Description
The global ecological crisis has led to calls within International Relations (IR) for moving beyond the ‘international’ as the main analytical framework of the discipline towards a ‘planetary’ perspective. This is argued to be more adequate for analysing international phenomena and their now inescapable entanglement with planetary processes that connect the human and non-human in complex webs of interdependence. However, most discussions on the ‘planetary’ focus on how the discipline should be evolving. Less common have been discussions about the sociological dimension of the transition to planetary perspectives. What social processes shape such a transition? Who are its main social actors? Through a deployment of insights from process sociology, this talk argues that a sociological understanding of the emergence of planetary perspectives requires engagement between IR and the history of science. Specifically, with the role that Earth System Scientists have come to play in contemporary understandings of human relations with non-human nature. Such an engagement also reveals the complex relationship between the ‘international’ and the ‘planetary’ since, while scientists are social actors that express emergent planetary orientations, their activity remains embedded in international dynamics, which reveals both the potential and the limitations to the emergence of planetary orientations.
