Description
In what ways does nature produce expressions of sovereignty? More specifically, how do the material forces, processes and dynamics of the global climate system prompt reconfigurations of sovereignty within the context of anthropogenic climate change? Situated within the relational and processual ontologies of (new) materialism and posthumanism, this paper aims to contribute to the development of understandings of sovereignty that are not only beyond the state, but also beyond anthropocentrism. It attempts, firstly, to broaden understandings of who or what is capable of producing expressions of sovereignty beyond the human realm and, secondly, to complicate the notion of human sovereignty over nature. To do so, it offers a conceptual framework for rethinking the human-nature relationship beyond the object/subject binary. Crucially, that framework prioritises attention to the ways that nature exists in excess of humans, from the temporal and spatial to the cognitive and agentic. In so doing, this paper also speaks to debates in materialist inquiry, where there are growing efforts to look beyond the framework of more-than-human entanglement towards a concomitant recognition of the ‘inhuman’: those parts of nature whose existence, dynamics and affect are not reliant on nor inextricably related to humanity.
