Description
Within the theorisation of International Relations (IR), a recurrent practice has been to use technological developments as organising temporal devices indicative of new ‘Ages’. The advent of the ‘Atomic Age’ (or ‘Nuclear Age’) was taken by some of IR’s most prominent thinkers as fundamentally altering the dynamics of international politics. More recent identifications of an ‘Age of Extinction’ – subsuming nuclear existential threats into industrial-technological overexploitation of the Earth – suggest that now might be the time of ‘planet(ary) politics’, existential crisis, and, possibly, the End Times of IR. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘chronotopes’ this paper seeks to analyse how such Ages assemble and delimit the space(s) of the international: in ways that privilege certain conceptions and assumptions of what it means to be modern within such timeframes. Critical reflection on the (techno)politics of Ages within IR, the paper seeks to argue, constitutes a distinctive contribution to established scholarship on time and temporalities within International Studies. This case is made by outlining and then undertaking, by way of exemplification, a chronotopic analysis of John H. Herz’s theorization of International Politics in the Atomic Age, comparing and relating that to more recent IR scholarship on the Age of Extinction.
