Description
The discipline of International Relations has a foundational interest in questions of world order, which define much work on global security and the global political economy. However, the emergence of the Anthropocene ushers in a new world order. At a time of escalating sustainability crises, the world order as we know it is being redefined by various attempts to respond to and prevent further anthropogenic global environmental change. In this paper, we thus argue that a plurality of global green visions – such as “Buen Vivir”, “Ecological Civilization”, “Energiewende”, “net zero”, “Pachamama”, “Ubuntu”, and many more – not only envisions different sustainability futures but also promotes – explicitly or implicitly – distinct and potentially conflicting understandings of an ideal future world order. Moreover, many visions complicate or challenge the notion of ordering the world as a state-centric activity as they have different referent objects and (more) explicitly relational ontologies. The paper, therefore, provides an innovative, theoretically guided, and empirically oriented account of how the global green visions of various actors interact with understandings of world order, thus connecting scholarship on global environmental politics, world order, and imaginaries and futures.
