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A Quantum Anthropocene? International Relations Between Rupture and Entanglement

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Non-Human Nature in World Politics

Part of the book series: Frontiers in International Relations ((FIR))

Abstract

The Anthropocene is marked as a paradigm shift in Earth history and politics. This has simultaneously led to two competing characterizations of the new epoch: as an age of “rupture” from the past and as a reflection of “entanglement” between the human and the non-human. In this chapter, I assess how the logics of rupture and entanglement create different, often competing understandings of the Anthropocene within the academic field of International Relations (IR). I conclude by challenging IR scholars to more closely engage with quantum social theory in light of the profound “spookiness” of the Anthropocene.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Luke (2015, 2015).

  2. 2.

    A number of important critiques suggest the Anthropocene concept depoliticizes the human in its desire to naturalize the species and envelop it within nature. Fagan (2019, p. 56) writes that “the idea of ‘nature’ (and therefore of ‘human’) itself is not innocent but entangled with discourses of race, extinction and geology emerging in the 18th century in which black life was treated as a form of animal life (Mirzoeff 2018); classing (some) humans as a ‘part of nature’ is nothing new.”

  3. 3.

    Take, for instance, the debate whether to quantify climate change via average temperature increases above pre-industrialized levels or in terms of concentrations of CO2(parts per million) measurable in the atmosphere. Whether one chooses to focus on 2 degrees Celsius or 350 ppm is not simply a scientific decision but reflective of attitudes towards risk and various social tradeoffs (Young and Schmidt 2019).

  4. 4.

    Clive Hamilton (2016b, p. 97) has referred to the feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s renaming of the Anthropocene as Capitalocene, Plantationocene, or Chthulucene as “terminological incontinence”.

  5. 5.

    As a recent paper describes, “The common intuition is that, while nature might allow for quantum effects on macroscopic scale, it makes them practically impossible to observe. This is due to technical limitations that forbid one to perfectly isolate a system from its environment and to perform measurements with unlimited precision. This leads to an effective quantum-to-classical transition, which can be ideally derived from the quantum laws themselves” (Fröwis, Sekatski, Dür, Gisin, and Sangouard 2018).

  6. 6.

    This sentiment from Seth and echoed by Rojas (2016) is expressed in relation to contesting colonial logics embedded in IR. Neither piece directly deals with quantum social theory and I do not wish to reassamble their critique in the service of my own quantum interest here. That said, there may be fruitful conversations to be had between those engaged in decolonial (or postcolonial) projects that destabilize the modern world and quantum social theorists.

  7. 7.

    Schmidt (2019) has recently labelled the planetary boundaries framework as a grundnorm (a norm basic to all others) for international programmes of environmental law and governance.

  8. 8.

    Drawing upon Norbert Elias, Quilley and Loyal’s (2005) article “Eliasian Sociology as a ‘Central Theory’ for the Human Sciences” offers a useful framework for thinking through potential ‘bridges’ between fields of investigation.

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  1. School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Cameron Harrington

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  1. Portuguese Institute of International Relations, NOVA University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Joana Castro Pereira

  2. Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    André Saramago

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Harrington, C. (2020). A Quantum Anthropocene? International Relations Between Rupture and Entanglement. 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_4

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