Description
Planetary politics and International Interventions: Time, Scale and Peace in the Anthropocene
The politics of time are increasingly prominent in International Relations(IR), but remain underexamined in the area of international interventions, and the related fields of peacebuilding, conflict resolution and development. These interventions involve not only issues of time, but also a rupture of scale, in terms of the traditionally understood divisions in political science, between the “national” and the “international”. Temporal assumptions are intimately entangled with our understanding of different scales, with the “international” often associated with modernity, compared to the “national” or “local”, which are seen as “traditional” or “pre-modern”. This paper examines the temporal and scalar implications of the emergence of a new set of theoretical approaches around the Anthropocene, which pose a significant challenge contemporary approaches to international interventions. Prominent schools of thought like new materialism, posthumanism and complexity theory are united around the emergence of a new temporal epoch, the Anthropocene, and a new scalar level, the planetary, both of which radically disrupt how we understand international interventions. The planetary scale operates both “above” and “below” the international, cutting across traditional spatial logics, whilst the Anthropocene sets up a new, apocalyptic temporal schema, replacing ideas of modernity and progress. The paper will consider the implications of these new developments for the way International Relations understands peacebuilding and other interventions in the post-colonial world.
