Big Pictures – IR’s Cosmological Turn
| Author | Chris Brown |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298211063934 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Review Article |
https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211063934
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2022, Vol. 50(2) 591 –598
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/03058298211063934
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1. Christopher Smeenk and George Ellis, ‘Philosophy of Cosmology’, The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. Available at: https://plato.stanford.
edu/archives/win2017/entries/cosmology/>. Last accessed October 27, 2020.
2. Ibid.
3. Justin Rosenberg, ‘International Relations in the Prison of Political Science’, International
Relations 30, no. 2 (2016): 127–53.
Big Pictures – IR’s
Cosmological Turn
Chris Brown
London School of Economics, London, UK
Bentley B. Allan, Scientific Cosmology and International Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018, 338pp. ISBN 978-1-108-40400-6 HB£75, PB, £21.99)
William Bain, Political Theology of International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020,
254pp, ISBN 978-0-19-8859990-1, HB £65)
Milja Kurki, International Relations in A Relational Universe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2020, 216pp, ISBN 978-0-19-885088-5 HB £65)
Cosmology is the study of the physical universe, nowadays an active area of physics and
astronomy. Its findings have implications that go far beyond those disciplines; as
Christopher Smeenk and George Ellis persuasively argue, cosmology was until recently
seen as a branch of philosophy, and still has major philosophical importance and impor-
tance for the human sciences taken as a whole.1 This is because, first, the uniqueness of
the universe means that cosmology is necessarily a historical science and, second because
cosmology ‘deals with the physical situation that is the context in the large for human
existence’.2 The three books examined in this essay run with this thought, and between
them, provide a wide variety of ways in which cosmology informs, influences, or per-
haps determines the way in which we think about both the subject matter and the dis-
course of international relations. After looking at each book in turn I will explore what
this putative turn towards ‘big pictures’ tells us about the current state of the art, using as
a reference point Justin Rosenberg’s influential essay ‘International Relations in the
Prison of Political Science’.3
These three books are very different in scope and style, ranging from a conventional
study which fits easily within the International Relations discourse (Bentley B. Allan)
via a work of political theology (William Bain) to a call to reorder all the social and
1063934MIL0010.1177/03058298211063934Millennium — Journal of International StudiesBrown
book-review2022
Review Article
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