Description
E.P. Thompson was once described as ‘the single most influential British public intellectual of his generation,’ and his work, such as the 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class, is regarded as essential reading for historians and sociologists. Yet despite such accolades, Thompson has had little impact in the discipline of International Relations (IR). This is surprising given that Thompson’s oeuvre speaks directly to issues at the heart of the discipline; the formation and sustenance of national identities, the everyday politics of resistance, the intersection of economics, culture, and society through an account of history-from-below, or indeed, the perils and politics of nuclear weapons. In this paper I address IR’s oversight of Thompson’s work by drawing upon and reappraising his writings about ‘exterminism, ’and I argue that it can help us understand and address the interconnected crises of the Anthropocene. This article first introduces Thompson’s work, articulates and advances his understanding of ‘exterminism’, examines the significance of exterminism in the ‘Third Nuclear Age’, before finally reflecting on how exterminism may also account for issues outside of the realm of nuclear politics, highlighting how, for example, states fail to address the catastrophic threat of climate change.
