Bruno Latour and Ecology Politics: Poetics of Failure and Denial in IR
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816643173 |
| Author | Anna M. Agathangelou |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 321 –347
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816643173
mil.sagepub.com
Bruno Latour and Ecology
Politics: Poetics of Failure
and Denial in IR
Anna M. Agathangelou
York University, Canada
Abstract
Failure and denial are seductive concepts, and they were explicitly theorised at the Millennium
conference in October, 2015. Though used to evoke an array of images to understand the
condition of International Relations (IR) as a discipline and in relation to other social sciences, the
concepts were not previously deemed pivotal for theorising world events. This article critically
assesses how failure and denial are used by IR’s scholarly community as signifiers, and what it is
that they signify. To this end, it considers Bruno Latour’s keynote address at the 2015 Millennium
conference, along with some of Latour’s shorter works. Drawing on STS (science and technology
studies), postcolonial and queer sensibilities, it concludes with a discussion of the significance of
theatre in IR scholarship, and examines the broader social and political implications of how we
think and understand failure and denial in the era of the Anthropocene.
Keywords
political ecology, Bruno Latour, theatre
Introduction
Failure and denial are equally seductive ontic trajectories in world politics; so much so
that they influence even critical IR, by illustrating the destructive logics that make up our
colonial and postcolonial present. This point was made clear by Bruno Latour in his
keynote address to the 2015 Millennium conference, organised by Scott Hamilton, Aaron
McKeil, and Andreas Aagaard Nohr. In an inventive and poetic presentation, Latour
Corresponding author:
Anna M. Agathangelou, Department of Political Science, York University, 4700 Keele Street, S Ross 653,
Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada.
Email: agathang@yorku.ca
643173MIL0010.1177/0305829816643173Millennium: Journal of International StudiesAgathangelou
research-article2016
Conference Article
322 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3)
1. Bruno Latour, ‘International Relations at the Time of Gaia-politics?’, keynote address, 2015
Millennium conference, London School of Economics and Political Science, October 17,
2015. Available at: http://mil.sagepub.com/site/Videos/Videos.xhtml.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Audra Mitchell, ‘Is IR Going Extinct?’ European Journal of International Relations (2016):
1–23. Available at: http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/26/1354066116632853.
6. Latour, ‘International Relations’.
7. Ibid.
8. See Mitchell for an analysis of survival in IR; Mitchell, ‘Is IR Going Extinct?’.
9. Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, et al., ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from
the End of IR’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2016).
argued that ‘failure and denial in politics …is the world itself’.1 Rather than focusing on
the ‘facts’ of IR (a top down abstraction), he shifted the conversation from the political
to the Anthropocene’s uncertainties, including the ‘difficulty of the denial and failure of
world politics, especially around the question of climate’.2 Taking the ‘world seriously’,
Latour continued, including ‘climate, water, and everything else’, makes simply impos-
sible an imaginary, and practice, of a discipline of IR that continues to visualise a bounded
territory. IR is turning its back on the possibilities of open-ended and overlapping terri-
tories, and is insisting on a familiar and fictional understanding of a state’s territory as
being bounded, and a theory of nature as existing outside it.3
Asking us to tell him where we as a field ‘stand on’ this issue,4 he pushed for a recon-
sideration of the politics of our personal attachments to notions and processes such as the
state, territory, and self-interest, that fail and deny the ‘politics of the world’ as a politics
of ecology. IR’s whole focus has been on territories and sovereignty, self-interest and
attachments; it has thus failed to take a stance on the world, consistently and systemati-
cally refusing to grapple with environmental issues, and possible mass extinction.5 These
issues are most certainly political, however, and test concepts like sovereignty, albeit
‘not in the Westphalian sense of the word, but in the sense that [sovereignty] is part of the
territory of the other’.6
Latour’s view of a genealogy of denial in IR can be traced to the social contract articu-
lated by Hobbes. Pointing to the Anglo-Saxon trajectory of IR, Latour problematises the
long entrenched idea of the ‘state of nature’ (i.e. the sovereign and sovereignty). He asks
why it is so difficult to talk about ‘nature, inside politics’.7 For him, forms of transference
across the borders of earth, humans, non-humans and in-humans, challenge simple
dichotomisations and distinctions. Using these same analytics, he alerts us, though never
explicitly, to a racially saturated field of vision with its logic of difference between
nature, culture, and among peoples, arguing that a somatography of order and disorder
turns some into masters of terror – the proponents of survival8 and domesticators of dan-
ger – and others into threats and risks; the vanquished or the non-existent.
Latour’s questioning of the failure and denial of IR comes at a moment when IR, across
a range of branches, including theory (conventional and critical), policy making, and
security studies, is under pressure to prove its continued relevance. Various disciplines
pose difficult but essential questions, from querying the ‘end of IR theory’,9 to asking
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