Description
Rethinking security in the Anthropocene challenges modernist assumptions about securing a modern subject against objective threats and questions the protection of territorial states. It calls for a transformation of security attentive to interconnection, complexity, and relationality, which in turn demands new spatial re-articulations. The limits of existing security logics, discourses, and institutions are more evident when dealing with issues such as climate change. While there is a growing literature on relationality from non-Western perspectives, the debate is marked by an emerging divide that presents Eastern, relational perspectives as an alternative to Western ones, adding epistemological and ontological dimensions to hegemonic struggles. Such a divide can be problematic for developing an approach that is open to a plurality of cosmologies and addresses the Anthropocene's challenges. Engaging with the debates on ontological security and framing it in a relational context, the paper explores how the literature tends to secure a specific understanding of International Relations as a discipline.
