Description
Understanding the relationship between world politics and climate change is more necessary than ever, yet this relationship is vexed by problematic conceptualizations of time that subtend much theoretical literature within International Relations (IR). As Hutchings argues (2008), assumptions about time are deeply formative to judgements about world politics, yet in IR these assumptions tend to be trapped within the epistemic horizons of modernity. This raises theoretical and normative problems. How then can this relationship be best examined and understood?
In the spirit of this conference’s theme, I ask what new theoretical directions scholars can take to address this crucial relationship. Drawing on my ongoing PhD research, I present a novel engagement between the ‘temporal turn’ in IR theory and music philosophy. This latter site of scholarship has examined the multiplicity of temporal registers, values, and scales within music and asked how these cohere within the singular conceptual object of music. I transpose the analytics developed within this literature to the relationship between world politics and climate change to make sense of its ‘messy mix-up of time scales’ (Malm 2016). This helps to make sense of how the various ‘presents’ of world politics (Hutchings, 2008) and climate change come to be formed by arranging these scales in specific ways.
