Facing human interconnections: thinking International Relations into the future
| Author | Charalampos Efstathopoulos,Milja Kurki,Alistair Shepherd |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117820948587 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820948587
International Relations
2020, Vol. 34(3) 267 –289
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117820948587
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Facing human
interconnections: thinking
International Relations into
the future
Charalampos Efstathopoulos, Milja Kurki
and Alistair Shepherd
Aberystwyth University
Abstract
Communities on the planet are faced with complex challenges: changing relations within and
between human communities, changing relations with ecological and climatic conditions, and
shifts in technology-human interconnections. The complex interconnections across issue areas –
migration, environmental degradation and new technologies, for example – demand that scholars
increasingly think across theories, paradigms, specialisms and disciplines. But how should we
‘hold things together’ as we try to make sense of complex realities in International Relations
(IR)? This introductory article to the Special Issue ‘Facing human interconnections: thinking
International Relations into the future’ discusses the open thematic of ‘human interconnections’
that is used to loosely structure the contributions. Analysis of human interconnections, as
understood here, does not have a precise or fixed definition but is considered an open-ended
notion with varied meanings and dimensions. Indeed, the authors engage it here in varied ways
to explore their empirical, theoretical and political concerns. Yet, this notion also allows for
interesting new questions to be posed on the potential and limits of IR as it faces the future, and
debates around how we see interconnections between issue areas and ‘-isms’, how IR constructs
‘humans’ or ‘non-humans’ in interconnections, and what is at stake in bringing to our attention
unacknowledged interconnections. Here we set out why human interconnection is an interesting
notion to work with and why we need to keep its meaning open-ended. We also provide an
account of six different orientations we observe amongst the authors tackling the dynamics of
human interconnections in this Special Issue.
Keywords
futures, global challenges, human, interconnection, International Relations discipline, non-human
Corresponding author:
Charalampos Efstathopoulos, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Penglais
Campus, Aberystwyth, SY23 3FE, Wales, UK.
Email: che15@aber.ac.uk
948587IRE0010.1177/0047117820948587International RelationsEfstathopoulos et al.
research-article2020
Article
268 International Relations 34(3)
Introduction
The year 2019 was an important occasion for scholars in the academic field of
International Relations (IR) to reflect on the contested origins and evolution of the disci-
pline, and this reflection continues in 2020 and will do for years to come. In this journal,
the centenary was celebrated with a Special Issue reflecting on the first 100 years of IR.1
That Special Issue analysed the key issues, processes and ideas that came to dominate
international politics and its study in the first century of IR. The Special Issue included
analyses of policies and practices of the international, centring on significant areas such
as race, human rights, technological change, great power relations and international law,
and examining patterns of continuity and change across these areas and for the broader
field as a whole.
In the wider field, the centenary has also prompted much reflection and discussion on
the shortcomings of IR scholarship, and the difficulty of understanding the dynamics of
international change. The centenary, unsurprisingly, has also raised questions as to how
we might understand IR into the future. Much IR scholarship is still expressed in the
vocabulary of concepts like anarchy, sovereignty and power, reflecting the remarkable
continuation of international political realities that are associated with difficulties of state
interaction, the nature of warfare, persistent hierarchies of global life and the ongoing
interplay between conflict and cooperation. Yet, various new conceptual, empirical and
political perspectives have been brought to the table in recent years: global IR, multiplic-
ity, post-humanism, assemblage theories, practice theories, postcolonial scholarship,
relational theories and cross-scientific conversations on the quantum and cosmology.
In this Special Issue, we take up the challenge of thinking into the future of IR.
However, our aim is not to predict the future of the international order or the issues that
will define the nature and practices of international politics. Rather, we ask how we might
‘hold things together’ conceptually and empirically as we face an emerging and complex
array of national, international, global and planetary challenges. We invited an array of
scholars from different theoretical perspectives and with different empirical interests, to
reflect on how they might think their scholarship and IR into the future, particularly
through grappling with the challenges presented by thinking through complex human
interconnections.
We put forward the notion of human interconnections as a concept around which both
established and newer IR theoretical ventures, and the study of multiple different and
novel empirical focal points, might productively cohere or be structured. Human inter-
connection, as we trace below, has been of interest to IR scholars for a long time. Yet,
human interconnections have not only been studied in different ways and within different
conceptual systems in IR but are also being thought through in qualitatively new ways in
recent IR literatures around relationality, complexity theory and politics of the human
and the non-human. As we explicate below, we do not then present this notion as one
with a singular meaning or as a new theory or paradigm for explaining or predicting into
the future. Human interconnection is instead put forward to as open-ended and dynamic
conceptual site where conversations and debates between IR scholars from different ori-
entations, focused on different empirical challenges, political struggles and theoretical
questions, can develop.
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