Description
This paper joins newer approaches to IR in questioning the relational frameworks that predominantly subtend critical perspectives, which emphasise the generative capacities of being-in-relation as the locus of political activity. Instead, newer approaches challenge us to attend to a politics of non-relation in forms of refusal and withdrawal, with an emphasis on critique and negation. With that in mind, the paper focusses on the occupation of Hambach Forest by a small group of anarchists as a site of radical refusal. The paper argues that it’s at once a refusal of the nearby lignite mine, set to be extended into and destroy the remaining forest; a refusal of capital’s fossil-fuelled global economy; and a refusal of the subjectivities constituted by capital that demand our complicity. Reading the occupation by bringing together Barad’s conceptualisation of the ‘void’ (2017) and Rancière’s account of politics as both a practice of aesthetic disruption and one that names a ‘wrong’ (1999), the paper demonstrates that building the infrastructures of refusal (homes, barricades, communal spaces) with and through the trees simultaneously makes the nucleus of a new world legible, one that could be just. Therefore, the paper concludes that refusal is necessary to make radical alternatives possible.
