Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221142179 |
| Author | Paul Beaumont,Elana Wilson Rowe |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221142179
European Journal of
International Relations
2023, Vol. 29(2) 449 –475
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661221142179
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JR
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Space, nature and hierarchy:
the ecosystemic politics of the
Caspian Sea
Paul Beaumont and Elana Wilson Rowe
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway
Abstract
The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems.
There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds
traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This
article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but
understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking
the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography,
the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive
logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise
politically awkward spaces. We contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate
spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and
the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus
of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. We illustrate our argument by conducting
a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has
produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region,
become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a
rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. We reason that if ecosystemic politics
can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the
Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences
elsewhere.
Keywords
Global environmental politics, hierarchy, International Relations theory, ecosystems,
Caspian Sea, global governance
Corresponding author:
Paul Beaumont, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), 0130 Oslo, Norway.
Email: paulb@nupi.no
1142179EJT0010.1177/13540661221142179European Journal of International RelationsBeaumont and Rowe
research-article2022
Article
450 European Journal of International Relations 29(2)
After the collapse of former Soviet Union, cooperation between the Caspian Sea littoral states
started through the signing of ‘Tehran Environment Convention’ . . . the first political document
signed between the five countries. In today’s historical meeting, we will witness the signing of
Caspian Sea Legal Regime Convention that will put emphasis on sovereignty, sovereign rights,
eligibility and monopoly of the right to decide on the sea.
The President of Iran, Aktau Summit (Rouhani, 2018a)
This article argues and illustrates that environmental cooperation and transboundary eco-
systems are a resource for producing hierarchies in world politics. Such ecosystem-based
hierarchies can structure regional order in significant ways and are likely to increase in
prevalence as the full import of systemic global environmental change figures into states’
foreign policy repertoires. By making this argument, we aim to advance the burgeoning
body of work in International Relations (IRs) that has sought to account for how hierar-
chies that structure world politics emerge, intersect and reproduce, and the consequences
of these processes (Zarakol, 2017; Mattern and Zarakol, 2016). This scholarship has
illuminated how broad hierarchies of race, gender (Sjoberg, 2017), science (Yao, 2021)
and civilisation (Towns, 2010; Yao, 2019) structure world politics. However, the ways in
which ostensibly ‘natural’ geography can be productive of hierarchies – ‘intersubjec-
tively constituted (or maintained) structure[s] of inequality’ (Mattern and Zarakol, 2016:
730) – have thus far been overlooked.1 This ‘green blind spot’ reflects a broader pattern
in the discipline of IR whereby environmental issues still receive less attention than IR
scholars themselves suggest they warrant (Green and Hale, 2017).2 It also reflects how
the ‘pretence of technocratic neutrality’ of global environmental governance success-
fully obscures power relations (Accetti, 2021).
To begin to remedy the IR hierarchy studies’ green shortcomings, we extend a nascent
research agenda pioneered in political geography that explores the political and social
consequences of regional cooperation anchored in transboundary ecosystems. We con-
tend that ‘ecosystemic politics’ (Wilson Rowe, 2021) – states clubbing together around
adjacent ecosystems partly through establishing new regional geopolitical imaginaries
– generates broad hierarchies that can transform relations of privilege and subordination
due to the seeming objectivity and ‘naturalness’ of geographic knowledge. These ecosys-
temically anchored hierarchies can cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and
the latent postcolonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of
most recent hierarchies scholarship (e.g. Barnett, 2017; Yao, 2019, 2021; Zarakol, 2017)
but sit in tension with both the cosmopolitanism of conventional environmentalism and
the plurality of state interests that frequently hinder such environmental efforts (Falkner
and Buzan, 2019). Taking inspiration from the field of critical geopolitics, we illustrate
that apprehending the production of hierarchies around ostensibly objective geographic
features requires attention to the emergence and scaling of the policy object itself (see
Allan, 2018). While cooperation around ecosystems takes legitimacy from the universal-
ism of science and environmentalism, we show how political engagement around eco-
systems can activate a latent spatially exclusive logic that privileges adjacent participants
while creating boundaries for others on the ‘outside’ (see Paes, 2022a on the Amazon, or
Depledge, 2018 and Wilson Rowe, 2018 on the Arctic).
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