Abstract
Over the past decade, notions of the non-human have become established in a range of disciplines—for example, archaeology, human geography, anthropology, and architecture. However, their impact on politics and international relations has been restricted. In this chapter, we consider the reasons for this, identifying what we term ‘normal politics’ as the dominant form of anthropocentric discourse that prevents non-humans from taking their proper place in the political realm. In contrast, we propose a form of assemblage politics that is better placed to accommodate notions of the non-human, whilst also offering fresh perspectives on politics and international relations. We develop and illustrate our notion of assemblage politics using three examples: car use, Brexit and the climate crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
The question of agency is one of long standing in the social sciences and humanities. It is often conceptualized as an attribute of rational thinking human beings, and, in so far as this is the case, such a view of agency is inescapably anthropocentric. Against this view, in this paper we advocate a view of agency as: assemblage derived, that is relational; emergent, because agency emerges through the relations that form an assemblage; and contingent, because all assemblages are only temporarily stabilized. On this account, agency is not a possession or an attribute of individual entities. Rather, our approach recognizes and emphasizes the historical specificity of agency, and requires that we attend empirically to its specific forms. We cannot know in advance the agency that assemblages such as ‘a mountain’ or ‘a human’ might have, or the differences between them—these have to be mapped in their specific, immanent, singularity. Whilst this complicates notions of ‘human responsibility’ because it also complicates any notion of simple linear causation, this does not, as we will demonstrate, mean we are unable to identify causally relevant actors, whether they are human or not.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the editors for their invitation to contribute to this volume, and for their patience during the writing process. The chapter has benefitted from the comments of, and discussions with, Alison Sealey, Barbara Misztal, Craig Cipolla, Lindsay Montgomery, Simon Dyson and Darryl Wilkinson, as well as the feedback from two anonymous reviewers.
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Carter, B., Harris, O.J.T. (2020). The End of Normal Politics: Assemblages, Non-Humans and International Relations. In: Pereira, J., Saramago, A. (eds) Non-Human Nature in World Politics. Frontiers in International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49496-4_2
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