Generative decay: toward a politics of and for earth

Abstract

This article assesses the possibility of transforming International Relations (IR) and Global Environmental Studies (GES), reflecting on the contributions to this special edition. It argues that despite passionate efforts by critical scholars, activists, practitioners, and others to transform these disciplines, they remain structurally and epistemically rooted in oppressive logics that are fundamentally at odds with the planet and its processes, and aligned with the ‘CRAACHE+ formation’ (a set of interlocking modes of structural violence compromising colonialism, racism, ableism, anthropocentrism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, eugenics, and their alloys). Instead of working to recuperate IR and GES, the article calls for an ecological approach to knowledge production in which the knowledge and resources accumulated within these disciplines is made available for repurposing by communities and movements working to align their politics with earth processes.

In the face of rapidly compounding eco-political crises, can the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and Global Environmental Studies (GES) offer a politics of and for – not just ‘about’ – the Earth, its systems, and the many worlds it fosters? As many of the contributions to this volume show, academic disciplines and practices often pit us against earthly ways of thinking, acting, and interacting. What’s more, IR, GES and other Euro-descended disciplines are embodiments and multipliers of what I call the CRAACHE+ formation: a global apparatus of structural violence composed of colonialism, racism, ableism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, eugenics, and alloys emerging from them. Co-constitutive and mutually-amplifying, these logics have sought to dominate global politics for more than five centuries, constructing and (literally) fuelling eco-political crises, from climate change and extinction to environmental racism and global patterns of pollution. Given these roots, can IR and GES be transformed to better align with Earth, its multiple worlds, and the processes of their continual emergence and transformation?

Reflecting on insights from the articles in this volume, I argue that this volume’s task of ‘re-rooting’ IR and GES cannot be achieved if it contributes to efforts to sustain dominant knowledge structures and accretions of power. Rather, it requires an embrace of earthly processes, not least those of generative decay, such as decomposition, biodegradation, compost, catalysis, and the (re)-cycling of resources through complex eco-political systems. This, in turn, requires the deliberate exposure of dominant knowledge systems and the institutions that bear them to earthly eco-political processes, rather than their insulation (see Hughes, introduction) from and against the conditions of co-existence. Processes of generative decay promote the breaking down of accretions of power – not as a mode of abandonment, ¹ collapse or destruction for the sake of it. Instead, they offer up hoarded energy, material, resources, and connections from ossified systems to make them available for nourishing alternative worlds. As several of the contributions to this volume suggest, if it is to promote the growth of futures better aligned with the climate, earth, and worlds, any ‘re-rooting’ of dominant knowledge systems needs the rich soil created by generative decay.

Resentment of the plurality of worlds

Founded on abstract universalism and a Western secular notion of cosmic order ² IR and GES each seek to govern ‘the’ world as a unified field of power. Yet Earth fosters myriad worlds and worlding. ‘Worlds’ refers to multi-temporal intensities of ecological and social connection between radically different beings (‘living’ and ‘non-living’, ‘physical’ and ‘intangible’, and so on), as well as the pulsing contractions and dilations of energy, matter, and action that create patterns of partial stability and duration without ever solidifying into permanence. ³ ‘Worlding’, in turn, refers to a set of open processes, events, and rhythms through which worlds emerge, transform, submerge, and recombine. Understood from the pluriversal perspective embraced by Gonçalves et al. (this volume), worlds are not simply ‘variations’ on a universal reality. Instead, each world is a (partially-)bounded system of consistency in which distinct realities hold – for instance, temporalities, social and ecological orderings, and modes of experience. All worlds work to varying degrees with and against Earth’s, and other worlds’, processes and rhythms – whether seasonal, social, magnetic, or metabolic ⁴ – and develop distinct ways of coexisting with them, from mimetic to collaborative to aggressive and eliminative, and with different, often dynamic, registers of openness and closure.

A hallmark of Euro-descended worlds and forms of worlding is their fundamental resentment of instability that comes with participation in a lively and dynamic cosmos composed of multiple worlds and processes of worlding, and continually reshaped by the circulation of matter and energy. ⁵ As a result, their modes of power and order focus on controlling and seeking to banish the conditions of fundamental relationality, including exposure to dynamic forces and processes, that are a feature of the cosmos. ⁶ Soldered to the eidetic tradition in ancient Greek thought, these forms of worlding cultivate abjection toward the decomposition of power and order. As a result, Euro-descended worlds and worlding seek permanence and durability (or in more recent discourses, stability, resilience, or sustainability) by refusing their relations to the Earth, and by insulating their core structures from change and decay – including those brought about by ecological ruptures. This urge is twinned by the powerful impulse toward assimilating and/or eliminating irreducible ecological, political, and other forms of difference ⁷ in order to construct the fictional terra nullius that has long been the desired ground for building infinite empires.

Several of the contributions to this special issue, including those that foreground anti-colonial and/or Indigenous modes of worlding, push back against this refusal of relations and resentment of dynamic earth processes within IR and GES. For instance, the pluriversal approaches embraced by Querejazu and Gonçalves et al. (this volume) ⁸ – steeped in Black and/or Indigenous modes of political order (including many contributions from Abya-Yala, or South America) – embrace the proliferation and transformation of relational structures that respond to, and work skillfully with, earth processes and other worlds. In the sites of eco-political transformation they describe, actors seek to multiply and ramify relations as sources of plural power and adaptivity, rather than refusing them or forcing them into abstract unity. These approaches do not ignore or disavow the role of violence between worlds, or the harms involved in some forms of change – not least climate change. Nor should they be framed against continuities or the permanence of foundational elements (for instance, of Ancestors, life forms, histories and stories, language, or kinship structures). Indeed, all worlds and forms of worlding resist decomposition to different degrees. However, pluriversal modes of worlding do not disavow or seek to entirely escape their openness to earth and cosmos, or to attain dominance over them, but rather to improvise conditions of co-existence within and as part of these systems.

IR, GES, and global structures of oppression

In their project of permanence, globally-dominant forms of worlding not only reject earthly conditions of relationality, but also impose their own insulating logics over and against both Earth and its worlds, dampening and even precluding responsiveness to these forces. This produces the uncanny absence of Earth, including the climate, from academic discourses purportedly dedicated to it (see Hughes, introduction). ⁹ Indeed, as Bernstein (this volume) argues ‘IR bakes in an inability to address core questions climate change raises, including on transformation, equity and justice, power, and ecological violence and harms’. ¹⁰ Similarly, Lipschutz (this volume) points to an entrenched habitus of thought that militates against transformation within IR and GES. ¹¹

This habitus reflects the CRAACHE+ formation: a complex of power, order, and violence that has sought to dominate Earth and its worlds for more than 500 years. The acronym CRAACHE+ stands for (or, more precisely, against): colonialism, racism, ableism, anthropocentrism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and eugenics, while the ‘plus’ signifies emerging and transforming modes of oppression. Arranged in this order, the acronym ‘CRAACHE+’ offers an onomatopoeic echo of the conditions of continual breakage and systematic destruction through which this formation clears away plural worlds to replace them with its own. However, no single element is more important than the others; their order varies by and within each context; and, crucially, each logic is co-constitutive, providing the conditions for amplifying and modifying the others. For instance, racism is rooted in norms about the ‘proper’ form and ‘function’ of bodies (ableism and eugenics), works through dehumanization (a function of anthropocentrism) and is expressed, realized, and elaborated through capitalist, colonial and gendered forms of structural violence. For example, during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, vastly different survival outcomes for racialized, poor and disabled people on a global scale were linked to racist, ableist, and capitalist mobilizations of medical systems, ¹² colonial-capitalist surveillance, and anthropocentric understandings of ‘proper’ relations between humans and nonhumans (for instance, as sources of zoonotic viral transmission; or between humans and viruses). Similarly, Métis waste scientist Max Liboiron, ¹³ shows how colonial patterns of power (including anthropocentric modes of thought) have alloyed with global racial and gender equalities and capitalist patterns of the distributions of harm (including health disparities) in the radically unequal distribution of pollution across Earth.

As Newell, Lipschutz and others writing in this volume point out, many approaches to IR and GES take for granted – or cannot be imagined without – elements reliant on and/or constitutive of the CRAACHE+ system, such as the Westphalian nation state and system of states, capitalism, or universalist legalism. While such arguments are perhaps more familiar to IR scholars, GES, too, reproduces these principles, whether in the form of financial and/or managerial approaches to ‘resource’ governance that rely on capitalist markets and colonial extraction; forms of conservation that involve land-grabbing and violent policing, or ideas of the ‘global commons’ that eliminate millennia of co-existence between people and the ecosystems they are part of. Importantly, there is a rich and continually growing body of critical and transgressive work within and outside of IR and GES – not least in the form of practical interventions by marginalized communities who explicitly confront, grapple with, and modify these structures (see Querejazu, this volume). However, it remains prohibitively difficult to imagine, let alone to express, versions of IR and/or GES that would be recognized as such by the academic institutional gatekeepers and that did not rely on the CRAACHE+ system. The converse is also true: an enormous amount of work is carried out daily to fight for earthly futures and (re)align with Earth’s processes, the vast majority of which is not recognized as IR or GES (or other academic disciplines or movements). Often, in fact, this work is actively discredited by dominant knowledge structures and the state, corporate or non-governmental institutions to which they are linked – for, the work of land defense carried out by Indigenous and land-based communities around the world, whether in resistance to state expansion, corporate extractivism, or to global environmental initiatives (e.g., biodiversity-banking or carbon offsetting programs that expropriate and criminalize Indigenous peoples).

What’s more, many contributions to critical IR and GES do not account for the dynamic interactions and feedback loops between the co-constitutive elements of the CRAACHE+ system. In some cases, this results in trade-offs in which some aspects of critique are accepted by the prevailing system, but only if they continue to reproduce other elements of it. For instance, several of the contributions in this volume offer useful critiques of anthropocentrism, a key facet of the CRAACHE+ system. Anthropocentrism severs politics from Earth and its worlds by artificially separating and prioritizing normative ‘humans’, reducing all other co-existents – including many humans who do not conform to dominant norms including race and gender to, at best, powerless recipients of stewardship, and at worst, targets for exploitation or destruction (see Newell, this volume). ¹⁴ The growing field of anti-anthropocentric IR theory has focused on the inclusion of other beings, their forms of agency (see Strausz, this volume; Gonçalves et al, this volume) and their influence on politics in areas such as rights and democratic practice, interspecies politics, ethics, and political order. ¹⁵ Drawing attention to this logic is crucial in dissolving structures that help to uphold global patterns of oppression. However, as racialized and Indigenous feminists have argued, in dominant knowledge systems, anti-anthropocentric discourses are often taken up in ways that reproduce ‘human’/‘nonhuman’ binaries that work to reify race, gender, and colonial hierarchies. ¹⁶ In many cases, this is due (at least in part) to the way in which dominant forms of knowledge-making demand a primary ‘lens’ of analysis or impose a mandatory and stylized theoretical elegance in which limited variables must neatly explain one another. This comes at the cost of attending to the multi-dimensional fields of power and disruption wrought by the co-production of CRAACHE+ logics in their distinct contexts.

Logics of arrest

An important element of the project of permanence central to Euro-descended worlding is the arrest of motilities, dynamics, processes, and events that challenge or prevent its consolidation. Several of the contributions to this volume highlight how dominant knowledge-making processes, mediated through IR and GES, seek to impose stasis, control, or relations of productive instrumentalization upon such sources of change. As Lipschutz (this volume) suggests, IR and GES often work to arrest, freeze, or capture such processes, integrating them into their own machinery. As Drieschova, McDonald, and Newell’s contributions to this volume show, these norms often reflect and ossify particular spatio-temporal moments or arrangements of power – for instance, the height of the Cold War in Euro-American contexts, or late capitalist austerity regimes. Seeking to maintain these norms against change and contestation – including the challenges to stability raised by an altered climate – IR and GES (and other academic disciplines) impose a logic of arrest on processes of eco-political contestation and change. This logic is embodied in the layered regimes of violence, criminalization, and detention forced on communities that seek to disrupt the CRAACHE+ system and assert forms of attunement with their worlds. Examples abound, from the fusion of police, state, and corporate violence against Indigenous communities seeking to halt extraction and land theft from Wet’suwet’en territory to the Brazilian Amazon to cultivatable land in the Philippines; in ‘biosecurity’ policies that embody racialized and cross-species xenophobia; to the increased policing of racialized, disabled, and gendered bodies differently harmed, displaced, and made vulnerable by climate change. In these and many other contexts, the habitus identified by Lipschutz et al. converges with global-carceral efforts to constrain, entrap, exploit, and waste bodies and worlds deemed expendable ¹⁷ in the effort to create ‘liveable’ futures for those deemed to fit dominant norms of ‘humanity’. As Gonçalves et al. point out, Earth’s systems (and communities that work to align with them or with other beings such as trees – see Strausz, this volume) are vibrant political actors who are also directly targeted by these logics of arrest. The threat they raise to dominant formations of power is precisely that, instead of seeking mere ‘inclusion’ within alienating logics of abstraction (from their worlds, and from Earth), these modes of eco-political action expose them to the catalytic power of generative decay.

Generative decay

It is understandable that scholars of IR and GES, many of whom are motivated by deep ethical commitments and years or decades of committed work, are fighting to reform and, perhaps, redeem, these disciplines. However, I have argued that efforts to conserve or reform these disciplines is likely to play into the project of permanence in which they are grounded, and into the complex trade-offs and demands of the CRAACHE+ system, whose imperatives turn many scholars against some of our most cherished commitments – and against the Earth itself. However, this does not mean that these disciplines are devoid of valuable knowledge and other resources; on the contrary, they have hoarded immense knowledge, energy, labor and other resources that are ripe for re-cycling. In this final section, I want to posit a different model for bringing IR and GES ‘back’ to Earth: generative decay.

This term refers here to earthly processes through which accrued energy, resources, and other goods are redistributed to nurture ecosystems, and is part of the dynamic modes of (re-)cycling discussed above. Examples include but are not limited to: biodegradation, composting, ¹⁸ nutrient cycling, erosion, the rock cycle, and other processes through which accrued matter and energy are transformed and redistributed across ecosystems. These processes are driven by the convergence of multiple ecological forces – for instance, the metabolic processes of diverse organisms (including the death and decay of bodies over different temporalities – e.g., those of trees and insects), the physical effects of water, light, chemicals and physical motion, chemical reactions, and physical processes. Crucially, they often include the participation of humans, other animals, and organisms. As Indigenous and Black feminists in particular have long pointed out, this includes intimate exchanges between bodies, cultures, knowledge, histories, and Earth itself – including the relationship between bodies and soil. ¹⁹ Importantly, these processes of metabolic exchange and redistribution are complexly linked to the exposure and instrumentalization of racialized, gendered, disabled, and other bodies: they are not only entry-points for harm (and reflections of the forms of power that wield it), but also sites of creative resistance and transformation. ²⁰ Through processes of generative decay, energy, and matter are redistributed across multiple systems of relations, preventing their coagulation within particular structures.

How might adopting an ethos of generative decay help with the ‘re-rooting’ of (what are now called) IR and GES? Like other academic disciplines, these disciplines have accumulated rich resources, including but not limited to knowledge, theories, data, relationships, solidarities, resources, public support, and much more, locking these within access-restricted institutions, networks, and processes. These entities – including the ‘disciplining’ element of Eurocentric knowledge practices (see Lipschutz, this volume) are designed precisely to preserve and insulate these resources within their own internal systems, preventing their decay. From this perspective, efforts to shore up disciplines, however transformative, are likely to contribute to their sealing-off from Earth, its worlds, and processes of worlding.

Instead, I propose that the politics of ‘re-rooting’ put forward in this volume (see Hughes, introduction) ought to include efforts to encourage, align with, invite, and offer our disciplines to processes of generative decay. Such efforts might include (but are certainly not limited to): the opening of knowledge-making processes, including free access to research and education; systematic support for the repatriation and reclamation of knowledge, the means of creating it (e.g. methods, approaches, ways of knowing) labor and matter (not least the remains of human and nonhuman kin) stolen by knowledge-making institutions; and the embracing of non-comprehensive, ²¹ provisional, experimental and ‘viral’, ²² open-source/‘hackable’ (by communities outside of academia), and other modes of knowledge making that convert decadent forms of knowledge into dynamic forms of worlding. At the same time, this ethos involves shifting the goal of knowledge-making away from the pursuit of definitive or comprehensive knowledge (e.g., efforts to predict and/or engineer future ecosystemic conditions or to catalog every currently-extant species) and toward knowledge as an offering to processes of generative decay – that is, knowledge that is intended to be broken down and (re-)cycled by others to support diverse forms of thriving. An analogy can be found in the current trend of ‘whole-life-cycle’ design, which aims to create objects (from fabrics to coffins to dwellings) that are not intended to be durable or disposable, but rather to decompose in ways that nurture their physical and cultural ecosystems (for instance by biodegrading into soil-enhancing materials). The ethos of generative decay does not mean destroying knowledge itself, or institutions for the sake of it; but rather resisting the urge to shore up and/or reform existing disciplines and to preserve their separation from Earth and its worlds. Only within such a context, I contend, can the forms of ‘re-rooting’ proposed by this volume bring dominant forms of knowledge-making into alignment with Earth and its worlds.