pertinent today, despite the steady consolidation of global environmental politics as a sub-field of the discipline.

There is a distinction to be drawn then between ‘environmentalism’ and ‘ecologism’ where the former addresses the symptoms of ecological crisis by tackling issues one at a time and in isolation, whereas the latter seeks to address their causes. Ecologism is grounded in different strands of green political theory ¹⁷ : a set of theoretical and political resources neglected even by scholars writing about the Anthropocene who suggest, for example, that addressing the latter ‘can be accomplished without abandoning IR’s central foci, which we might faithfully limit to war, security, and the effects of an anarchical international society on states’. ¹⁸ For most Greens, the causes of our current predicament lie in the nature and contemporary organisation of the global economy, dominant power relations and anthropocentrism. This is what distinguishes more radical socio-ecological thinking from approaches within global environmental politics which focus on those politics within a ‘given area of international relations’ taking their cue from regime theory in IR. ¹⁹ Comprehending the deeper drivers of our current predicament means confronting hard-wired ideologies and structural imperatives associated with economic growth and militarism and their associated anthropocentrism in an ‘only human’ understanding of world politics. I suggest that drawing on strands of work within ecologism both as a body of political thought and philosophy and a repository of practice, unsettles, challenges and transcends key ‘givens’ in the study and conduct of IR. For the purposes of this paper, I focus on here on three key ‘givens’ in IR (and the interdependencies or relationalities between them) in turn: speciesism, growth and militarism. I outline ways in which ecological thinking both challenges and helps to transcend these givens and thus helps to provide the basis of an ecology of IR.

Beyond speciesism

Anthropocene world politics are built around the assumption, often unstated, that the biosphere exists as a set of resources to meet human needs and desires. Human duties and responsibilities to other species and beings with which we share the planet are rarely articulated in anything other than general platitudes around stewardship, responsible management or the invocation of a (under-specified and human-centred) common future. ²⁰ For most bodies of theory, including more critical feminist, queer, constructivist and postcolonial strands, the de-centring of the human as the main and often sole point of reference and purpose of theorising would pose considerable challenges to their ontologies and normative assumptions. Despite significant victories around animal welfare and the protection of ecosystems, ²¹ advocacy and activism have struggled to establish the worth of more than human nature as intrinsic or of value beyond its instrumental benefit to humans as a source of food, clothing, materials, shelter and so on. As Fougner states, ‘it is no understatement to argue both that the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) operates as if animals hardly exist, and that most of its practitioners seem completely ignorant of the anthropocentric and speciesist underpinnings of the discipline and their own work’. ²² Where they do appear, it is often as collateral damage in wider waves of biodiversity loss, or else the preoccupation is with when they disappear (extinction) rather how they live. Concern quickly returns to what this means for ‘us’ as humans as the primary point of reference.

This hard-wired anthropocentrism takes as given a bountiful cornucopia available for exploitation to meet human ends. Its origins can be traced back to the thought of Descartes, Darwin and other leading philosophers and scientists whose works helped to (re)produce social worlds with humans at the apex, there through natural selection and claims that rationalism is the only basis of agency and rights. In terms of defining the boundaries of political community, responsibilities and duty of care, as Boyer et al. argue, ‘when Aristotle laid the groundwork for the empirical study of politics and staked out its subject matter, he did so by explicitly excluding animals from the polis’. ²³ But such world views premised on human supremacy also find justification and resonance in many religious texts about the dominion of humans over nature, reinforced by colonial mindsets of pillage and looting premised upon racial hierarchies and human/nature binaries and enforced through violence and subjugation. Through these means, dominant systems of value enable forms of ‘epistemicide’: the erasure of other ways of knowing (indigenous, tribal, female, collective). For example, as Querejazu suggests, ‘IR has marginalized difference not only by disciplining epistemologies, but also by rejecting other ontologies, particularly those which belong to indigenous peoples, by relegating them to the realm of myths, legends and beliefs.’ ²⁴

This policing of value systems and human only worldviews is reinforced by the hegemony of economics and the drive to ascribe value through the prism of the market and its reductionist and anthropocentric logics ²⁵ underpinned by a particular notion of scientific reasoning and ‘objective’ calculation of costs and benefits (for humans). Disciplinary silos have rendered it impossible to understand more than human nature in its entirety, leaving ecology as a minor player compared with other disciplines whose analytical gaze is less holistic and more anthropocentric. But as critical scholars have shown, ecocide is also policed through the construction and imposition of boundaries around the value of species: to either care for/preserve/eat/torture. ²⁶ The consequences of this violent anthropocentrism are observable in mass extinction events, the huge increase in zoonotic diseases as non-human habitats are destroyed and the growing number of ‘positive’ feedback effects as ecosystems can no longer perform their roles in helping (self) regulate carbon and water cycles because of their over-exploitation and the surpassing of key tipping points. ²⁷

Conceptually and methodologically, one starting point for advancing a more than human IR is to acknowledge the agency of the non-human world as being material to world political outcomes, an endeavour which could benefit from insights from actor network theory and the new materialism ²⁸ reflected in the idea that ‘we have never been (only) human’. Work in this vein provides a more generous and realistic account of the distribution of agency across human and more than human assemblages in global politics which helps to account for the ways human aspirations and attempts at control of the ecosystems of which they are part are so often frustrated or result in failure. ²⁹ This at least opens up the opportunity of recognising (and acting upon) interdependencies and new relationalities. ³⁰ As Kurki suggests, ‘relational cosmology’ can help facilitate engagement with situated knowledges and deep-going relationalities across ‘nature’ and ‘society’, ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ communities’. ³¹ This implies discarding an ontology grounded in the sovereign, autonomous nation-state that has ‘relations’ to other nation-states in an ecological void and rather locates such interactions as one strand in a ‘web of relationalities’ that bind the fact of human and more than human subjects together akin to Moore’s ‘web of life’. ³²

This move could entail a shift of purpose and standpoint from the bird’s eye view of an international system organised by and for humans in atomistic ways against a background of pervasive conflict, to an appreciation of a complex ecosystem of mutual interdependencies and practices of cooperation between humans and other species and life forms premised on the possibility of more convivial (and as a result more sustainable) forms of co-existence grounded in an ‘interspecies politics’. ³³ Some authors, for example, have contrasted a ‘relational-ecological’ disposition among Australian Aboriginal people with IR’s predominant ‘survivalist’ disposition, ³⁴ or explored how Amazonian Kichwa thinking can ‘fold an inter-human “international” into a continuum of relations that include human-nonhuman ones’. At minimum, it requires a recognition of pluriversal politics and the active embrace of traditions which take ecology and more than human nature seriously. ³⁵ But a key challenge is to ask the question the other way. Not just what non-western and anthropocentric worldviews can do for IR, but what can a more inclusive IR do to enhance the voice and life chances of the people articulating those worldviews whose defence of the environment benefits everyone. ³⁶ By explicitly decentring humans, as Eckersley suggests, Green politics introduces ‘an important note of humility and compassion into our understanding of our place on earth’ ³⁷ and does so by advancing eco-centric rather than anthropocentric world views. Building on these insights, the political and normative project is one of ‘decentring the human’, embracing humility and recognising the worth morally, ethically, politically and ecologically of more than human life.

At the level of strategy, challenges to speciesism could take a number of forms. One of them involves visibilising more than human actors such animals and plants and the relationships of care in which they are entwined: bringing them to life in the human gaze and learning from them in order to develop more healthy multispecies relationships. Insights from the more than human world around interdependence and cooperation and the rhizomic and entangled nature of relations between humans and non-humans ³⁸ upset anthropocentric and human-centred hierarchies and could enable IR scholars to write nature into stories about the world: how it came to be, how value is created and radical co-existence sustained. For example, Fishel shows in her discussion of the ‘global tree’ how ‘Foregrounding the forest’s materiality and trees’ symbolic power for human cultures opens important pathways to understanding how the non-human is, and should, alter and affect global politics’. ³⁹ Concretely, as well as documenting the impact of human destruction upon more than humans: for example, the deaths of horses in the first world war or the destruction of bison on indigenous lands as part of settler colonialism, ⁴⁰ the ‘free’ labour animals provide for all human endeavour, challenging speciesism can facilitate a (re) writing of security narratives and uncover what is lost by conventional boundary-drawing exercises.

For scholars of security in IR, this would mean including more than human accounts of the causes of war which, without falling into traps of ecological determinism, reveal that the deeper sources of conflict and competition between states and other actors can often be located in stresses and tensions induced by the mismanagement and plunder of resources such as oil or water, ⁴¹ or assessing the extent to which ‘security’ is provided in any given context against more than human parameters, rather than reproducing the assumption that human security can be achieved at the expense of the ecological systems upon which it depends. For scholars in IPE, challenging speciesism means revisiting fundamental questions about how value is created and by whom in the global economy, as well as the viability and ecocidal nature of the global economy. It is perhaps the height of speciesist thinking to assume that humans are not bound by the laws of nature which mean that overconsumption of a resource base ends in population collapse. ⁴² Concretely, discussions of the profitability of corporate actors would highlight the volume and consequence of non-renewable resources extracted and disposed of for those excluded from narrow calculations of profit and shareholder value to disrupt the privatisation of gain and socialisation of the ecological costs onto human and more than human society and challenge dominant narratives about profit, loss and wealth creation.

A second approach at the level of political strategy involves human-led institutional innovations to address this blindness to more than human nature and its consequences. This could include calls for indirect representation of ecosystems from proponents of ‘planet politics’, ⁴³ moves to make ecocidal tendencies illegal ⁴⁴ and efforts to confer rights and representation upon more than human nature. For example, in 2019 a ballot in Ohio in the US gave Lake Erie rights normally associated with a person to protect it from further high levels of pollution, while in 2017 the New Zealand government passed legislation recognising the Whanganui River as holding rights and responsibilities equivalent to a person. Those acting on behalf of the river will now be able to sue for its own protection under the law. ⁴⁵ Such rights claims are not unproblematic, tied as they are to property and its exclusions and historical violences, and can be used to ‘ring-fence’ or privilege defence of certain ecosystems over others, when according to many indigenous worldviews, they are both inseparable and of equal value. But they can provide an important mechanism of self-defence and recognition for indigenous groups that helps to put certain environments and territories beyond the sphere of accumulation. Other state-led innovations include moves to protect the rights of nature, related to Pachamama in the Bolivian context and ideas about buen vivir in Ecuador where the rights of nature are enshrined in the constitution. ⁴⁶ The law, including international law, is clearly a key site in this terrain of struggle including moves to award rights to animals reflecting ‘an evolving inter-judicial dialogue . . . whose interactions could potentially feed into a cosmopolitan global jurisprudence for animal rights’ which captures the plurality of ways of understanding and conceptualising nature. ⁴⁷

Hence, taken together, an embrace of other worldviews and these innovative forms of politics and practice which take ecology in its widest sense seriously offer conceptual, methodological and political entry points for centring less anthropocentric forms of thinking in IR. In this way, a project decentring humans operates in solidarity with other critical approaches which seek to decentre Eurocentrism and its colonial legacy and to visible the hierarchies and exclusions which perpetuate social and environmental injustices in IR. What connects them is a common endeavour to expose not only other worldviews, values and ways of conducting international politics, but concrete empirical insights about the actually existing labour, social and ecological relations and materials which sustain life on earth.

Beyond growth

A second means of bringing IR back from the dead is to move beyond the ‘given’ objective of pursuing infinite economic growth in global politics. Recent attention has been paid in IR and IPE to this critically neglected edifice of the discipline. ⁴⁸ Whereas the accumulation of resources is thought to be synonymous with the ‘wealth of nations’, a key source of power politics in classic texts in IR, ⁴⁹ the historically peculiar and particular project of economic growth since the second world war ⁵⁰ coincides with the great acceleration in global economic activity and corresponding exponential increases in resource depletion. ⁵¹ Critical scholarship on de-growth and post-growth questions the viability and sustainability, both socially and environmentally, of such a trajectory, unsettling its always tenuous hold on the notion that its pursuit is primarily about meeting basic needs. ⁵²

Given that growth is taken to underpin an open and peaceful liberal order and assumed to be a dominant rationale for the organisation of the global economy, a key function of much IR theory, is to explain how best to promote and expand it as an end itself and an assumed means of addressing inequalities despite evidence to the contrary. ⁵³ But ecological thinking disrupts the umbilical chord between economic growth on the one hand and prosperity and development on the other. ⁵⁴ Marxism’s critique of capitalism would need to be extended to a critique of industrialism as a whole and therefore require a new vision beyond a central state steering an ecocidal industrial economy, albeit one held in public rather than private hands. In a radical departure from this, post-growth scholarship and activism articulates alternatives to human flourishing within planetary boundaries. ⁵⁵

Critiques of growth in The Costs of Economic Growth ⁵⁶ and then the Club of Rome Limits to Growth report in 1972 ⁵⁷ laid the basis of a critique of industrialism that went beyond environmentalism devoid of a broader political project of economic restructuring. Business as usual patterns of resource use, it predicted, would result in ‘overshoot and collapse’; predictions which have been revised and updated since, but found to be remarkably accurate ⁵⁸ despite the allegations at the time that they were peddling ‘doomism’. ⁵⁹ The report formed the bedrock of calls for a steady state economy. ⁶⁰ It is this proposition that human needs are not best met by continual economic growth that most clearly stands in opposition to all other political ideologies as well as one of the core givens of the modern age: that industrial growth is correlated with prosperity. Hence, in contrast to other critical strands of IR and IPE, such as Marxism, the issue of who owns the means of production is secondary to the unsustainability of growth as a model of wealth generation premised on the notion of an abundant, disposal and infinite nature, however its spoils are subsequently divided up. This critique of ‘industrialism’ in general as a way of organising the economy and exponential growth as a legitimate, viable and sustainable goal also challenges both Liberal orthodoxies about the foundations of peace through expanding commerce, and Realist assumptions about growth and resource acquisition as means to survive in an anarchical international society. This critique extends to prevailing orthodoxies and dominant practices around trade liberalisation, de-regulated finance and the internationalisation of production and the role of the Bretton woods institutions in propping up this system and perpetuating its social and environmental injustices. ⁶¹ For all these reasons, Greens reject claims about the possibility of ‘green growth’ and a ‘green economy’ as articulated by the OECD, World Bank, UNEP and many governments and corporations. ⁶²

One source of critique seeks to historicise and contextualise the contemporary fetishisation of economic growth, showing that obsession with it is a relatively recent phenomena and not a permanent, given or timeless goal of human society, ⁶³ and hence creating the possibility to reorient society around different goals and means of securing prosperity. Often presented as an unquestionable given, un-contestable and pre-political goal of human endeavour, a valuable contribution is to de-mystify and de-naturalise it as a peculiarly modern project as part of a genealogy of growth. ⁶⁴ According to Dale: ‘The growth paradigm appears ubiquitous, even natural, but it is uniquely modern . . . For millennia no sense of “an economy” as something separate from the totality of social relations existed, nor was there a compulsion to growth.’ ⁶⁵ Moreover, contrary to myths about the natural outward expansion of markets through growing demand, the pace of innovation and the nature of technological progress, the construction of economies built along these lines coincides with, and presupposes, the use of force. This is true for the acquisition of resources both overseas and internally through dispossession to feed growth, and against domestic populations resisting the acquisition of their land and resources for the profit of others: a phenomenon observed in relation to green grabs ⁶⁶ and broader patterns of accumulation by dispossession. ⁶⁷ It speaks to the close relationship between growth-driven extractivism and the patterns of militarism described below which a more ecological account of IR would foreground.

What the critique of growth also does is reveal not only the ecologically uneven exchange between richer and poorer countries, historically and today, but also draws attention to the everyday or ‘slow violence’ ⁶⁸ required for extractivism, contributing to accounts which seek to centre colonialism as constitutive of the contemporary global political economy. ⁶⁹ This emphasis on how growth is secured and at whose expense, documenting resource flows and the conflicts that ensue helps to give lie to decontextualised presentations of competitive advantage and the misplaced assumption that wealthier societies are so because of their ingenuity and superior innovation. It strengthens decolonial understandings of the origins of wealth in Europe ⁷⁰ and the global North more generally as well as of the origins of our current ecological predicament. ⁷¹ This provides a richer socio-ecological reading of IPE by highlighting the multiple relationalities between political communities and classes and across diverse socio-natures. It shifts the emphasis in dependency and world systems theory to ecological uneven exchange and the dependence of all humans on a viable ecosystem of which an uneven global economy organised around the core and periphery is a sub-set. Growthism requires violence to enforce its aims given the injustices it perpetuates and aggravates but also rests on an anthropocentric (as well as colonial and patriarchal) worldview which views ‘cheap’ nature, labour and care economies ⁷² as lootable and extractable and in the service of capital accumulation by wealthy elites. As other scholars have shown, ⁷³ there are many conceptual resources and methodological resources available from ecological economics to Marxism to document, quantity and make sense of these uneven but interconnected patterns of exchange that could help to push contemporary IPE, in particular, beyond its uncritical embrace of the idea that economic growth is a pre-requisite to wellbeing and stability in the international order.

Beyond the generic critique of growth, Greens are also critical of how growth is counted: the indices and metrics employed to measure growth, highlighting the problematic ways in which the wealth of nations is ranked in IR. Ekins suggests ‘A large proportion of the outcome of the production process expressed each year in GNP does not represent any benefit to the quality of life and of the environment’. ⁷⁴ Greens propose instead alternative indicators of well-being such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) and the Happy Planet Index while the government of Ecuador frames ‘buen vivir’ rather than growth as its overall goal. ⁷⁵ To contribute to more meaningful assessments of human and more than human progress, IR scholars can help to generate explanations of the political characteristics, global relations and enabling socio-economic conditions which account for the performance of those countries with the highest levels of social well-being and lowest environmental impacts and how generalisable they might for other states in the international system.

At the moment, the discipline of IR reproduces dominant orthodoxies by confusing means with ends where growth is, but one, possible way of enhancing human welfare. It fails to ask questions about growth for whom, what is growing and with what consequences. By way of an alternative, Greens have articulated what they refer to as the ‘new economics’, ‘rooted in the recognition that human life and economic activity are an interdependent part of the wider ecological process that sustain life on earth and will either operate sustainably within those parameters or bring about their own demise’. ⁷⁶ This notion is fundamental to critiques of mainstream economics and forms the basis of the recognition that the economy is merely a subset of society and the biosphere which sustains all life on earth. Herman Daly has articulated most clearly what Greens refer to as a ‘steady-state’ economy as their alternative to growth fetishism. This position is partly informed by the laws of thermodynamics which state that ‘we do not produce or consume anything, we merely rearrange it’ and the law of increasing entropy: that there is a continual reduction in potential for further use within the system as a whole. The steady state alternative ‘is characterised by constant stocks of people and physical wealth maintained at some chosen desirable level by a low rate of throughput’. ⁷⁷ A key methodological innovation for scholars of IR then would be to unpack the black box of growth that states use to project their success by revealing the economic inequalities, social dislocation and ecologically uneven exchange upon which it is premised through greater attention to the ecologies of international and global circuits of power that produce uneven and combined (mal)development. ⁷⁸

Taking these insights about the ‘deep relationality’ between ecology and economy and wealth and inequality more seriously in IR is not just a conceptual or methodological question of course. It means helping to address the complex questions of addressing inequality and poverty in a global economy where levels of production and consumption in richer parts of the world need to be actively curtailed to free up ecological space for poorer regions. Scholars of global governance and international law could turn their attention to the design of global agreements based on ‘fair share’ principles. Precedents include ideas about ‘contraction and convergence’ or the ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ framework which reconcile different historical responsibilities and development needs within ecological limits. ⁷⁹ There has also been growing attention to the question of degrowth and geopolitics and IR scholars could make valuable contributions here to exploring the ways in which degrowth strategies might reduce geopolitical tensions, but also, at times, enflame them and how this can be avoided. ⁸⁰ Counter-hegemonic struggle and counter-veiling forms of political power will also be critical to displacing growth as the central organising principle of global economic and political life. ⁸¹ Indigenous and other scholarship has a key role to play here in showing how key frontline battles on resource frontiers have served to defend ecological limits, ⁸² and how indigenous understandings of justice could inform appeals for ‘planetary justice’. ⁸³

Beyond militarism: planetary security

As noted above, taking ecology seriously and choosing life means not building theories and worldviews around the projection and defence of militarism which derive from social constructions of an anarchical world. ⁸⁴ Instead, ecology becomes that which shapes the life chances of states, their citizens and the ecosystems they are notionally charged with protecting. It is the ‘new anarchy’ in IR. In a structural sense it sets the conditions in which all of us make decisions because many resources are finite and determine what can be done by whom and where. Without indulging in a unhelpful form of environmental essentialism, the point is that a discipline whose origins lie in the effort to ensure human survival (since more than human survival was not a central issue in 1919 at the birth of the discipline) will at some point have to heed that, even on its own terms, efforts to secure that survival – whether in national or collective terms – are fundamentally compromised by ecological and social collapse as a result in large part to the three givens which the discipline of IR perpetuates.

A third contribution to embedding an ecological turn in IR, therefore, is to challenge and transcend from an ecological standpoint the notion that militarism is a valid and legitimate means by which power is accrued and the means by which international relations are conducted and order preserved. With Green security the thing to be secured is the biosphere, seeing ecological sustainability as a precondition for security and well-being: a post-nationalist and holistic perspective on security which changes fundamentally how and for whom it is studied and enacted. ⁸⁵

Drawing on scholarship on militarism, defined as the social and international relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, organised political violence, ⁸⁶ for many Greens, the critique of prevailing approaches to security is not just of institutionalised violence embodied in the state, but also of the social and systemic sources of violence. Drawing on feminist insights, this is taken to refer to the everyday insecurity brought about by domination, patriarchy and competition. ⁸⁷ As Laferrière and Stoett put it: ‘The ecological understanding of peace compels an examination of all forms of violence, locating their sources at various societal levels; war is but one expression of violence and not a sui generis phenomenon’. ⁸⁸ A more ecological IR provides the basis for understanding ‘everyday militarism’ in order to address the causes and not just the manifestations of socio-environmental crises. ⁸⁹

The critique of militarism operates then on a principled moral and ethical level around the value of human and non-human life. But it also sees militarism as a social and cultural, as well as political and economic phenomena embedded and validated in the reproduction of everyday life, currently organised along ecocidal lines. Rather than moments of spectacular exception, the breeding grounds of war are sown and nurtured in the soil of industrial society. Green thinking on security in many ways resonates with scholarship that moves away from more limited and narrow conceptions of security as reduced to war and military power. The notion that for large swathes of the world’s population the primary threat comes from their own state and not an enemy one shares a lot in common with critiques of state violence and repression. ⁹⁰ Citizen and collective security can be juxtaposed with narrower pursuits of state security in this sense, centring questions about at whose expense and on whose behalf power and order are secured. The methodological innovation is to connect the production of ecological (in)securities across scales, challenging binaries and typologies of security that fail to address the interconnected nature of ecological security.

Eliding the separation of security studies and critical IPE, militarism is understood then as a function of and intrinsically linked to the capitalist industrial society of which it is part, whose project it polices and whose structures it is called upon to enforce ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’ in the service of the industrial state and its growth imperatives. This affords a more holistic, social and deeper understanding of the social, economic and ecological causes of conflict, violence and war in society (and not just international society): what fuels them and why they persist and endure, including the ways in which the organisation, maintenance and expansion of military complexes lock-in unsustainable pathways. Such an approach further punctures the fragile distinctions between sub-fields of the discipline such as security, IPE and global environmental politics. But rather than just invite scrutiny of the empirical connections between these phenomena, the critical work is also to locate them as part of a common political project.

At the heart of this is a concern with the state-military-industrial complex which serves as a vehicle for the systematic exploitation of society as a whole at home and abroad in pursuit of control and profit. ⁹¹ On the one hand, there is the internal everyday violence that industrialism requires and generates in its wake which reap particular impacts on marginalised, precarious, racialised minorities and environmental defenders. ⁹² This results from its extractivist orientation and growth obsession which demands ‘accumulation by dispossession’. ⁹³ The extraction of resources such as oil and minerals, often against the wishes of host communities who rarely benefit from the revenues from it, necessitates acts of dispossession against excluded groups such as indigenous peoples. These are among the ways violence is mobilised for the preservation of hierarchies and social order based on extracting wealth from rich to poor, South to North and rural to urban areas. ⁹⁴ Extractivism and violence become synonymous in an intra-social, inter-national, inter (and intra)-species and inter-generational form of uneven exchange which sustains simultaneous concentrations of wealth and poverty.

By way of an alternative, pacificism and non-violence has a central place in a normative vision grounded in peace studies and Gandhian traditions of non-violence and non-cooperation. Pacifism is not only anti-war, though. ⁹⁵ It can also be linked to the anarchist critique of the state which suggests that the only way to eliminate war, armed conflict and other forms of political violence is to remove the capacity for institutionalised and systematic violence epitomised by state military structures. Meanwhile, conflict resolution, peacebuilding and strengthened multilateralism are seen by many Greens as the best ways for ensuring against future conflict and managing existing ones: exiting the destructive cycle of violence and retribution. This is reflected in recent interest in post-growth peacebuilding. ⁹⁶ The move away from an economy organised along extractivist lines and its attendant repressions and requirements for violence, as envisioned in a post-growth world, might enable a de-militarisation of the state. Reduced dependence on resources such as oil would mean fewer resource wars, though lower levels of consumption of all resources would be required to ensure that substitutes for fossil fuels do not just form the basis of a new locus of conflict (over critical minerals for example).

A counter to the general thrust of claims about the co-constitutive nature of industrialism, extractivism and militarism based on the liberal peace doctrine is the idea that trade and economic interdependence among liberal states are a key means of securing peace. ⁹⁷ This builds on Kant’s idea in Perpetual Peace that free commerce is vital to the possibility of peace, as well as Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points. What such accounts overlook, however, is the everyday forms of violence visited upon communities around the world as a direct result of the imperatives of expanding and globalising trade and production in an unequal world. Export-led extractivism has led to intense social conflict and violence the world over as a glance at a global map of environmental justice and resource conflicts makes clear. ⁹⁸ This is overlooked by the preoccupation with inter-state war which is largely a thesis about the reduced likelihood of war between liberal states since it is evidently the case that liberal states frequently engage in war with other types of regimes. ‘Reciprocal vulnerability’ which runs through much Liberal thinking, can be recognised and acted upon in other ways than extending and deepening the chains of commerce over larger distances, and indeed the sorts of worldviews and cosmologies described above form a better starting point for recognising the most material of all interdependencies between all species in our global ecosystem. Liberalism’s desire to secure and explain the prospects of peace and cooperation would need to recognise the impossibility of peace in an unsustainable world and assess institutional arrangements in global affairs not against the degree of cooperation and implementation they secure as an end in itself, but whether they help to preserve the conditions that make existence viable. Taking planetary security more seriously might require institutional innovations such as the creation of an ‘Earth System Council’ that would operate on the basis of inclusive stewardship and through majority voting with representation from frontline indigenous communities, major ecosystems, species groups, states and environmental scientists. ⁹⁹ Critical conceptual and methodological innovations for the discipline meanwhile would start from the work of ‘worlding’ and ecologising security noted above: shifting the unit of analysis from the state and the international system to the world and the biosphere and judging the success of proscribed security strategies against their ability to advance planetary security in more than human terms.

Consolidating an ecological turn in IR

To conclude, consolidating an ecological turn in IR means bringing to the fore questions of life rather than death that de-centre key givens in the discipline of IR by challenging their (often implied) speciesism, growthism and militarism.

I have suggested an ecological IR, informed by neglected strands of green politics and theory, provides a rich vein of critique of dominant practices of global politics as well as useful normative propositions about alternatives and methodological clues about what an ecological IR could look like. It affords practical and analytical insights into the sources of global instability and where some of the solutions to them might lie by questioning an uncritical acceptance of militarism and economic growth as central pillars of international relations. A further key contribution is to both de-centre humans as the only actors with agency over global affairs by way of furnishing less anthropocentric understandings of the world, and to show that without adequate attention to the ecological systems which sustain life on earth, many of the other preoccupations which dominate our discipline from war and peace to development and human rights, run the risk of becoming preludes to a much deeper existential crisis for all of us.

A critical starting point for an alternative envisioning and re-visioning of global politics is to establish that what we take as given, is not fixed; that what seems permanent, is transitory; that structures, institutions and power relations that hold incumbents in place, eventually fade away; that things have been radically different before and could be so again. We are a key juncture in global politics, perhaps akin to what Gramsci described as an ‘interregnum’ where many ‘morbid symptoms’ are evident. ¹⁰⁰ The challenge we face is how we build new worlds in the shell of the old. Reflected in the discussion above is a sense of their being an ecosystem of transformation that is both required to activate multiple leverage points ¹⁰¹ and provides an understanding of how such change may come about: within and beyond the state, though challenges to structures and the basic organising principles of society, rewiring the economy in particular as a foundational move, but also seeking to culture sustainability through shifts in values and worldviews which implies the embrace of a pluriverse of perspectives which actively de-centre the human as being the starting and endpoint for understanding global politics.