Towards Posthumanist International Relations

Despite the numerous methodological debates in International Relations, it has arguably remained an anthropocentric discipline. Regardless of one’s stance on values, the systematicity of the international domain, the role of power, the balance between structure and agency etc., it has remained fundamentally about humans behaving in human contexts. Other factors were only considered in terms of opportunities and constraints (e.g. the environment) or as tools (e.g. technology). By contrast, recent work belonging to what could be broadly construed as posthumanist thought (for some recent book-length studies, see e.g. Braidotti 2019; Lupton 2020; Kalpokas 2021) has been postulating the inseparability of humans from their natural and technological environments, with all of these summands being equally important and mutually constitutive. Consequently, this paper argues for a posthumanist turn in IR on both ethical and practical grounds. On ethical grounds, building upon critical and postcolonial studies, the anthropocentric focus of IR is seen as reflective of long-standing discriminatory practices (both outside and within the anthropos) and ultimately destructive to both humans and non-humans by way of legitimating both physical and symbolic violence towards the allegedly inferior summands of the world. On practical grounds, meanwhile, the relegation of both environment and technology to mere contextual status risks overlooking important developments. Not only digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, have become key factors in international competition but also the growing autonomy and sophistication of such technologies means that they acquire increasingly autonomous shaping power. For example, the way in which content governance algorithms are able to bind groups of humans and shape their opinions, thus significantly affecting both domestic and, as an extension, international processes, the rise of algorithmic governance technologies and techniques on both domestic and international levels, or the way technology challenges the distinction between state and private power and governance could be examples of the tendencies that necessitate the extension of agency in IR beyond humans and their institutions. Likewise, the natural environment, with the exception of geopolitics, has thus far hardly enjoyed agency at least on part with humans, at least as far as IR theories are concerned. Nevertheless, the impending climate catastrophe and the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic have served as notable warnings of the cost of ignoring natural factors on their own right. Overall, the anthropocentric focus of the currently dominant approaches to IR has to be rethought. Instead of it, a radically egalitarian approach that puts the human, the technological, and the natural dimensions into a mutually interactive relationship in which neither can be seen as an isolated agentic force but, instead, as part of a larger whole. Hence, it is claimed, time of a posthumanist theory of IR is ripe.