Stretching concepts at the cowshed: Towards relational,planetary,multispecies politics

Abstract

For some years, the traditional conceptual frames of International Relations (IR) scholarship have been under fire. We have been encouraged to ‘sidestep’ classical IR concepts and ‘-isms’ in order to better engage the challenges facing varied human and non-human populations on the planet. In so doing, three distinct, yet seemingly interconnected, approaches have stood out: relational, planetary, and multispecies frames. While theoretical interventions have grown in confidence, practical questions abound: how do we ‘do IR differently’ in relational, planetary, and multispecies ways? This article tackles this crucial challenge for the future of IR theory and research practice. I argue that to do so we should start, not with abstract concepts, theories, or definitions, but rather by feeling, moving, and thinking in relations with others somewhere. To show what this might entail for IR, the article explores a process of engaging planetary multispecies relationalities in and around a cowshed in Wales, UK. It is argued that, far from being a peripheral site for IR, in the cowshed one can (1) more readily notice the limits of IR concepts and scales; (2) enable new analytical senses, connections and expressions to percolate to the fore; and (3) thus also gain a ‘sense’ not only of why relational planetary multispecies politics is so challenging for IR theory and practice but also what it would mean to ‘do IR differently’.

Introduction

Theoretical pluralism and contestation have long characterised the field of International Relations (IR). Yet, in recent years, new lines of rupture have emerged in the field. Powered by increasing awareness of IR’s complicity in environmental destruction, colonialism, misogyny, racism, able-ism, and species-ism, a new generation of scholars has sought to develop very different ways of ‘doing IR’. Instead of developing more -isms to take on classical IR theories like realism, liberalism, and constructivism, different kinds of possibilities have been opened to break away from ‘IR-as-it-once-was’, to place the field in a more cross-disciplinary context, and to align the field with the challenges of not only ‘the future’ but the many futures and presents often sidelined in Western IR (see, for example, Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). One slogan for this shift – reflected also in the name of a coalition of IR scholars from around the world – has been to call on scholars to ‘do IR differently’ (Trownsell et al., 2021, Trownsell et al., 2022).

The challenges to ‘classical IR’ today take many forms, from complexity theory, posthumanism and quantum theory (e, g, Cudworth and Hobden, 2011, 2017; Der Derian and Wendt, 2020; Wendt, 2015) to new materialism, assemblage theories and everyday IR (e.g. Acuto and Curtis, 2013; Connolly, 2017; Coole, 2013; Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017), from green theories, political ecology and Anthropocene IR (e.g. Chandler et al., 2021; Dalby, 2019; Dryzek and Pickering, 2019; Eckersley, 2005, 2017; Harrington, 2016; Mitchell, 2017) to earth systems governance (e.g. Biermann, 2014) and ecology politic (Burke and Fishel, 2025), from decolonial perspectives (e.g. Blaney and Tickner, 2017; Shilliam, 2022; Querejazu, 2016) to black, indigenous and people of colour futurisms (e.g. Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020; Querejazu, 2022; Trownsell et al., 2021) – to mention just a few.

Three particularly interesting and challenging ‘new’ perspectives, or concepts, for ‘doing IR differently’ have revolved around ‘relational’, ‘planetary’, and ‘multispecies’ thinking.

Relational thought is perhaps most widely recognised in IR at the present juncture. As has been emphasised in recent years, relational theorising ‘is not a doctrine or a method, but a set of interconnected analyses whose starting-place is a concern with relations’ (Nordin et al., 2019: 570). Relationality has gained prominence, not least having served as the central theme for the 2024 International Studies Association’s annual conference. Even so, it has not emerged as a unifying ‘paradigm’ but rather as multiple very different kinds of engagement with the idea of ‘relations’. It follows that differences characterise varied relational attempts to rethink the subject matters of IR. For example, some argue that relational thought entails more experiential and exploratory ways of engaging with and reporting on worlds around us (see, for example, Klein Schaarberg, 2023; Strausz, 2024; Querejazu, 2022) while others have suggested that academic language and structures of communication inevitably delimit how we can and should engage relationalism (Jackson and Heo, 2022).

As for planetary thought and planet politics, these notions are increasingly being acknowledged as the next necessary move in thinking IR with the environment as well as technology (Burke et al., 2016; Connolly, 2017; Deudney, 2022; Pedersen, 2021). Planetary theorising seeks to include atmospheres, glaciers, tundra, minerals and metals in our thinking, expanding our concepts beyond ‘social theory’ towards ‘planetary social theory’ (Clark and Szerszynski, 2020). Nevertheless, differences of approach also emerge around what exactly the planetary stands for. While some see the planet as a kind of hyper-object which stands ‘above’ us, almost impossible to grasp (Connolly, 2017; Morton, 2013); for others it stands for the agencies of the planet which make new forms of politics possible (see, for example, debate between Burke et al., 2016; Chandler et al., 2018). Yet others emphasise the inherent plurality of the planetary: the planetary is perhaps not at all a single ‘whole’ but to think planetary is to recognise pluriversality of the planetary (see, for example, Kurki, 2024a; Latour, 2017). What planetary thought entails in IR is far from determined and very much under intense scrutiny at present.

Multispecies politics is perhaps the most recent addition to IR theorising. With origins in multidisciplinary environmental humanities and animal studies, multispecies politics calls for careful reorientation of our interests in the non-human world as part of IR thinking (Leep, 2023). Thus, engaging trees (Fishel, 2023) or rats (Youatt, 2023), for example, is seen as a vital task for grappling with human connections with non-human agents. This has explicitly entailed developing attentiveness to and an interest in multispecies worlds and development of multispecies reporting attentive to the agency of non-humans, also in how human identities, experiences and relationships are structured (Van Dooren et al., 2016, 2019). How multispecies politics is to be done and its implications for human-centric IR paradigms is an active area of analysis (see, for example, Burke et al., 2016; Leep, 2023; Pereira and Renner, 2023).

While none of these concepts seeks to become a new ‘grand theory’ for the field of IR per se – itself an important characteristic of many new perspectives in IR – they nevertheless invoke important new registers of seeing, knowing and being and thus have potentially significant consequences for IR. Notably, they all seem to challenge anthropocentric frameworks and push for more serious engagement with how societies are made in intra-actions (Barad, 2007) with distributed relational worlds. Yet, as with any new concepts, there is a suspicion that these notions may be ‘another fad’ with little substantive implications for IR as a field.

How then do they shift IR’s classical concerns with power, order, or the international system, for example? How do we think and practice politics in relations, or ‘planetarily’? How does multispecies awareness intersect with existing analytical thought processes and methods in IR?

In a traditional academic practice of IR, we might approach the challenge of getting a sense of planetarity, relationality, and multispecies thinking conceptually and ask: how do relationality, planetarity, or multispecies analysis conceptually challenge core IR concepts such as sovereignty, power or order, for example? Or we could interrogate their relevance to the ‘real world’ of international politics: what does multispecies analysis for example tell us of how sovereignty of the state is deployed or in what ways does a planetary scale challenge IR’s theoretical frames often focused on states? In other words, approaching these new concepts in classical academic ways we would, first, conceptualise and then we would test or apply these concepts ‘against’ other concepts, constructions or the mirror of ‘reality’. We could see what they ‘reveal’ or ‘capture’ or ‘miss’ and then would rethink our IR theoretical conceptual moulds, if need be, accordingly.

This article is motivated by the sense that there is a fundamental problem with such starting points for exploration of relationality, planetarity, and multispecies politics. If we seek to ‘do IR differently’, we need to appreciate the depth of the challenge involved in our thought processes and infrastructures. If we are to take seriously the challenge IR has faced – of ‘thinking for others’ rather than with them – then relational, planetary, and multispecies perspectives are perhaps promising precisely because they ask us to avoid imposing concepts on places, people, animals, or non-human entities. We are asked, instead, to think with them, exposing our minds and bodies to relationalities with them (Ghosh, 2016; Meijer, 2019). The contribution of this article is to explore what it would mean to take this analytical, and also ethical, challenge seriously and to think IR theory not ‘in abstract’ but somewhere.

To do so, this article takes a different approach: it approaches conceptual puzzles around relationality, planetarity, and multispecies politics in a specific material context shared by humans, non-human animals, and technology, a site where IR theorists would not normally venture, but which, as I will show, is highly productive for thinking IR differently. This context is a dairy cowshed near Aberystwyth in Wales, UK, an active dairy and science farm, home and workplace to 300+ cows, a handful of humans and other animals and many technologies which shape the space. This article reflects on the encounters of humans, non-humans and technologies at the cowshed. These encounters primarily took place during a period of 3 months in 2023 as part of an Natural Environment Research Council-funded project which brought together expertise in biological and livestock sciences, computer science, film studies, art and performance, creative writing, and politics and IR.

For reasons detailed below, these encounters are reflected on in the form of short stories which reveal embodied, creative, emotive as well as more traditional analytical registers. Crucial to the approach here is that IR concepts and, also, relational, planetary, and multispecies registers are explored without imposing neat definitions of these concepts. This article is offered as an attempt to show what happens to IR scholarship if it ‘lets go’ of conceptual life in exposure to others, relations, planetary connections. The article explores what senses, notions, feelings, and analytics thereof emerge in concrete places – or, if you like, how places themselves can become analytical.

This analysis is not offered as a ‘universal’ theory or ‘the’ methodology for rethinking IR. Yet, the registers of proceeding, hopefully, are provocative for further creative exploration of IR’s conceptual edifices, their concrete moorings and the ways we might do relational, planetary multispecies politics within – or sideways to – them. I hope to show that as classical IR concepts struggle and wither in the cowshed, new meanings, sensations, and ways of relating also emerge from the cracks of what falls away. In other words, from the decay of IR of the old, blooms new life, new relations, conceptually and practically (Colello, forthcoming).

Because of the nature of the analytical argument explored, the stylistic mode of expression here is also somewhat unusual – the middle, main part of the article proceeds through ‘vignettes’ or ‘stories’ as a mode of analysis. I offer three initial clarifications on what I do and do not aim to achieve here with these.

First, while there is a rich tradition of narrative approaches in IR (see, for example, Berenskoetter, 2014; Inayatullah, 2011; Krebs, 2015; Oppermann and Spencer, 2018; Sadriu, 2021), the inspiration for the style of writing here has not developed from this literature, which is concerned with how narrative forms are tied to political agendas or alternatively autobiographical narratives. The stylistic choices arose rather from the practical need to find words to express embodied findings in spaces shared by human and non-human others. Thus, the vignettes are offered here as a method of systematically ‘feeling around’ for an analytical argument when purely logical, theoretical, linear, and abstract language fails to do encounters justice in the cowshed.

Second, while the aim is to think with non-human others, it is important to note that the aim is not to develop a conceptualisation of the notions explored here by non-humans. Rather, the aim is to understand what happens to IR theoretical frames of a human thinker when we think with non-humans and places (see also MacFarlane, 2025). As such, the engagement with others here necessarily has a heavy ‘human accent’ (Meijer, 2019).

Third, these vignettes are written by a white, middle-class female based in Western Europe and strongly imbued in academic IR theoretical learning for 25 years or so. The experiences and thoughts are, in some sense, then particular to the relationalities of the author. Yet, as I hope to show, they are not simply reducible to ‘personal’ experiences or thoughts, for they arise in relational, planetary, and multispecies flows.

This article proceeds as follows. I start with a more traditional ‘academic’ frame. I briefly introduce the background to the concepts I explore here and why they might entail a challenge: one of ‘stretching’ rather than fixing concepts and knowledge. In the second section of the article, I put forward an engagement with relationalities and planetary multispecies politics in the cowshed. I finish with reflections on the implications of the exploration for doing IR differently, reflecting on what shifts, is exposed, and is (dis)enabled.

Stretching concepts: The challenge of relationality, planetarity, and multispecies politics

For many decades, critical theories of varied persuasions have called for IR scholars to actively challenge inherited conceptual systems, also in IR, in order to open space to ‘think anew’. These calls to not only think critically but also to generate knowledge ‘from the margins’ have been given new urgency by the ecological and climate crises of late. It has been suggested that the challenge of the ‘so-called’ Anthropocene is at its core to face the profound limitations of IR’s conceptual frameworks. IR theories, it is argued, are not only complicit in environmental harms but also are emblematic of the modern era’s attempts to use concepts to ‘capture’ ‘reality’ in an attempt to ‘manage’ and ‘order’ ‘the world’ as if that was ‘our’ task so to do (see, for example, Burke et al., 2016; Dryzek and Pickering, 2019; Grove, 2019; Katzenstein, 2022, 2025; Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020).

But if indeed this paradigm of knowledge and the idea of certainty is crumbling (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019; Katzenstein, 2022, 2025; Kurki, 2020), how do we develop knowledge, concepts, or political interventions ‘differently’ in the current juncture? Tentative propositions have been made – in different ways – by those developing relational, planetary, and multispecies scholarship. Each orientation has its distinct origins, foci, and debates but also shared directions of travel between them emerge, as we will see.

Relational theorising has multiple origins, not only in different parts of the world but also across a wide range of disciplines. Relational theories – whether arising from quantum theories or indigenous thought – share important insights. All of them in one form or another seek an orientation away from human-only relations towards wider entanglements with materialities in which we are made, including with non-humans and technology (see, for example, Barad, 2007; Cudworth and Hobden, 2011, 2017; Cudworth et al., 2018; Fishel, 2023; Leep, 2023; Pereira and Renner, 2023). They also have argued for a concerted effort to think past Western-only origins or sources of thinking. A key part of the relational agenda for many has been engagement with non-Western, decolonial, and indigenous ways of thinking and doing relations (e.g. Trownsell et al., 2021, 2022; Kavalski, 2018; Qin, 2018; Querejazu, 2016). This in turn has entailed a kind of re-enchantment of thought: emotional and spiritual relationalities also matter not just analytical thoughts devoid of feeling. That is, relations are not just of those of states (realism) or forces of production (Marxism) but also include relational lives with spirits and ancestors (e.g. Querejazu, 2022; Shilliam, 2015). Another interesting aspect of relational thought has been the movement away from definitional firmness: new relational theorists do not necessarily need to or want to ‘capture’ or even clearly define, for all, what is meant by relationality (Querejazu, 2022).

But relational thinking is not the only opening for new forms of IR. It is, arguably loosely, aligned with many other interesting and challenging initiatives. In 2016, a collective of IR scholars put forward a manifesto for ‘planet politics’ (Burke et al., 2016). The concept has since been debated (Chandler et al., 2018; Corry, 2020) and developed (Conway, 2020; Dryzek and Pickering, 2019; Kurki, 2020) and planetarity has become an important way to explore the limits of the ‘international’ and the ‘global’ by showing how ecologies and geophysical realities can and must be integrated into our understandings of politics (see, for example, Deudney, 2022; Kurki, 2024a; Pedersen, 2021).

The planetary comes with a challenge. At its heart is a foundational challenge to the core concepts that we use to describe ‘levels of analysis’. If classical IR is about the international or the global, the planetary poses a direct challenge to both of these conceptual frames. It challenges the state-centric thinking embedded in the idea of the international – that the state-space is all that matters politically. But it also challenges the idea of ‘globality’: it challenges the idea that we, humans, live on a single networked object, bound together, into a ‘globalised’ whole. The planetary seeks to capture embeddedness of human networks in the more-than-human processes – glaciers, global warming, nitrogen cycle, ocean currents – as part of the reality of planetary unfolding. Like Morton’s (2013) hyper-objects, the planetary exceeds or escapes our capacity to ‘capture’ it. Yet, whether and how it should do so is contested in the recent literature on the planetary. In particular, a debate has developed around whether the planetary challenges us as a ‘whole’ somehow beyond us or as a plurality, a pluriverse, with important political stakes for whether we adopt what you might call a one-world or a many-world approach to the planetary (Escobar, 2020; Kurki, 2024a, 2024b).

Another important frame, developed in a cross-disciplinary space (e.g. Haraway, 2008; Van Dooren et al., 2016) but receiving also attention in IR recently (Leep, 2023; Youatt, 2014, 2020, 2023) has been the idea of inter- or multispecies politics. This notion has sought to highlight not only planetary challenges but the concrete realities of inter- and multispecies living. Even IR and its practices of security, borders, and states are not ‘human-only’, but as Youatt (2020) has powerfully shown, deeply inter- or multispecies in nature, involving constant negotiations and interactions across multiple species boundaries.

Multispecies analysis foregrounds an on the ground, ‘immersive’ perspective with a practical interest in ‘inhabiting and co-constituting worlds well’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016: 1). Multispecies studies then suggest we start from the ground, from concrete multispecies encounters and interactions, rather than conceptual challenges in human-only spaces where we have developed the impetus to ‘know’ something as if we existed outside of those relations. Multispecies thinking is about ‘experimenting with novel ways of engaging with worlds around us . . . immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals and plants . . . about being attentive to diverse ways of life’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016: 1). In a sense one could argue that the aim of multispecies studies is not to emphasise the ‘unknowability’ or limit condition of the planetary but rather it is to sidestep it by an empirical invocation to pay attention to and follow up concrete lifeways and think politics, justice, and ethics from these multispecies encounters.

While relational, planetary and multispecies perspectives are distinct, they also often draw on adjacent literatures. Crucially, there are at least four ways in which the concepts seek to shift IR scholarship in similar directions:

1. Disturbing dichotomies . Each approach has been explicitly evoked to disturb dichotomies: between nature and the social/political, environment and human, rational and emotional, individual and collective. The aim has been not so much to dissolve these dichotomies but ‘to pay attention to . . . the powerful work that various modes of differentiating and distinguishing do in shaping worlds’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016: 13). Each perspective emphasises, for example, how the conditions of human and animal life are deeply enmeshed; how the very notions ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are created in a discursive co-construction.

2. Limitations of human-only ideas of politics and agency . Each set of literatures emphasises the agency, activity and role of non-human actors in determining the conditions of life and political interactions. From emphasis on animals as actors (Meijer, 2019) to the role of planetary forces (Connolly, 2017), these notions seek to challenge the notion of humans as key actors, acting against an inert background, the ‘environment’. Many actants and actors are active once we remove the ‘human-only lenses’ which did not allow us to see them (see, for example, Cudworth and Hobden, 2017; Latour, 2005; Salter, 2015; Stengers, 2010; Youatt, 2020)

3. New challenges to ethics and political commitments . Each area of scholarship explicitly emphasises how new ways of thinking on ethics or commitments as part of ecosystems and techno-spheres arise from these perspectives. Critical of normative theories and rule-based perspectives, each nevertheless emphasises ‘accountabilities’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016), commitments to others, responsibility and response-ability (Haraway, 2016) and care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).

4. Decoloniality . Each is seeking to, or at least welcomes, indigenous, BIPOC and other marginalised ways of thinking relations among humans and non-humans from different parts of the world (see, for example, Bold, 2019; Fishel, 2023; Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020; Querejazu, 2016, 2022). Indeed, a key challenge of moving beyond uncritical humanism is to recognise the culturally varied ways of constructing the meaning of humans, animals and planetary forces.

These concepts come to IR scholarship then with a bold set of challenges: their aim is to challenge classical IR theories, concepts and dichotomies. They are critical of the focus on states and human-only social orders, impetus to ‘save’ others, and ‘knowing’ to capture, control and order the world. The challenge is to push beyond – or behind – IR theories and -isms. The aim is not to know ‘from above’, conceptually, metaphorically, or practically – but to know from within relations, planetary and multispecies too. But how do we implement such a bold set of ambitions in IR?

Stretching concepts in IR?

IR is more than an academic field. Its concepts – sovereignty, anarchy, order, global capitalism – reflect and construct not only minds of scholars but also a particular kind of international/global order and particular ways of being in it. Moving away from IR concepts then is not a simple challenge. As many critical theorists have long emphasised, moving ‘beyond’ our situated horizons of knowing, of conceptualising, is difficult if not impossible. If we are socially and materially structured to think in particular ways, how can we escape this structuring? And how do we understand others if we are ourselves situated in particular conceptual horizons?

In previous work (Kurki, 2015, 2020) I suggested that we could try to engage in a systematic effort to ‘stretch situated knowledge’ in and around IR. While we are embedded in socially and culturally inherited concepts and environments, we can and should also engage in a process of ‘stretching’ our conceptual categories, senses and arguments. In International Relations in a Relational Universe (Kurki, 2020), I suggested that science can be interpreted as a process of trying to ‘think past’ existing frames and that in IR, too, doing so can help to move past classical -isms, concepts and categories.

However, this notion of ‘stretchy situated knowledge’ (Kurki, 2015), while theoretically embedded in relational cosmology and also limited engagements with planetary and multispecies thought, was distinctly theoretical and abstract. Crucially, it did not show what this stretching looks like in concrete situations. My previous approach to this process lacked any engagement with ‘the worlds’ around our thinking processes. I proposed an abstract operation of thought (by a human, alone) as a ‘stretch’. But what does ‘stretching situated knowledge’ mean in concrete terms, with concrete others, in concrete relations? How do we stretch concepts, not in the abstract, but in places with others? What does it look like, feel like, to do so and what are the outcomes and implications?

In what follows, I put forward an account of a ‘conceptual stretch’ in the cowshed in conjunction with cows, starlings, robots, and others. As discussed previously, in what follows, I report the analytical thoughts through stories. This is done to enable me to systematically follow up the lifeways of concepts – IR and otherwise – as they negotiate the material site, thoughts, body and emotional registers, and multispecies encounters.

The cowshed

Looking for somewhere to land?

It’s April. I’m relieved about the coming end of term, as are my climate change students. But I’m also feeling anxious. I’m thinking about exam questions and whether my question about what we should understand by the term planetary politics is too hard for my students. I’ve been struggling to convey a clear-cut definition for them to deploy throughout the semester. I’ve also been thinking about just how much work it has taken to try to manifest even a ‘sense’ of what planetary politics might be. I’ve crawled on the floor of the lecture theatre with spiders and tried to evoke different kinds of cosmological imaginations. I’m not sure my efforts have really worked.

Planetary politics seems alien, somehow, in the classroom environment. One could say the concept feels too abstract, or too imaginatively ‘out there’, to be captured by my words in the classroom.

Why is planetary politics such a particularly tricky concept? I can explain the international system with such ease and even globalisation as a concept presents no particular difficulties. I can even use popular imagery of the world divided into states or of an interconnected globe to illustrate my explanations. The students do not, nor do I, struggle. With these concepts, we can sit in the classroom and ‘capture’ the world, like an idealised snapshot, in our minds. We can hold the world in the mind’s eye and give it the imprint of the ‘international’ or the ‘global’. We can ‘hold’ the world through these conceptual imaginations. But I’ve been struggling to do the same with the planetary or the idea of planet politics.

With multispecies politics, I think I have somehow been able to communicate a meaning by saying it’s about being interested in how other species live and bringing their worldviews into ours, their voices into our political processes and rethinking our political processes through doing so. Yet, even here I struggle when asked: ‘how do you bring sharks to the UN’? And ‘what does it do to liberalism to co-operate with sharks?’

Relational theory doesn’t much help, either, even as it promises to: it says, relations do not have ontological meaning so don’t look for such. As Querejazu (2022) has argued, we need not ontologise the idea of relations but practice relationality. But how do I do that? And how do I do that when trying to converse with others, especially if they don’t think or practice ‘relationally’, whatever that means?

I’ve been thinking on whether I’ve failed with these concepts because I’ve not ‘understood’ their meaning myself. And then immediately I am left thinking: can these concepts be ‘understood’ or ‘captured’ ‘by me’? Isn’t the point that they are not for me to ‘capture’ and impose on the world, that the meanings should arise, relationally, in multispecies, planetary encounters?

Logically, I think so. Analytically, though, I have no idea how to ‘land’ with these concepts in the ‘world’. I’m not sure my IR training has taught me to ‘land’ concepts into concrete environments for the meaning to be generated from there. I think I’ve been instead taught to kind of ‘hover’ on top of the world imposing concepts on the world, reading the world through them, like trying on little ready-made moulds to see which one fits.

At best, it feels like kind of bungee-jumping with concepts. Imagine that you sit on a kind of a spaceship, let’s call it the IR Hovercraft, because this metaphorical machine always hovers ‘up somewhere high’. To ‘capture’ the world from the Hovercraft with a concept, you metaphorically jump down to see if the concept touches reality. But before you know it, you are then jerked up back onto the Hovercraft to ‘make sense’ of what you saw ‘down there’, through the lens of your concept. At the Hovercraft, you share your thoughts of the jump with others who also inhabit the Hovercraft.

But what if you’re not on the IR Hovercraft with conceptual moulds with clear, or even contested, meanings, fitting such onto the world? What would it be like to theorise from the ground, if not by but somehow with non-human others, and not from the cleanliness and dislocation of a classroom or an office? I feel stuck on the IR Hovercraft in the classroom with fancy tech and sterile work surfaces.

Thinking about cows

In January a ‘team’ of scientists, artists, humanities and social science researchers gathered for the second time in a departmental teaching room of the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth. We had only met once and were only just getting to know each other. Based at the same university in a rural location, we were all interested in climate science and politics and ecological harms, but our ‘ways in’ differed as did our ways of communicating. By our second meeting, there were some frictions in the room. The truth of the warnings that cross-disciplinary discussion is not easy was becoming apparent.

So as the slightly prickly exchange continued, our discussion went from talking about geese at Amsterdam airport to colours and heat experienced by non-human animals in urban settings. It was a diverse discussion that veered from one subject to another – from film theory and representation to circular ecologies and food production. I think it was kind of what we all needed; open-ended conversation that revealed something about where we all came from – but it also tested us, our vocabularies, and mores of academic engagement.

At one point, Jon Moorby, a livestock scientist, asked, ‘So, how do you define multispecies politics?’ As the leader of the project, I was a little embarrassed as I fumbled around for some kind of definition, not knowing what words and in which order would quite capture the idea. I did not have – I still don’t have – a ‘good’, ‘neat’ definition.

While this question – and uncomfortability around it (at least by me) – lingered, a key turn in the discussion and the project was a very simple question by Jon. He said something like: ‘How many of you have met cows, actually hung out with them?’ Some said they were familiar with cows from their family farms, others declared they were a little afraid of them, including myself, following encounters with ‘aggressive cows’ on walks in the countryside. Jon suggested that we should come to the farm and meet the cows.

Despite the fact that we were there to talk about planetary multispecies studies, this was a somewhat surprising suggestion for many of us used to thinking in classrooms and offices, ironically even when thinking about animals and plants. And yet it was a welcome suggestion, at least for me: not only to create a break in the otherwise slightly circular, increasingly abstract, discussion but also to give us something to ‘do’, to get away from ‘bickering’ in that classroom space, in which the four walls were closing in on us a little by now. It was also clear we had very different baseline knowledge or experience of cowsheds. We decided we should have a day out in the farm and meet the cows and, it turns out, the many other critters – human, animal, robotic – that live there.

At the farm

On a Saturday morning, we arrived at the farm – a research farm of the university which serves as base for research on cow nutrition, veterinary care, and sustainable farming, and which also actively produces milk for the dairy industry. I pulled on my new, shiny, wellies and immediately felt a little ridiculous. They signalled perhaps some sort of privilege for some but also ignorance and dislocation. Livestock scientists and veterinarians are allowed here at the farm but not political theorists, they do their work elsewhere. Their boots are clean.

The farm houses around 350 cows for milking and for beef industry, alongside a small amount of other farm animals, such as pigs. Jon, who works in this space and heads the farm, welcomed us and started introducing us to the surroundings. We didn’t know each other very well still, so we politely smiled and asked what we thought sounded like relevant questions such as ‘How many cows? How much milk? How do you balance commercial and research interests?’.

And while we were intrigued, so were the cows. Tentative questions and tentative looks all round. Even as the cows here are not milked by people, the cows work with a small handful of farmers, scientists, and veterinary students regularly. We, however, looked a little out of place. Lacking in confidence, a little suspect. A few of the cows gathered to sneak a peak at us at the entrance (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Initial encounters.

Before we even fully entered the cowshed, there were disorienting noises all around us, which made me befuddled. My intricate plans for the team’s visit kind of ‘fell out of my head’ as we stepped in. Structured thoughts planned in the office were swept up by the noise of hoofs and clanks of metal and the sights and sounds of the thousands of starlings and shooshing of the robots, some milking cows, some cleaning.

Somehow, I found it hard to think, to make sense. Here I was – all into ‘climate science’ and ‘green politics’ – but very ‘green’ to the cowshed. Yes, I had read about cowsheds and global production requirements for milk and the ethical debates around that. And I’d encountered cow rumen research and its importance for sustainability and climate change. I was ready at a certain level of ‘knowledge’; but it also turns out I wasn’t quite ready – for the sensory, and analytical, overload.

For one, I don’t think we expected thousands of starlings in the cowshed. Or the cows dancing with the robots. I don’t know what I expected, in afterthought; but this certainly was not cows meandering on a green field, munching on grass. Nor was it a dystopian nightmare of animal oppression. It was a kind of complex space of scientific, multispecies and technological interactions.

Robotic mother-father-baby

As we wandered around, we were introduced to one of the kings of this particular castle: one of the milking robots. These fully automated robots at the vanguard of Precision Livestock Farming (see e.g. Neethirajan et al., 2024) milk all the cows in this shed now. The cows queue up to go see ‘them’ when they want. The machine reads the tags; immediately pulls up the individual record of production; calculates the objective for the session; takes medical measurements; provides treats; disinfects teats; and milks around 10-20 litres; all in one brief visit of less than 10 minutes. The milking robots are the all-knowing father, the loving caring mother, and at the same time, of course, as Joe Thurgate reminded us, also the replacement baby, standing in for the calf, inhabitant of another shed altogether.

As the cows queued up to be milked, we observed the numbered tags in their ears as they ate their treats and occasionally kicked the metal frames around them as they were milked (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Father-mother-baby at work.

By the milking robot we also met the little farm dog, running around: quite old and funky looking and very knowledgeable and comfortable in the space.

She gave me comfort: she wasn’t quite a pet but I could imagine that she could be. Somehow it seemed like it helped for her to look like a ‘pet’– something familiar, among the ferocious, fearless starlings stealing the cows’ food, the all-knowing milking robots, and the intrigued but dismissive cows.

Crumbling

I asked polite questions, through what I think you could describe as some kind of state of shock. I’m not sure it was just urbanite academics having an uncomfortable moment of disorientation in a cowshed. The shock I think was more the disappearance of capacities to make sense of this place, and its relationships to the wider world, to us, when all of a sudden very few concepts or words readily came to mind. It felt like the thoughts thought in clean infrastructures of IR scholarship, confined largely to Anthropocene exo-skeletons of university teaching rooms and offices, were not able to speak with such clarity here.

So I asked lots of questions to quiet the stirring emotions and hard-to-describe discomfort. I think asking questions was a coping mechanism. If only I could pull out from this space, conceptually, to get the facts, conceptually capture it, to figure it out, I could make sense of it and feel more in control, feel more ok. If only I could find the right concepts I could make sense of the ‘politics’ of this place and how it is tied to global power relations and all that. If only I could find the right theoretical edifice to put the place in, I could map it. I could ‘put it in its place’.

In so doing, from a force of habit learned in 20+ years of ‘doing IR’, I tried on some concepts to impose on the space.

I thought on the intense international negotiations facilitating the dairy production and trade here. In an ‘interdependent’ world the uninterrupted movement of the milk across not just the United Kingdom but Europe has been a central concern for the UK government in the context of Brexit. Third largest milk producer in Europe, the UK state takes an intense interest in the flow of milk. I thought on all the public policy reports and the many calls from politicians for the dairy sector to be safeguarded in the turmoil of Brexit (see, for example, Dairy UK, 2016). These reports prioritised market access and UK producers’ interests.

But I also thought on how the state’s concern in structuring the international for the flow of milk is tightly weaved together with concrete lifeways here: if the mozzarella produced in Anglesey cannot move, the milk trucks from here do not either, and the cowshed’s social routine too is disrupted. When cows are encouraged to lactate, the milk needs to move. Their bodies are the premise and also feel the direct consequences of post-Brexit negotiations, even as they are not at the negotiation table. Post-Brexit trade deals cause havoc for not just ‘the state’, for its businesses (see, for example, Bakker and Datta, 2018) but the cowsheds and their inhabitants. Interdependence is multispecies interdependence.

International politics, the state, sovereignty and drives of globalisation are smeared all over the cowshed, the cows, the seeds, the robots, the dung, the science. IR concepts make not just ‘institutional’ realities in Brussels or economic realities of the state but also simultaneously cow realities in health, productivity, space and lifeways. And yet, IR concepts like international interdependence or sovereign statehood also feel alien, imposed, singular, human-only. They are one-dimensional concepts which while they structure lifeways here in the shed too, also readily ‘forget’ the cows, the robots, the starlings and their complex possibilities, ethics, and power relations. They capture just one, bland, still image of the cows as resource and ignore the complex interplay of cows’ strong wills, the starlings’ devious tactics, the robots’ steely but loving embrace here. They do not capture the flow of material; no, the flow of planetary, multispecies interactions.

The paradoxes of power, too, seem striking here. Cows here are not objects but subjects, very much in control of the movement of the shed. The cowherd also has its own intricate power relations. Yet, simultaneously, in some ways, the cows here are also powerless to run off, say, if they wanted to. There is not just power over or power to, or structural or discursive power of IR theories here. If power makes any sense here – and it seems too clean a concept somehow, with too much weight attached to it – it is like there are multiple worlds of power here all at once, weaved together, seamlessly, but not into a ‘one world’ where power relations could be defined, ‘captured’.

I then thought on ‘global capitalism’. Surely here, if anything, was capitalism in action: a global power structure placing these cows in use relations for our thriving. Something in me shouted in outrage: ‘Let them out! Capitalist oppression!’ But I immediately felt that this concept also failed to capture. Capitalism in abstract was alien to the complexity of this space. Numbers and objectification, ‘quantified animals’, but care and community, too; forced labour, but willing participation; oppression but contentment; a cowshed but many more starlings than cows. Indeed, the familiar edifices of ‘global structures of power’, ‘knowing’, and even ‘right and wrong’ were kind of crumbling in the clanks and pumps and the chirps and the licks. It is so much easier to look at a neat map of the world, in the office or the classroom, and claim to ‘know’; here it felt like the concepts I had to mind as an IR scholar kind of withered and died.

Discomfort in the guts

Jon must have been a little taken aback by how rattled some of us looked. I thought that perhaps he became concerned about what we thought of the treatment of the cows. The farm aspires to be among the 5% best in the world for living conditions for the animals. I am absolutely sure this is the case. But I think we were concerned about it all, nevertheless, somehow. Because I felt somehow ill, discomforted. But even this ill feeling was not easily identifiable or to-be-made-sense-able.

I think some of the ill-feeling was that the cowshed resembled a factory floor. Like the robotic arms in Amazon warehouses, here too the robots danced in synch with the animal workers (Figure 3). And these labourers here had some good benefits: world-class food and the best of automated health care. Downside: you live to produce. And when you do not produce with adequate flow, well, you are retired. But not to greener pastures, I gathered.

Figure 3.

The muckscraper.

As we left the cowshed and explored the other parts of the farm, we asked lots of questions: mostly things like: ‘Are they happy? Where are the babies? Do you mean they never eat green grass, outside? What do you mean they don’t want to go out?’ So many questions. But perhaps more significantly a kind of pit in the stomach feeling, a kind of a discomfort. And yet, not captured by concepts. I guess it was IR analysis looking for expression, but somehow not in my head via concepts, but more as feelings in the pit of the stomach.

Indeed, it wasn’t just concepts that were crumbling but also a kind of background ‘milk carton’ ethic, or perhaps an aesthetic. No green fields – even as the milk carton so portrays. Not even in the top 5% of farms focused on health and sustainability? Somehow, I just needed those cows on a green field. Like a naïve child, my insides kept demanding, if only there was green grass, I would probably make sense of this, be ok with all this.

By the time we got to our second site visit, Pwllpeiran Uplands Research Centre, we were relieved to be faced with cute goats and alpacas – on green fields. ‘Thank the gods!’ We finally found something that seems more like ‘nature’ (!). More Attenborough, somehow, more palatable. A smile came back to my face. Yes, let’s film the alpacas. This is nice. Don’t they have cute knees! And they are also good for the environment; great! Sunshine, goats, alpacas! This is more the kind of multispecies climate politics I like! Phew (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Alpacas.

Contamination

After the first visit to the cowshed, a kind of gnawing feeling continued. I had dreams about the cows and the starlings and the robots. Unsettled feelings. I liked to talk to my colleagues about the farm but when they’d ask: ‘so is your research about animal rights in food production? Is it about social construction of cows as resources for economy, state and trade?’ I struggled to answer. I’d say something like: ‘Maybe, I guess it could be. But really I’m more interested in how planetary connections are weaved together in the shed, the cows and the tech and the humans and the science and the seeds and the starlings. And I’m interested in how they feel and how I feel about it and I have no idea why I’m even interested in that. I just feel I need to say something about it, but I don’t know how, for ‘IR’’.

I wanted to cycle up to the farm often to see the cows, starlings, the shed. But I feared this would be perceived as little creepy since it is just a normal workplace community for the animals and humans who work there. They don’t need excitable political theorists wandering around.

But since we were in a team doing a project together, we went back: to film, to walk and to do other project-related things. I got more used to the smell and the sounds. And it helped a little that later the starlings had migrated and left the shed less frantic and noisy. I saw one of the ladies fall out of the pen. I said hello to new-comers in their temporary shed. I observed efforts to make art of and with the cows. As a team, we tried to represent our feelings of our encounters in multiple ways: performance, film, poetry, and essays.

I was happy about this all, about the unusual access to a farm and the cows, and about the creative thoughts, discussions, pictures, and stories that emerged. But all of this didn’t seem to offer me any clear IR theoretical insights. Perhaps, I had grown a little lazy of trying to capture the shed in IR frames, trying to bungee-jump into the shed from the Hovercraft. It seemed so pointless. And yet, I felt it was the space where planetary, multispecies politics was at.

I also brought some students there. I was more ready for the space and the complex connections it invokes by then, but I could see the students going through what I had gone through. All this talk of IR theory, and of climate politics and Anthropocene: and then the cowshed. The cowshed jars with all of that. Somehow it blows a hole in the textbooks and concepts that seem to ‘capture’ in classrooms. Some wrote about the cowshed and related thoughts in their essays. Faces seemed thoughtful, full of feelings of mixed kinds. No quips or offers of quick ‘solutions’ we so often are keen to throw out in a seminar discussion on international politics.

Anna Tsing (2015) speaks of contamination; how our encounters contaminate us. Cowshed encounters have definitely contaminated me.

How does one process the contamination? The best I found I could do is write little essays or stories or reflections – free form, with minimal structure (essays which you read here). Used to writing more abstract, more definite, more argumentative IR theory, writing these snippet stories feels unusual, ‘incomplete’ somehow, and yet somehow the stories and vignettes speak from/in this space better than IR concepts and conceptualisations – at least of the kind I’m used to. And they gave me a ‘tip of the tongue’ feeling of what could be meant by the planetary, relational, and multispecies move in IR. Not trying to write weighty logical arguments in IR language, from below emerged ‘senses’: how the smell of cow dung ties in global seeds, international science teams, transport networks, climate change, in a planetary cross-scalar, relational multispecies knot.

I think I for the first time understand, inadvertently perhaps, why story-telling is helpful and needed in IR. I’m not used to it, I am no creative writer and the narrative turn in IR unfortunately passed me by – but when concepts crumble, stories somehow help. They somehow capture the gut feelings, the connections made, the shooting through of relations.

Sidebodies

What emerged from the unexpected death of IR and its concepts in the shed, were new ‘concepts’, though I’m not sure they are concepts. I think they might be more like what Harraway has called ‘knottings’.

My colleague Matthew Jarvis’s way of knotting the shed was intriguing. He explored this space of the cowshed through visual poetry. These visual poems are constructed from images of flanks, or ‘sidebodies’ as he called them, of the cows in the cowshed through simultaneous engagement with the words of scientists – Jon Moorby and Mariecia Fraser (Moorby and Fraser, 2021) – working with/on the cows, their rumen and nutritional needs, in conjunction with questions of productivity (milk) and also sustainability (grains).

These visual poems explore, I came to think, the drivers of life ways in and around the shed; the temperature rises that drive the effort to feed the sustainable ‘local’ grain (Figure 5) and the ‘cutting regime’ of production, the politics of science (Figure 6).

Figure 5.

Sidebodies: Rising temperatures.

Figure 6.

Sidebodies: Cutting regime.

As Toni Čerkez pointed out, they get at the relationalities as always a ‘side’-affair: moving sideways, rather than forwards or backwards in linear, clear-cut directions. These sidebodies then show the side-moves, relationalities of the space that travel far and wide, across planetary food production systems, science, and climate trouble. They allow us to slide across the relationalities, planetary multispecies connections.

The trouble with IR concepts is that they just kind of ‘hover over’, ‘beyond’, or ‘just above’ the cowshed and its realities. IR concepts – from interdependence and power to discursive construction of subjectivity – do not touch the realities here. They float somehow upon them, seemingly feeling a connection, and then they zoom off into the abstract realm of theory, of wholes, or truths and debates about them; leaving behind the cows, the starlings, the robotic ‘hands’ looking for the teats to disinfect.

They are all too clean as concepts; sterile, somehow, one-dimensional, abstract, too.

Knowing in the cowshed?

What is it to ‘know’ in the cowshed? Van Dooren et al. (2016: 8) suggest that we should remember that the world is only ‘partially knowable’ (Ogden et al., quoted in Van Dooren et al., 2016: 12). It is suggested that instead of capturing wholes we should engage anecdotes as ways of knowing for they ‘[allow] us to move outside a narrow space of species-typical behaviours to recognise individual or social diversity and creative capacity within other modes of life’. These propositions help. They help to recognise the shed as multiple: as complex, relational, and diffracted quite differently through different knowledge systems, vocabularies, concepts, ways of knowing and representing. I am increasingly aware that there is no ‘one cowshed’ to be ‘captured’, to be mapped into ‘the’ ‘world’, but multiple realities and relationalities that shoot through and across to be followed up, attentively. Partiality and incompleteness rule.

Somehow I expected to go to the cowshed to capture it, to put it in its place, to place it in my pre-conceived though hazy notion of planetary multispecies politics. Instead of putting the cows in their place, they’ve put me in mine. I can smell the shooting through and shifting borders of ins and outs, human and non-human, resource and agent. The ‘both-and’ which relational theorists speak of. Things are not somehow ‘either-or’ here, to be neatly defined.

I can also sense relationalities in the body: ‘gut’ processing the robots, the trucks, the ethics, the multispecies lifeways. I also sense how the planetary, the multispecies shoots straight through the state, the international system and the abstract scalar concepts of IR. This is not capturable neatly, but I get a ‘sense’ of it. With IR concepts I was unable to get even a sense of it: in IR planetary becomes just another ‘scale’ somehow hanging ‘above’ the international. In IR, the planetary somehow doesn’t land on the ground. Here-ish in the cowshed, I breathe it in.

This paper’s narrative structure is in part seeking to reflect the process of being exposed, differently, in and around IR. It is also problematising the expectation that ‘academic’ papers need to exhibit a sort of ‘above the ground’ objectivity, where we have clear subjects and objects, participants and researchers. The cows are not ‘my’ subjects, fodder for ‘my’ IR theory. I’m trying to stay with, difficult as it is, the proposal by Eva Meijer (2019) that non-human animals already do political theory with us. They always have, even when rendered inanimate silent objects for our theories. In this rendering here, they are not quite inanimate. That said, they haven’t really spoken here either. To be honest, I’ve not really allowed it as I keep processing my obsessions with ‘IR’.

I wonder why I am so concerned with speaking ‘to’ IR from the ‘cowshed’. What does IR do for the cows, for the starlings? What does it do to ‘us’ or our understandings of the ways in which humans, animals, and computational systems converge at the farm? It seems to me that it does very little and at the same time a great deal. IR concepts are often not interested in cows, or starlings, or even ‘us’, human subjects, as many IR feminists have argued, but they still structure, and consolidate structures, subjugation and silence. That is why they matter, but also why it matters to soften their steely grip, to find different ways of relating.

As for why IR needs to find a cowshed ‘unimportant’, not ‘relevant’, for IR: I suspect IR as a structure of thought and practice tied in with the state and its international power structure is quietly fearful of the cows speaking back, robots that are shown to be all-important for structuring our global food production systems, starlings that do not behave according to our wills. The planetary, relational, multispecies nature of the cow dung, of trade negotiations, of transport infrastructures, of robot maintenance, interdependence, is a constant presence, but it is also a threat, to ‘our’ role as those that structure. So, we better be careful what we allow ‘in’, to our social scientific Hovercraft which allows us to elevate ourselves above it all and make the world neat.

So, so what, for IR?

To talk about relationalism – to work on relationalism in a scholarly way – is already a not-very-relational way of going on. (Jackson and Heo, 2022)

There is something paradoxical about trying to develop conceptual tools to escape disciplinary confines within disciplines. However, disciplines and their futures matter and IR’s does too, not least because of its important role in reflecting and reifying the assumptions and practices of international and global politics, and all the lifeways so structured, confined, enabled, and disabled. IR’s conceptual system’s matter, regardless of their accuracy.

How do we develop concepts and the process of conceptualisation in light of this exploration, and in the context of the challenges presented by the somewhat ill-defined but yet arguably evocative ideas proposed by relational, planetary, multispecies approaches? In other words, how might we stretch our concepts, our minds, and also perhaps our bodies in relations, with planetary others and what does this mean for IR and for politics with planetary others?

It is not a surprise that I will not offer in conclusion a heavy all-encompassing ‘theory’ that ‘captures’ how to do so, or ‘a method’ which ‘resolves’ how to ‘get at’ world(s). Instead, I offer some, let’s call them provocations for how IR scholars and concepts might interact with the openings presented by relational, planetary, and multispecies frames.

Starting somewhere

It is not so easy to know how to start doing relational, planetary or multispecies thinking if we start from the IR Hovercraft. That is because that Hovercraft is not really somewhere: it is more like an imaginary room where it is safe to play around with concepts that don’t really have to encounter anything or anyone. But if we take seriously the challenge that relational, planetary and multispecies thinking all point towards – that we must think in relations, with others, immersed – then we must start conceptualisation in IR too somewhere. Thus, instead of starting with IR frames of reference, or even abstract definitions of planetary, relational and multispecies politics, we are provoked to go somewhere and to be in the space, to listen, to reflect, to let go of concepts, or to allow the somewheres to stretch them.

The cowshed I have been stretching in is just one concrete place you could start from, but there are innumerable others. In reaching towards relational, planetary, multispecies you could go outside, or underground. Even an office or a classroom will probably do if you really follow up its relational, material, planetary connections, relations. If like me, you find that you have been rather too well-trained in the arts of the ‘IR of the Hovercraft’ which has numbed your capacity to think, to sense, to go with the flow in concrete places, to think with others, you may find, as I have, that this is not as easy as you might think. But it is possible to unlearn distance and learn to sit, walk, slide, roll somewhere, and think with, even if it might feel ‘messy’. If, in so doing, you ask yourself too: ‘but what is the relevance for IR?’ try not to panic, just go on anyway.

In this sentiment of staying connected, on the ground, what I suggest here fits in with the wider anti-elitist ‘turn’ in IR: IR interested in the everyday (e.g. Bjoerkdahl et al., 2019), micropolitics (Solomon and Steele, 2017), practices (Adler and Pouliot, 2011), assemblages (Acuto and Curtis, 2013) or indeed feminist curiosity (Enloe, 2014). Instead of starting from abstraction of ‘global capitalism’ or ‘sustainability’, or with the goal of ‘testing’ a grand theory, we start from specific choices, structured lifeways, and communities to ask: what do these tell us of what matters, there?

This is what Tsing (2005) calls conceptualisation with a sense of friction. Donna Haraway (2008) on the other hand calls this conceptualising with ‘grappling hooks’ to the ground. I find this notion particularly helpful in trying to land the IR Hovercraft in relational, planetary, and multispecies worlds. With hooks to the ground, even global capitalism, power, and interdependence become different kinds of concepts; they are grounded to specifics, do not fully capture, and yet relate their users to their spaces and planetary relationalities thereof, including the silences and ethics thereof. With hooks to the ground, the planetary doesn’t zoom off the planet but digs into it, faces the fact that the planetary is also always place-based (Clark and Szerszynski, 2020).

Or we may be led to different analytical notions instead: stories, feelings without words, senses, dreams. These may not easily emerge as one thing to capture: but they do the work of knotting things, again. Vignette stories, and Sidebodies, I believe, are hooked to the ground and as such do not levitate to ‘capture’ as a whole, at a distance, so easily. They are ways of engaging the politics arising from place, the relational, planetary connections; they don’t ‘zoom off’ quite so readily.

Is this what we are to do now? Write stories, create art? This may sound unsatisfactory for some used to the tricks of the Hovercraft. Surely the aim is to say something more profound, to present a general view, a global view, a view somehow from the outside, even if it is via the cowshed. But just because it feels unsatisfactory, we are reminded in the cowshed that we need to be wary of just recoiling back to the Hovercraft. That is the natural impulse of those trained to do so, like me.

But it makes a difference where we think and who does the conceptualising and how the relational, multispecies hooking of our concepts to the ground takes place. The infrastructures in which we think matters, too, because in relational, planetary multispecies frames we think ‘with’ spaces, tech, humans, animals, and also in their present absence. Also, the analyst is not innocent in the way the concepts bloom or do not from the ground. The differences in landing sites as well as landers matters analytically, not just because stories will be different but also because relationalities, connections are too. Accounts will reveal different relationalities, tensions and knottings. IR off the Hovercraft then will not look like -isms of classical IR; it is multiple, it is pluriversal (Trownsell et al., 2022). Off the Hovercraft the ‘general view’ that captures ‘all’ is disenabled. This is uncomfortable for those who have been taught the arts of ‘capturing’. But if capturing is a myth of the Hovercraft as I suggest then what we should do, unapologetically, is roam around, in relations, smeared in planetary multispecies response-abilities and develop knowledge, IR, from there, many wheres.

Percolation

Hovercraft concepts struggle on the ground or they look for new moorings which shift them. From the ground, we can see, no, more like feel, the limits of IR concepts. But this failing is not the point, or the only point. The point is that from the limits of those concepts, their silences, percolate other senses, meanings, feelings, thoughts, practices, commitments. From stretching of the situated knowledge, from the strange, the non-makeable-sensable, percolate other things. Stretched concepts, like multispecies interdependence; or new feelings of ethics of care; or visceral senses of being entangled; or feelings of lack of order and control.

With time, what percolates lends itself to, let’s call it re-presentation: from the cracks of the withering concepts arise feelings, guttural sensations, screams, maybe even strings of words and some sentences, perhaps even stories or snippets of them.

These percolations are also analytical, for they are ‘knotting’ things ‘again’, differently, somehow stretched. And in so doing they are re-orienting you to those around you and their role in your ways of speaking and being. Like a crystal lattice with once firm structure released, stretched and rejiggled. Similar, but different, reoriented.

Something happens here to how we ‘know’. My colleague Kim Knowles reflected on this in an essay on experience of filming in the cowshed (later published as Knowles, 2024). Kim had come prepared: both in theory and in research into previous representations of cows and cowsheds in experimental film. But once Kim got started filming in the cowshed the concepts and theories kind of receded. Different, unexpected, registers of being with and representing arose in the shed, from the hands and camera, entangled in relations, without ‘just’ thinking.

I have this same feeling. Of thinking through the gut, the ears, the nose, somehow. If filming is not just thinking then IR theory too is perhaps not just thinking. When you shut your eyes and listen to the hooves and the clanks and the chirps in the cowshed, you can hear the ‘capital’ in the room but you can also discern the detail of multispecies living, of the starlings, cows, humans, dogs and robotic machines; though you can’t quite necessarily give it a name, or capture it. You can know/feel how thorough-goingly their lives are infiltrated into relations of production, of value, of scientific management, and in so doing also reveal relationalities, networks, how we are tied up, tangled, all knotted up. You can feel the reality of the interplay of ‘sustainability’ agendas, capitalism and scientific knowledge here. International is not so clean and sterile and the planetary distinctly smells. And experience, expressed, is also an analytical portal, ‘messier’ as it might be than classical IR isms.

Breaking the scales

One of the difficult criticisms an account such as this can encounter in an IR classroom is the one derived from abstract notion of scales: cowshed is simply not ‘of’ or even ‘in’ the world of the ‘international’ when conceived through the classical notion of anarchy. From this abstract perspective of the Hovercraft, the cowshed’s realities are ‘local’, ‘personal’, immaterial to ‘IR’. IR works at the ‘higher’ scales of international and global. Yet from our perspective on the ground, there is nothing ‘local’ or ‘particular’ about this space which would allow it to be ‘relegated’ to the sphere of ‘personal’, or ‘local’. From the ground, there are no ‘scales’; I guess you can only perceive such scales from an imaginary Hovercraft.

This cowshed as we have encountered it is utterly planetary. The machinery which is the ticking heart of production of milk are planetary, not just in the materials which make up its robotic tentacles but in how it is maintained through a network of technological supplies and flows of expertise. None of the cows would be milked in this shed if it wasn’t for the planetary connections of the milking machine and its maintenance. The ore, the minerals, the labour which dug them up, the fuel which fed the transport which moved the parts, the semi-conductor factories and the planetary shipping routes, the scientific papers and patents, and the experts ready to travel at moment’s notice if the milking machines fail and throw into chaos the ‘functioning’ of the needs, provision, society of the shed. The cows are as good as the robot’s global networks, in parts, and in expertise. And the milk needs to flow because the trucks need to move because the mozzarella needs milk because I want pizza. The trip to slaughterhouse of a cow at the end of its productive lactations is part of this network. And so am ‘I’ made, deeply implicated, in these planetary relational multispecies connections of eating, movement and thought.

Let’s then be very careful about deploying scales when we develop relational, planetary, multispecies thoughts and politics. Nothing about places we inhabit makes sense as ‘local’. And nothing about my experiences of the cowshed is ‘personal’. And this is even as ‘my’ frames of reference, relations of power, are as imprinted on my stories of the cowshed as the cows’ lives are networked between the milking machine and the slaughterhouse. All is connected, intricately and concretely: tied up, gathered together, or as Haraway (2008), again, so well puts it, ‘knotted up’.

Conclusion: Towards relational, planetary multispecies politics

We set out to make sense of relational, planetary and multispecies politics, not from IR as we know it and its abstract scales and concepts but from the cowshed. The process has been uncomfortable and lacking in certainty and precision. And yet it has been – even if rather differently from the usual – analytically productive and, potentially, deeply impactful for how I might ‘do IR differently’. I have not come to a firm singular definition of relational, planetary and multispecies politics but I have developed a sense of them in the cowshed. If I have felt tongue-tied in IR language, in the cowshed I have developed relational, planetary, multispecies feelings, senses, notions, and re-presentations.

This process provides a new kind of analytic scope and possibility, for me, perhaps also for IR. And this new analytic scope is also linked to a new kind of politics and ethics. Because concepts construct, in part, political horizons and possibility, it matters how, where and with whom we make, remake, stretch or abandon concepts. At stake is much more than concepts or theory; at stake are lifeways, deaths, and ethics in the concrete. At stake is material multispecies politics, justice, response-abilty, here in the cowshed and simultaneously, much beyond, in the planetary knottings of this shed.

In the cowshed, loosening concepts from their human-only moorings, you respond to what politics percolates to the fore viscerally, ethically, in the gut, not just in the mind, with changed ways of moving through the world, even if you respond with none of the clarity ‘from on high’ that one craves as an IR scholar on the Hovercraft. If multispecies politics is about ‘paying attention to others and meaningfully responding’ (Van Dooren et al., 2016: 6), the meaningfulness here is also not just theoretical. Instead you feel it, you act it, you relate to worlds, differently. Relational, planetary, multispecies politics is not just about thinking IR differently but about doing IR differently, in planetary, multispecies relations.

We may continue to speak with ‘outrageous human accent’ in IR – I think this is inevitable – but it seems to me that armed with the new, deeply challenging notions such as relationality, planetary and multispecies politics we can, also in IR, develop ways of trying to open up and develop ‘inter-worlds’ (Meijer, 2019: 73–74). Maybe this is the kind of Inter (not-so-national) Relations we are pointed to in the register of relational, planetary, multispecies politics. And yet, as we have seen, practicing such Inter (not-so-national) Relations also requires development of alternative analytical, conceptual and communication registers, or unlearning dominant ones.

And it requires a new kind of infrastructural politics – in IR scholarship but also practice of international politics. It was only recently that I was able, or interested, to enter a cowshed. But I’m not sure we are better for the lack of access or interest in these sites. Many of us remain land-locked in classrooms, office buildings, conference venues, international human-only institutions. That’s not good for our politics with planetary others.

One outcome of relational planetary multispecies politics then is that it also opens up an important infrastructural politics, for IR, but also practice of international politics. Settings for academia, for IR, and for international politics in practice are confined to buildings manufactured to exclude worlds of others. We think and do policy in closed worlds. But where we think seems to matter for what and how we think. Where we develop politics seems to matter for who we do politics with. What would it do to hold International Studies Association conferences at cowsheds? What would it do for the UN Security Council meeting to be held on Arctic tundra? And what would it do to diplomacy for a presidency to be held by a glacier as has been proposed in Iceland? Would policy, too, be thought, felt, processed, differently – the international shifted towards the planetary; concepts grappled to grasses or glacier flows? In my office, an answer echoes from the four walls: ‘no, most likely not’. At the cowshed, however, a different sense percolates to the fore, a whisper: ‘yes . . .. maybe yes’.