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- Philosophy, Political Science, International Relations, Political Theory, Political Sociology, International Relations Theory, and 26 morePeace and Conflict Studies, International Law, Human Rights, Continental Philosophy, Jacques Derrida, War Studies, Historical Sociology, Sociology of Science, Sociology of the Military, History of Human Rights, War Theory, History of International Relations, Reflexivity, War and society, Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge, Militarization & Power, Peace and Conflicts Studies, Critical Theory, Critical International Relations Theory, Speculative Realism, Posthumanism, New Materialism, Science and Technology Studies, Computer Networks, Databases, and Softwareedit
This chapter uses the posthuman to envision a creative identity based on complexity and cooperation, rather than the transcendent, unilinear arguments based on natural selection. In these metaphors, the ontology supported is one that... more
This chapter uses the posthuman to envision a creative identity based on complexity and cooperation, rather than the transcendent, unilinear arguments based on natural selection. In these metaphors, the ontology supported is one that renders multiple agents as worthy of care and regard by understanding the place of difference—not as threatening, but necessary.
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I left no one at the door, I invited all; The thief, the parasite, the mistress—these above all I called— —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass International Relations needs a bigger vocabulary. This claim does not mean that we need a more... more
I left no one at the door, I invited all; The thief, the parasite, the mistress—these above all I called— —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass International Relations needs a bigger vocabulary. This claim does not mean that we need a more specialized language or theoretical jargon, but rather new words and concepts that explain the world with greater clarity. It means, as in the epigraph by Whitman above, we open our door to those who have been excluded or ignored at both a disciplinary level and a worldly one. We can invite guests from other disciplines or redraw the intellectual history of International Relations (IR) and reuse it for a new era of global or, more hopefully, planetary politics. This could begin simply with giving up the title “International Relations.” This discipline and the world it explains are more than, and less than, relations between nations. The familiar IR view of states and their corresponding nations obfuscates the challenges facing human communities in what ...
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The materiality of the body is introduced as a way to provide methodological insight into both the way the body works, and by analogy how society works. This includes an expansion and redefinition of the political lexicon of body... more
The materiality of the body is introduced as a way to provide methodological insight into both the way the body works, and by analogy how society works. This includes an expansion and redefinition of the political lexicon of body politics, and an attempt to tie self-interest to supporting an enriched and complex idea of community.
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Forest ecosystems are crucial to survival on Earth. This article argues that trees and forests are both vital components of a healthy Earth system and productive examples for expanding International Relations’ disciplinary boundaries. The... more
Forest ecosystems are crucial to survival on Earth. This article argues that trees and forests are both vital components of a healthy Earth system and productive examples for expanding International Relations’ disciplinary boundaries. The article discusses the forest in three contexts: the global, the (post)colonial, and from the tree itself. From tree planting as a practice of social and environmental justice, to postcolonial and Indigenous science and knowledge, to the mycorrhizal ‘wood wide web’, a focus on trees, forests, and biosphere opens the possibility for a multispecies IR. Through a consideration of trees and forests in law, treaty, culture, and science at the local and global level, this article adds to a growing literature in IR that strives to bring the non-human, more-than-human, or other-than-human creatively and productively into the discipline. Foregrounding the forest's materiality and trees’ symbolic power for human cultures opens important pathways to unders...
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This chapter will return how metaphors work, rather than what they are for, and reiterate that the engagement with metaphor and materialism is less about defining a new approach than it is concerned with bringing ontological and ethical... more
This chapter will return how metaphors work, rather than what they are for, and reiterate that the engagement with metaphor and materialism is less about defining a new approach than it is concerned with bringing ontological and ethical commitments grounded in particular framings of the world to the fore in the study of IR.
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Research Interests: Critical Theory, Sociology, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Posthumanism, and 10 morePolitical Science, Transitional Justice, Justice, Animal Rights/Liberation, Environmental Justice, Political Representation, Contemporary Political Theory, Multispecies Ethnography, Capabilities Approach, and Human Animal Studies
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Since the article ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’ (hereafter the Manifesto) was published in 2016, it has provoked discussion and debate in multiple forums.2 Sessions have been dedicated to it at the 2016 European... more
Since the article ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’ (hereafter the Manifesto) was published in 2016, it has provoked discussion and debate in multiple forums.2 Sessions have been dedicated to it at the 2016 European Workshop on International Studies on ‘Politics in the Anthropocene’, the R.J. Vincent Colloquium at the Australian National University, the Oceanic Conference on International Studies in Brisbane, in two roundtables at the 2017 ISA in Baltimore, and this October at the Earth System Governance Conference. In May 2017, Joseph Camilleri dedicated a web forum with 12 contributors to the question, ‘Can world politics save planet Earth?’3 The 2017 Millennium Conference drew another reference in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s keynote. These
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This article explores the power of food and fermentation as a situated and material way for women and feminist communities to come together for change and sustenance. Fermentation processes, when understood as a microbial process, can aid... more
This article explores the power of food and fermentation as a situated and material way for women and feminist communities to come together for change and sustenance. Fermentation processes, when understood as a microbial process, can aid in imagining a feminist political project of transformation that begins in the kitchen, and it can be a powerful metaphor for rethinking politics and equality.
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Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for... more
Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.
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This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings of the High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, do not substantively explore the problematic relationship between intrastate violence,... more
This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings of the High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, do not substantively explore the problematic relationship between intrastate violence, the sovereign state, and humanitarian interventions relationship to war in the violence to which it is responding. Without looking at these complex relationships, international intervention for humanitarian purposes, as defined by the Responsibility to Protect, will not be able to truly answer sovereign intrastate violence, as it never fully identifies the processes that are producing that violence.
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The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for... more
The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for teaching IR theory in an engaging manner, and have used zombie outbreaks to analyse the responses of the international community during catastrophe, invasion, and natural disasters. The authors of this article would like to unearth another aspect of the zombie that is often left unsaid or forgotten: namely, that the body of the zombie, as a historical phenomenon and cultural icon, is deeply imbricated in the racialisation of political subjects and fear of the Other. Through a critical analysis of biopower and race, and in particular Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, we suggest that the figure of the zombie can be read as a racialised figure that can provide the means for rethinking the relationship of the discipline of IR to the concept of race. We rea...
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This paper will review the main debates surrounding organ transfer and its potential to become either market or state controlled, and the medical response to the "shortage" of organs. It will argue that the highly medicalized... more
This paper will review the main debates surrounding organ transfer and its potential to become either market or state controlled, and the medical response to the "shortage" of organs. It will argue that the highly medicalized and technocratic nature of organ procurement, transfer, ...
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This chapter introduces ideas and metaphors from ecological immunity and biomedicine as a way to illuminate the relationship between bodies and states. Rather than arguing that the state and the body should be separated, this chapter... more
This chapter introduces ideas and metaphors from ecological immunity and biomedicine as a way to illuminate the relationship between bodies and states. Rather than arguing that the state and the body should be separated, this chapter intervenes on this metaphorical relationship by enlivening our ideas of the “body” in the body politic.
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Debates about democracy and ecology invariably lead to the question of the representation and membership of non-human animals, ecosystems and the biosphere in world politics. This chapter responds by interweaving two lines of inquiry. One... more
Debates about democracy and ecology invariably lead to the question of the representation and membership of non-human animals, ecosystems and the biosphere in world politics. This chapter responds by interweaving two lines of inquiry. One considers the fundamental political theory that could generate an adequate account of how to give representation to the non-human in the polity. Key theoretical interventions will be considered alongside a posthumanist, new materialist account of the material agency of ecosystems. The second considers the dilemmas involved in designing ecological democratic institutions that could include the non-human in communicative systems of membership and accountability. We propose two new enabling structures for ecological inclusion and governance: 15 regional ecosystem assemblies to cover the Earth’s major biomes, and an Earth System Council to coordinate integrated action, both of which include and channel representation from states, indigenous communities...
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In this chapter, the authors revisit the founding tenets of political power in the light of the Anthropocene, both in Political Science and International Relations as disciplinary fields, and in global politics as a set of institutions... more
In this chapter, the authors revisit the founding tenets of political power in the light of the Anthropocene, both in Political Science and International Relations as disciplinary fields, and in global politics as a set of institutions and regimes. We first survey anthropocentric theoretical understandings of power in world politics—both traditional and critical—and then develop an alternative theory of power exercised in complex and distributed ways across “thing-systems” that ineluctably connect society and nature. We do not argue that traditional state-based notions of power have no continuing salience or value—at least within restricted, Anthropocentric domains. We do, however, argue against restricting our ideas of power to the human and the social. It is no longer tenable to understand social life as ontologically separate from ecosystems or the biosphere, as if there were an actual category separation between the social and the environmental. Therefore, this chapter focuses on how power in the Anthropocene expresses not merely relations between people or governments, but functions across entangled domains of institutions, ecologies and things that are connected to more than human intention and influence. We argue that IR’s twin poles of anarchy and hierarchy are both anachronistic in an epoch in which social\nature is rebounding brutally on humanity with uncontrollable power, and dangerous because of the way they have, when translated into practices and institutions, deepened the appalling ecological crisis facing the earth. We then develop an account of collective responsibility for Earth system repair that is inflected by such a shared and distributed model of global power.
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World politics generates a long list of anxiety-inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics and... more
World politics generates a long list of anxiety-inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics and climate disaster, the diabolical violence of the recent past and conceivable future is the stuff of nightmares. Yet International Relations scholars and practitioners are often criticized for being disconnected from the human realities of international calamity. The challenge for both is to engage world politics in a way that foregrounds the human consequences of extreme violence and depravation. In this article, we explore these difficult experiences through popular culture representations of the apocalypse, a subject of intense interest for researchers in a discipline where global destruction is a distinct possibility. However, we take a different route by engaging the apocalypse through the horror genre, the one place where human suffering is expl...
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Research Interests:
Debating the utility and ethicality of nuclear weapons has often centred on the “unspeakability” of nuclear war, often drawing this silence from the apocalyptic power of nuclear technology. This can manifest itself in greater secrecy in... more
Debating the utility and ethicality of nuclear weapons has often centred on the “unspeakability” of nuclear war, often drawing this silence from the apocalyptic power of nuclear technology. This can manifest itself in greater secrecy in policy decisions concerning nuclear technology and the phenomenon of “nuclear reclusion” in the public realm. This article compares the memorialization of nuclear weapons in Japan and the US, and explores how remembering the attack on Hiroshima from multiple viewpoints could lead us towards different policies or support more open debate about nuclear weapons and power.
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Debating the utility and ethicality of nuclear weapons has often centred on the “unspeakability” of nuclear war, often drawing this silence from the apocalyptic power of nuclear technology. This can manifest itself in greater secrecy in... more
Debating the utility and ethicality of nuclear weapons has often centred on the “unspeakability” of nuclear war, often drawing this silence from the apocalyptic power of nuclear technology. This can manifest itself in greater secrecy in policy decisions concerning nuclear technology and the phenomenon of “nuclear reclusion” in the public realm. This article compares the memorialization of nuclear weapons in Japan and the US, and explores how remembering the attack on Hiroshima from multiple viewpoints could lead us towards different policies or support more open debate about nuclear weapons and power.
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Humans have long had relationships with microbes; before we knew of the micro-processes involved, humans used bacteria to ferment beverages, cheeses, and preserve olives. Some contribute to chronic diseases and conditions while others are... more
Humans have long had relationships with microbes; before we knew of the micro-processes involved, humans used bacteria to ferment beverages, cheeses, and preserve olives. Some contribute to chronic diseases and conditions while others are absolutely necessary for the health and well being of humans and the earth’s ecosystems: in our bodies, bacteria aid us in digesting food and in the ocean, they create half of the earth’s oxygen. Viruses have always coexisted with life, plagues and diseases have affected bodies, populations, and events across continents, changing the course of human history, but viruses are also essential to sea and freshwater regulation and human reproduction. This chapter will examine these delicate and complex relationships humans have with microbes, both benign and pathogenic, as an encounter that allows us to revisit our ethical and political commitments: international relations from this perspective is both more modest and yet more vital. Habits—from what is eaten or what medical choices are made, from antibacterial soap to misuse of antibiotics—can alter global networks and either improve or inflict harm on communities humans might not even know exist. Most importantly, to respond with care to other forms of life, even if we may never meet them or know precisely what their claims of rights and wrongs may be, is seen as vital to survival within earth’s fragile ecosystem.
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This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings of the High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, do not substantively explore the problematic relationship between intrastate violence,... more
This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings of the High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, do not substantively explore the problematic relationship between intrastate violence, the sovereign state, and humanitarian interventions relationship to war in the violence to which it is responding. Without looking at these complex relationships, international intervention for humanitarian purposes, as defined by the Responsibility to Protect, will not be able to truly answer sovereign intrastate violence, as it never fully identifies the processes that are producing that violence.
Research Interests:
This paper will review the main debates surrounding organ transfer and its potential to become either market or state controlled, and use Giorgio Agamben's distinction between the sacred and profane and the movement of things... more
This paper will review the main debates surrounding organ transfer and its potential to become either market or state controlled, and use Giorgio Agamben's distinction between the sacred and profane and the movement of things between these two spheres in hopes of ...
... Theocratic War Machine Stefanie Fishel Western Political Science Association Annual Conference Vancouver British Columbia March 19-21 2009 Draft copy Abstract: This paper explores an unarticulated relationship between capitalism and... more
... Theocratic War Machine Stefanie Fishel Western Political Science Association Annual Conference Vancouver British Columbia March 19-21 2009 Draft copy Abstract: This paper explores an unarticulated relationship between capitalism and Evangelical Christianity in the US. ...