Description
The discipline of International Relations (IR) has amply recognized how contemporary processes of ecological breakdown, increasingly summarised under the heading of the Antropocene, pose a fundamental challenge to the state-based international system. Consequently, there have been calls within IR for the development of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘planetary’ perspectives that permit to address these phenomena at a global level via the political integration of humanity. And yet, most of these calls assume an idealistic outlook, laying out what would be the most adequate way to address the Anthropocene, but being much less forthcoming in discussing the actual political practice that could make their proposed solutions a reality. In a way, they remain at a utopian level of argumentation, without engaging with actual political practice nor with the challenges posed by the fragmentation of humanity into a multiplicity of political units. This fundamental ‘international’ condition needs to be addressed if critical international theory is to move beyond utopian proposals and reconnect theory with practice in ways that ensure its relevance into the future. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this revitalisation of critical international theory in the Anthropocene by addressing the work of an apparently unlikely figure in this context: Nikolai Bukharin. The Bolshevik revolutionary was one of the few that realized the political challenge of the ‘international’ for global transformation projects. Faced with the failure of the spread of socialist revolutions to other European countries, Bukharin confronted the political challenge of promoting global change amidst the international fragmentation of humanity. His answers to this challenge reconfigured not only the role of the national and the state in emancipatory critical projects but also the conception of the relation between human societies and non-human nature in ways that are increasingly relevant to the contemporary challenges posed by the Anthropocene.
