Climate Change and Order: Mapping the Scope of International Relations in Studying Climate Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-374
Author(s):  
Isha Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Environmental Threats ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Robert Cox

As globalization gained currency in international politics, multilateral negotiations increasingly expanded their scope to include environmental issues. Still, the political dimension of environmental change remains underrepresented in international relations (IR) theorization. This article aims to focus on the theoretical fortification in the mainstream IR when it comes to transboundary environmental threats. Since the threats of climate change and environmental degradation cannot be contained within the sovereign territories of states, the state-centric conception of the political order in the conventional approaches to IR fails to respond to the threats that are planetary in nature. The article seeks to answer two questions: (a) What are the inadequacies in the realist and liberal concepts of political order vis-à-vis climate change? (b) How to destabilize the conventional assumptions of political order with the aim of making it more receptive to the concerns associated with climate change? To do the latter, the article delves into the work of Robert Cox in order to delineate his intersubjective approach, which combines the material basis of political order with social relations of production. By doing so, this approach also sheds light on the transnational variants of hegemonic power, making it a useful explanatory framework for political implications of climate change.

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

Part I Introduction, Ch.3 The Law and Politics of International Organizations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dunoff Jeffrey L
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Institutional Fragmentation

This chapter describes the contours of the international law (IL) and international relations (IR) scholarship on international organizations (IOs), as well as some of its key characteristics and debates. It proceeds in three parts. Part I briefly surveys the major theoretical approaches to the creation and functions of IOs found in the IL and IR literature. Part II analyzes the most important conceptual debates that have occupied IO scholars in recent years, including debates over the autonomy, accountability, and legitimacy of IOs. Part III explores a cluster of policy dilemmas, including the political implications of institutional fragmentation, how to manage IO interactions, and why IOs increasingly seem unable to effectively address matters of pressing international concern.

The Politics of Climate Change

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loren R. Cass
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
Political Response ◽  
Change Climate ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
Climate Change Politics

Climate politics presents difficulties for study given its interdisciplinary nature and the scientific complexities involved in climate change. Climate change politics had got its start in the mid- to late 1980s, as climate science became more and more accessible to policy makers and the general public. Yet prior to 2008, climate politics was only touched upon in major publications on international relations, with the exception of policy journals. Climate change was frequently referenced in articles on a range of topics, but it was not the primary focus of analysis. The recent years have seen an explosion in literature focusing on the topic, however. The potential for massive economic, political, and ecological dislocation from the consequences of climate change as well as from the potential policies to address the problem have since resulted in an extensive literature, with scholars addressing aspects of climate politics from every paradigm within international relations, as well as drawing on research in numerous other related disciplines. In addition, efforts to address the consequences of climate change have evoked controversial ethical and distributive justice questions that have produced an important normative literature. Overall, the literature on climate politics centers on two issues: how we can explain the international political response to climate change, as well as how the international community should respond to climate change.

scholarly journals Origins, Benefits and the Political Basis of Agroecology

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Colin Ray Anderson ◽  
Janneke Bruil ◽  
M. Jahi Chappell ◽  
Csilla Kiss ◽  
Michel Patrick Pimbert
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Systems

AbstractIn this chapter, we introduce the origins and history of agroecology, outlining its emergence as a science and its longstanding history as a traditional practice throughout the world. We provide a brief review of the evidence of the benefits of agroecology in relation to productivity, livelihoods, biodiversity, nutrition, climate change and enhancing social relations. We then outline our approach to agroecology which is rooted in the tradition of political ecology that posits power and governance have always been the decisive factors in shaping agricultural and other ‘human’ systems.

scholarly journals Epilogue The Scandal of the Refugee: Some peflections on the "Inter" of International Relations

Refuge ◽  
1998 ◽  
pp. 30-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dillon
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Decision ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Displaced People ◽  
International Power ◽  
Political Decision Making

The refugee is a scandal for philosophy in that the refugee recalls the radical instability of meaning and the incalculability of the human. The refugee is a scandal for politics also, however, in that the advent of the refugee is always a reproach to the formation of the political order subjectivity which necessarily gives rise to the refugee. The scandal is intensified for any politics of identity which presupposes that the goal of politics is the realization of sovereign identity. The principal argument, then, is that what I will call the scandal of the refugee illuminates both the fundamental ontological determinations of international politics and the character of political action, because the refugee is both a function of the intentional political destruction of the ontological horizons of people's always already heterogeneous worlds, and effects an equally fundamental deconstruction of the ontological horizons which constitute the equally heterogeneous worlds into which, as refugees, these people are precipitated. It is precisely on this concrete and corporeal site that both the ontological horizons and the allied political decision-making of modern politics are thrown into stark relief and profoundly called into question. For it is precisely here that the very actions of modern politics both create and address the incidence of its own massive and self-generated, political abjection. If that is one of the principal ends of international relations, one is forced to ask, what does it take as its beginning? If, in other words, the vernacular political architecture of modern international power commonly produces 1:115 forcibly displaced people globally, one is inclined to ask about the foundations upon which that architecture is itself based.

Theories of Language

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Fellerer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
East Central ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Implications

This chapter identifies key notions about the nature and workings of language and their wider political implications in Europe from around 1789 to the first decades of the nineteenth century. There are at least three formations, aesthetic and philosophical, linguistic, and political. Even though treated under separate headings for ease of exposition, they are meant to meet in this introduction in response to more granular surveys. The political dimension in particular tends to be left to historians or to philologists who deal with that part of the continent where it first gained real prominence: East and East Central Europe. Thus, after the first two sections on aspects of philosophy and early linguistics, where the focus is on Germany with France and England, the third section on language and nation moves eastwards to the Slavonic-speaking lands, to finally return back, albeit very briefly, to the West. The main purpose of this survey to provide introduction and guidance.

2. Looming Tragedy

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-52
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Carrying Capacity ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Earth System ◽  
Planetary Boundaries ◽  
Limits To Growth ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Global Action

Ecologists have applied the concept of “carrying capacity”, the population of a species that an ecosystem can support, to human populations. Ecological limits to growth in population and the economy dominated environmental concern in the 1970s and beyond. More recently they have been supplanted by the idea of planetary boundaries, based on the stresses that the earth system is capable of absorbing, several of which (including biosphere integrity and climate change) have already been transgressed, suggesting the system is in grave peril. This chapter also considers the points of critics of the idea that there can be limits, then analyzes the political implications of limits and boundaries, from the authoritarianism associated with some 1970s thinkers to the need for cooperative global action to the more democratic possibilities that could be associated with degrowth and planetary boundaries.

Political Challenges of the Climate-Changed Society

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (01) ◽  
pp. 13-17
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global Environmental Governance ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

We are at a turning point when it comes to the political implications of climate change. Given the reality of a future in a climate-changed world, it is time for us—broadly as a species, but particularly as academics—to move beyond the foci of the last few decades on the politics of preventing climate change through global agreements. There is a growing literature on the obvious need to slow the impacts of climate change, develop postcarbon energy systems, and design new forms of global environmental governance. Beyond these immediate needs, however, climate change poses a range of new problems and requires a broader research agenda for a climate-challenged politics.

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