Bruno Latour Encounters International Relations: An Interview
| Author | William Walters,Mark B. Salter |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816641497 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Interview |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 524 –546
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816641497
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1. This interview was conducted by William Walters [WW] and Mark B. Salter [MS], with contri-
butions from Iver B. Neumann [IBN]. The discussion was moderated by Scott Hamilton [SH].
It was convened by the Editors of Millennium, volume 44, in conjunction with their 2015
Millennium conference on ‘Failure and Denial in World Politics’ held at the London School of
Economics and Political Science (LSE) on 17 October, 2015. The discussion has been lightly
edited and amended.
Bruno Latour Encounters
International Relations:
An Interview
Mark B. Salter
School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada
William Walters
Departments of Political Science and Sociology/Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada
Abstract
Philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour’s work on actor-network theory (ANT), science and
technology studies (STS), and the politics of nature, has made a substantial impact upon the social
sciences, and more recently, International Relations (IR). This interview records Latour’s first
direct ‘encounter’ with IR, and explores concepts and topics as varied as sovereignty, the State of
Nature, globality and spheres, the thought of Carl Schmitt, war and universalism, Gaia and climate
politics, and the creation of publics, secrecy, and politics as a mode of existence. It provides
new insight into Latour’s thinking and philosophy, while opening new avenues of research for IR
scholars to pursue in the future.
Keywords
Latour, Interview, IR
WW [to BL]: 1In your writing around the mid-2000s you’re working with the figure of
parliament – a parliament of things. It’s not a ‘parliament’ as political science or publics
Corresponding author:
Mark B. Salter, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, 120 University Ave., Ottawa, Ontario, K1N
6N5, Canada.
Email: mark.salter@uottawa.ca
641497MIL0010.1177/0305829816641497Millennium: Journal of International StudiesSalter and Walters
research-article2016
Conference Interview
Salter and Walters 525
2. Philip Conway, ‘Back Down to Earth: Reassembling Latour’s Anthropocenic Geopolitics’,
Global Discourse (2015): 1–20. doi: 10.1080/23269995.2015.1004247.
3. Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss, ‘Generalising the International’, Review of International
Studies 31, no. 3 (2005): 451–71. doi: 10.1017/S0260210505006583.
4. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature, Gifford
Lectures, Edinburgh, February 28, 2013.
5. Latour is referring to the comedic play written in 1670 by Molière, Le bourgeois gentil-
homme, or The Would-Be Noble. The play’s title is oxymoronic because it would have been
an impossibility to be both bourgeois and a noble, at this time in France.
6. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum
(New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2003).
7. See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (London:
Harvard University Press, 2004).
8. Pope Francis, On Care for Our Common Home, Encyclical Letter Laudato, Si’ of the Holy
Father Francis. This line is drawn from St. Francis of Assisi, The Canticle of the Sun.
Available at: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-franc-
esco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Last accessed October 20, 2015.
might understand the term, but a parliament that includes things as well as the devices
necessary to transport people and things into a given place for assembly. But in your
more recent work, as Philip Conway has observed,2 politics is discussed less in the figure
of parliament than as what Edkins and Zehfuss call a ‘generalised international’.3 We
think this comes across especially in your Facing Gaia lectures,4 where we encounter
Carl Schmitt, his talk of friends and enemies, of frontlines, of territory, of geopolitics,
diplomacy, war, and so on. And so, our first question would be: have you in a certain
sense gone ‘international’, as it were?
BL: [Laughs] Ah, like Monsieur Jourdain, in Molière, while doing prose.5 That is, with-
out knowing!
I don’t know – I’ve always been interested in the question of the ‘globe’ as a sort of
wrong way of approaching the question of nature. In fact, I’ve always been interested in
nature as a political entity and a hidden parliament, so to speak. Or, a type of hidden
authority which was always behind the back, and was made, very explicitly, to weaken
the assemblage of politics. So in that sense, I was always interested in the same ques-
tions. But now, through reading The Nomos of the Earth,6 I was struck – and I will talk
a little about the Politics of Nature project7 – I was struck by the coming back of the ter-
ritory – and the land, and even of the soil. It is very impressive, how many people now
are even working on the soil! The soil, including grass, and earthworms, and all sorts of
things.
Even the Pope mentions it in his Encyclical.8 There are now dozens of art projects
around land and territory, which makes sense because it is a question of going back to
Earth. Earth matters; as an abstract concept, but as a very localised, and re-localised, and
re-territorialised, site.
I don’t know what a ‘nation’ is, or ‘international’. I’m not sure what they mean. I
am working now with scientists who study ‘critical zones’, which are sort of water
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