Description
Posthuman and more-than-human approaches to International Relations (IR) seek to shift away from understandings of agency and power as capacities linked exclusively to humans. Through concepts like ‘thing-power’ and ‘thing-systems’, New Materialist scholars—particularly those who draw inspiration from vital materialism and Actor-Network Theory—attempt to broaden the location of agency beyond humans by distributing its production among human and nonhuman entities. The understanding of nonhuman agency constructed by these frameworks has, however, been critiqued as severely limited: it attributes agency to nonhumans only by reducing it to the ability to act or affect, but not to think, perceive or desire. From a different angle, other scholars contend that a broad-brush conflation of agency as the ability to act—and the flat ontology that enables this perspective—obscures the different types of power that permeate social and political life, and in particular those that speak to power inequalities. In this paper, I seek to address some of these critiques by developing a typology of more-than-human power within the context of anthropogenic climate change. It is hoped that this typology offers a fuller account of the diverse ways that power operates amid human-earth relations. Intended to be non-exhaustive, this typology includes structural power (providing the conditions of possibility for others), material power (producing material impact), and productive power (shaping processes of meaning-making). I suggest that this framework offers a way to navigate the paradox of the Anthropocene discourse, where humans-as-species are posited as simultaneously exceptional in their geological impact and non-exceptional in their dependence on a functioning biosphere. At the same time, it seeks to challenge the homogenisation of the Anthropocene discourse by encapsulating how the structural effects of colonialism and racism shape situated human-earth relations.
