Abstract | The Anthropocene offers a challenge to mainstream approaches to International Relations and to thinking across a range of policy concerns. This challenge is posed in several distinct registers, well expressed in this diverse collection, which emphasizes the ontopolitical dimensions at stake. Ontopolitics, as the introductory chapter states, brings to the forefront the need to interrogate ‘the often-unrecognized ontological assumptions which underpin theories, beliefs and practices’ of agents and actors seeking to understand the Anthropocene as a problematic and to develop new approaches to governance and policymaking today. Exemplary here are conceptions of the ‘posthuman’, of multi-species and new and entangled forms of security, and of the ‘Capitalocene’, ‘Chthulucene’, ‘Plantationocene’, ‘Technocene’, and ‘Kinocene’—just to highlight some of the differing concerns and conceptual lenses well-represented in this collection. Each of the chapters deploys a different framing and the ontopolitical assumptions and ethical and political stakes are drawn out in the chapters themselves and in the editor’s final ‘Conclusions’ chapter. |
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