Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816636674 |
| Author | Audra Mitchell,Simon Dalby,Stefanie Fishel,Daniel J. Levine,Anthony Burke |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 499 –523
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829816636674
mil.sagepub.com
Planet Politics: A Manifesto
from the End of IR
Anthony Burke
UNSW, Australia
Stefanie Fishel
University of Alabama, USA
Audra Mitchell
Balsillie School of International Affairs/Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Simon Dalby
Balsillie School of International Affairs/Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Daniel J. Levine
University of Alabama, USA
Abstract
Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices,
both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political
manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal
and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its
possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate
science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes
wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.
Keywords
international relations theory, ecology, climate change, extinction, international law, diplomacy
Corresponding author:
Stefanie Fishel, The Department of Gender and Race Studies, University of Alabama, Box 870272,
104 Manly Hall, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA.
Email: srfishel@bama.ua.edu
636674MIL0010.1177/0305829816636674Millennium: Journal of International StudiesBurke et al.
research-article2016
Conference Article
500 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44(3)
1. Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2015).
2. Global carbon budget project. Available at: http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbon-
budget/14/hl-full.htm. Last accessed November 16, 2015.
3. Boris Worm et al., ‘Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services’, Science 314,
no. 5800 (2006): 787–90. doi: 10.1126/science.1132294
4. Gerardo Ceballos et al., ‘Accelerated Modern Human-induced Species Losses: Entering
the Sixth Mass Extinction’, Science Advances 5, no.1 (2015). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1400253;
Damian Carrington, ‘Earth Has Lost Half of Its Wildlife in the Past 40 Years, says WWF’, The
Guardian, 1 October 2014. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/
sep/29/earth-lost-50-wildlife-in-40-years-wwf?CMP=share_btn_fb. Last accessed January
29, 2016.
5. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London and New York:
Penguin), 169.
This manifesto is not about politics as usual. We seek political imagination that can rise
from the ashes of our canonical texts. It is about meditating on our failures and finding
the will needed for our continued survival. Global ecological collapse brings new urgency
to the claim that ‘we are all in this together’ – humans, animals, ecologies, biosphere. To
survive, we must ask questions that are intimately connected to capitalism, modernity,
and oppression. We must ensure that our diplomacy, our politics, and our institutions are
open to those who will bear the brunt of ecological change.
Planet politics must emerge as an alternative thought and process: a politics to nurture
worlds for all humans and species co-living in the biosphere. The local, national, and
global no longer define our only spaces of action. The planet has long been that space
which bears the scars of human will: in transforming the world into our world, we dam-
aged and transformed it to suit our purposes. It now demands a new kind of responsibil-
ity, binding environmental justice and social justice inextricably together.
We need not focus on who is responsible, but we do need to learn to adapt to the world
we have created. We can dwell in this time of failure and still long for the surety of a
future, a future that allows us all to survive and honours our deep entanglement with the
planet. This is why we have chosen the polemic and political format of the manifesto. It
aids us in searching through the old, getting rid of what no longer serves, and mixes up the
political and personal to combine and confuse our political commitments. We don’t need
more reports or policy debates. We need new practices, new ideas, stories, and myths.1
We must face the true terror of this moment. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmos-
phere now exceed those experienced for over a million years, and global greenhouse emis-
sions trends show the planet hurtling towards a world, in this century, that is three to five
degrees warmer than the preindustrial era.2 This is a world of melted ice caps and perma-
frost, flooded cities, oceans so acidic they cannot support life, and the loss of the Amazon’s
rainforests. Ocean acidification, pollution, and overfishing may also cause the collapse of all
major marine fisheries by mid-century.3 At least 617 species of vertebrates have become
extinct in the wild since 1500, exceeding the ‘background rate’ of extinction by over 100,
and half the Earth’s wild animals have disappeared in the last four decades.4 All this is loom-
ing as much of the world suffers under a burden of extreme poverty and inequality, and
communities from the Niger Delta to Bangladesh are condemned to live in ‘sacrifice zones’
devastated by oil drilling, mining, fracking, pollution, nuclear testing, and inundation.5
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