Description
"Zoos remain among the most common visiting sites in many places around the globe, yet their significance as an international political space remains somewhat underexplored in IR scholarship. This is especially striking, given the growing body of IR research critiquing some of zoos’ basic make-up, premised on ‘dogmatic ontologies that privilege human life’ and ‘the separation between the natural and human worlds’ (Erhoukhmanoff and Harker 2017). Moreover, since zoos around the globe are deeply steeped in imperial histories – originating out of aristocratic menageries, evolving into 19th-century venues of scientific modernity and public displays of colonial exoticism – they provide further insight into how imperial extraction practices have sat at the foundation of international status-seeking, and how these practices reverberate into contemporary international political hierarchies (Subotić 2025).
This paper will therefore investigate the role of zoo operations in intersecting the maintenance of human-nonhuman and Global North-South modes of supremacy. Comparing the London and Amsterdam Zoos and their respective (non-)engagement with issues of ecological (post-)imperialism, the paper seeks to explore the ways in which hegemonic anthropocentric discourses and practices continue to reinforce the convergence of human-fauna domination with (post-)colonial international politics. Besides the most egregious similarities between (historical) speciesism and racism found in (neo-)imperial narratives, zoos may 1) serve to white-wash states’ (post-)colonial and environmental extractive practice; 2) function akin to imperial museums as repositories of ‘mankind’s heritage’, enabling a (self)-representation as ‘guardians of global nature’; and 3) constitute sites of (post-)imperial infrastructural prowess at the expense of animal well-being.
