On the way to planet politics: from disciplinary demise to cosmopolitical coordination
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819879482 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Author | Philip R Conway |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819879482
International Relations
2020, Vol. 34(2) 157 –179
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819879482
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On the way to planet politics:
from disciplinary demise to
cosmopolitical coordination
Philip R Conway
Central European University
Abstract
From climatic chaos to mass extinction, from ‘geoengineering’ to unprecedented urbanisation,
world politics has, in recent decades, become inescapably planetary. Recent discussions concerning
‘Planet Politics’ are, therefore, timely. However, the debate, to date, has been limited by a number
of conceptual and political problems. In particular, an apparent disinclination to address serious
differences as regards the authority of natural scientific knowledge with respect to collective
ontologies raises the question of what is truly political in planetary politics. Drawing on Gayatri
Spivak’s concept of ‘planetarity’ and Isabelle Stengers’ ‘cosmopolitics’, this intervention consists
of a diagnosis, a method and an alternative. The diagnosis is that this debate has yet to constitute
a workable starting point for the very thought processes, and political processes, that those
involved demand. The method is simultaneously ‘forensic’ and ‘diplomatic’ – that is, it focuses
on bringing undisclosed and semi-disclosed conflicts into the open while, furthermore, ‘thinking
through the middle’ of established polemical positions, enabling new possibilities. The alternative,
then, proposes to distinguish a cosmopolitan agenda of global connectedness from a cosmopolitical
process of situated coordination. Finally, it is argued that adding ‘planetary’ to our politics aptly,
if counterintuitively, encapsulates the condition of ‘political multiplicity’. However, rather than
lending weight to disciplinary consolidation, this encapsulation should serve to forge connections
with problems of multiplicity of all sorts. That is, the purpose of planetary politics, as conceived
herein, would be that of inventing speculative practices that maintain the possibility of unlikely
alliances between disparate powers, and not only those of the nation state.
Keywords
Anthropocene, cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitics, diplomacy, planet politics, pluralism
Introduction
As an agenda for research, collaboration, agitation and institutional reconstruction,
recent debates concerning ‘Planet Politics’ could not be more timely.1 In Planet Politics:
Corresponding author:
Philip R Conway, Central European University, Nador u. 9, 1051 Budapest, Hungary.
Email: ConwayP@ceu.edu
879482IRE0010.1177/0047117819879482International RelationsConway
research-article2019
Article
158 International Relations 34(2)
A Manifesto from the End of IR,2 co-authors Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Audra
Mitchell, Simon Dalby and Daniel Levine summarily declare that ‘International
Relations, as both a field of knowledge and a global system of institutions, is failing the
planet’.3 Hitherto blinkered by the spatial-ontological scale of the international, the dis-
cipline is thus challenged ‘to reorganise its very foundations’4 and to embrace a politics
of the planetary.
Such declarations have not been uncontroversial.5 Most conspicuously, in a response
article, David Chandler, Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden excoriate what they see as
‘an elitist and managerialist assault on the political imagination’.6 Far from setting out a
bold, world-making vision, the Manifesto is instead characterised as a depoliticised apo-
logia: a ‘global cosmopolitanism’ in the vein of ‘David Held and Tony Blair’, armed to
the teeth with éminence grise, promoting yet another ‘global liberal mission’.7
Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘planetarity’, and Isabelle Stengers’ ‘cos-
mopolitics’, my intervention to this debate consists of a diagnosis, a method and an
alternative. The diagnosis is that while International Relations (IR), as both field and
system, may well be ‘failing the planet’, and while the Manifesto has succeeded in stok-
ing discussions in this regard, this text has itself failed to constitute a workable starting
point for the debate it demands. In particular, its fusion of Earth system-based cosmo-
politan governance with an ethos of allyship concerning situated and historically subju-
gated knowledges is, at best, discordant. However, pace Chandler et al., I take this failure
to demand not scorn and condemnation but scrutiny and reconstruction. The Manifesto
does indeed identify crucial intersections for our moment, even as, I argue, it gets lost at
the crossroads.
The method herein employed is simultaneously forensic and diplomatic. It is forensic
in both the etymological sense of forensis – relating to a forum or place of public assem-
bly – and in the sense of close, detailed scrutinising. That is, its objective is to make open
and apparent the problems at issue. It is diplomatic in the sense developed by Stengers.8
That is, its objective is to ‘think through the middle’ of established polemical positions,
enabling new possibilities.9 The alternative, finally, proposes to fundamentally distin-
guish a cosmopolitan agenda of global connectedness from a cosmopolitical process of
situated coordination.
The following, therefore: (1) elaborates upon the above; (2) explicates the concepts of
planetarity and diplomacy; (3) forensically analyses the tangled intertext surrounding the
Manifesto; (4) diplomatically rearticulates major lines of controversy; (5) explicates
Stengers’ cosmopolitics, as distinct from the cosmopolitanism of Burke et al.; and (6)
concludes by proposing a cosmopolitical planet politics. In short, this would be a politics
requiring the invention of speculative intellectual and political practices that maintain the
possibility of unlikely alliances, not only between nations but between planetary agents
of all sorts.
Overwriting the globe
Not for but from ‘the end of IR’, Burke et al. issue us an invitation – to participate in ‘a
new global political project: to end human-caused extinctions, prevent dangerous cli-
mate change, save the oceans, support vulnerable multi-species populations, and restore
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