Description
This paper develops response-able witnessing as a research praxis for more-than-human international relations (IR) scholarship that grapples with the problem of alienation and intangibility of scale of ecological collapse. Humans inability to grasp ecological phenomena and issues sensible at nonhuman scales often leads to alienation. Drawing on Haraway's concept of response-ability and Bird Rose's ecological witnessing, I argue that IR requires narrative methodologies that cultivate responsiveness to more-than-human worlds while bearing witness to multiple forms of existence at different scales. Response-able witnessing counters alienation by moving beyond representational politics based on human-scaled existence to practice thinking-with more-than-human others, generating multiple, even conflicting stories that remake conventional understandings of scales. The paper does so by developing three dimensions of response-able witnessing: First, a methodological practice of attentive presence that registers more-than-human agencies often rendered invisible in anthropocentric frameworks. Second, a writing practice of narrative care that crafts stories attuned to multi-scalar, multispecies entanglements while resisting anthropomorphism, human exceptionalism, and homogenisation of humans. Third, a political practice of transformative accountability that recognises witnessing as an obligation to respond and act, rather than merely describe and critique, and thereby reconfigures political responsibilities across species boundaries. Through a narrative vignette of more-than-human fieldwork encounters in the Brazilian Amazon, I offer an example of narrative care and demonstrate how response-able witnessing reveals international politics as always-already more-than-human assemblages that break down the intangibility of scale and alienation. This praxis challenges IR's epistemological foundations by refusing the nature/culture divide that structures conventional analysis. Instead, it generates what van Dooren calls ‘lively stories’ that thicken our understanding of extinction, climate change, and ecological collapse beyond human-scaled existence. The paper concludes that response-able witnessing offers vital tools for engaging planetary crises by cultivating narratives that make perceptible the more-than-human relations sustaining and devastating earthly flourishing.
