Animalising International Relations
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231192345 |
| Author | Erika Cudworth,Stephen Hobden |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231192345
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(3) 398 –422
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178231192345
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Animalising International
Relations
Erika Cudworth
De Montfort University
Stephen Hobden
The University of East London
Abstract
This article explores what it means to ‘animalise’ International Relations (IR). The posthuman
move in the social sciences has involved the process of de-centring the human, replacing an
anthro pocentric focus with a view of the human as embedded within a complex network of inter-
species relations. In a previous work we drew attention to the lack of analysis within International
Relations of the key role played by more-than human animals in situations of conflict. The current
COVID-19 pandemic again indicates that an analysis of international relations that does not have
at its core an understanding of a more than human world is always going to be an incomplete
account. The paper argues for the animalising of International Relations in order to enhance
inclusivity, and suggests five ways in which this might be approached. As it becomes increasingly
clear that a climate-related collapse is imminent, we argue for a transformative approach to the
discipline, stressing interlinked networks and a shared vulnerability as a political project which
challenges capitalism (advanced/late/carboniferous/genocidal) and the failure of states to address
the concatenation of crises that life on the planet confronts.
Keywords
agency, animals, COVID-19, International Relations, relationality
What could ‘animalising International Relations’ possibly mean? Of all the social sciences,
International Relations would appear to be the most human-focused – concentrating on
the actions of state leaders, diplomats and the military, together with forms of human
Corresponding author:
Erika Cudworth, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK.
Email: erika.cudworth@dmu.ac.uk
1192345IRE0010.1177/00471178231192345International RelationsCudworth and Hobden
research-article2023
Article
Cudworth and Hobden 399
organisation – states, international organisations and transnational corporations. While
‘the environment’, mainly related to climate change, has become a topic of study within
the discipline, this has primarily focused on state and international organisations’ ways
of dealing with the issues rather than the ingress of actors beyond the human. As
such, International Relations as a discipline remains highly anthropocentric. By contrast,
we argue here that the practice of international relations is thoroughly animalised.
International relations occur within a context of relations with myriad other species and
life forms. While we should not overlook that what we call international relations is far
from a human-only zone, what students of international relations frequently overlook is
the animality of the human species. As Melanie Challenger argues, ‘the world is now
dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal. And the future is being imag-
ined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal’. ‘This’, she argues, ‘matters’.1
This article makes the case for animalising our thinking about international relations.
That it matters, in thinking about the human as animal, is where we will begin. While
there has been progress in thinking about the animality of international relations, there is
still a long way to go in acknowledging our relations with the rest of nature. The next
section will consider how has this division with the rest of nature come about and why,
in our view, this is not only significant but potentially dangerous. In the second part of
the paper, we turn to an example from International Relations, the impact of the COVID-
19 virus. Susceptibility to a virus highlights human animality. The pandemic also high-
lights the way in which human interactions with the rest of nature at a very simple and
low level have the potential for global implications. The outcomes of the pandemic sug-
gest a need for thinking about agency beyond the human, which is the focus of the third
section of the paper. The final section considers what issues ‘animalising’ might raise for
International Relations and what trajectories it suggests for the future research agenda of
the discipline. We will suggest five, increasingly radical, paths that the discipline could
take towards ‘animalising International Relations’.
The human animal: Why it ‘matters’
Timothy Morton summarises the complexities of being ‘human’ clearly: ‘I am not bound
in an impervious whole and there are parts of me that also belong to other life forms, or
just are other lifeforms’.2 There are common body parts with many other species. ‘Our
bodies are connections to a menagerie of other creatures. Some parts resemble parts of
jellyfish, others parts of worms, still others parts of fish’.3 Even though we think of our-
selves as an ‘I’, we are a ‘we’, a multi-species assemblage. While there is some scientific
debate around the numbers, even conservative estimates indicate that our bodies contain
at the least the same quantity of non-human cells as human cells.4 In core areas such as
eating, defecating, reproducing and dying, our bodies perform the same functions as all
other living critters on the planet.5 Nevertheless, in the Western tradition, our animality
is something from which we have increasingly sought to distance ourselves. ‘Historians’,
notes Travis Holloway, ‘have routinely separated human history from natural history,
while political theorists have described politics as a distinctly human realm that is some-
how completely separate from its environment’.6 While this is a feature of Western cos-
mology, it is worth noting that this is both a recent phenomenon and not a view shared by
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