Erika Cudworth

Killing animals: sociology, species relations and institutionalized violence

Influential voices have argued for a sociology which acknowledges the way we are co-constituted with a range of non-human species as part of the condition of life on this planet. Despite this, sociology has generally retained a conception of the social that is centred on the human. This paper argues for the inclusion of non-human animals in sociological agendas, focusing on the emerging field of the sociology of violence. It examines the institutions and processes through which non-human animals are subjected to different forms of violence, most notably, mass killing. The practice of killing animals is routine, normative, institutionalized and globalized. The scale of killing is historically unprecedented and the numbers killed are enormous. The paper argues that this killing of non-humans raises questions around inequalities and intersectionality, human relations with other species, the embedding of violence in everyday practices and links between micro and macro analyses. These are questions with which the new sociology of violence might engage.

Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism

Abstract The term ‘new materialism’ has recently gained saliency as a descriptor for an eclectic range of positions that question the human-centred and human-exclusive focus of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In turn these emerging perspectives have been subject to critique by those writing in the established materialist tradition, who argue that new materialism ignores the unique specificity of human agency and the transformatory capabilities of our species. Our previous interventions have endorsed a particular account of posthumanism that draws together complexity influenced systems theory with elements of political ecologism that have incorporated aspects of established materialist and humanist thinking. This article rejects the old materialist critique that denies the emancipatory potential of posthumanist thinking, and explores the potential for an emancipatory posthumanism.

Of Parts and Wholes: International Relations beyond the Human

While some theorists in International Relations have engaged with thinking about complexity, we would argue that few have thought it through to its logical conclusion – the interconnectedness of systems, and the implications for agency and structure. This article examines the structure–agency question using the framework of ‘posthuman international relations’, which draws on recent thinking in complexity and argues for an approach to the study of global politics that is post-Newtonian and non-anthropocentric. Key elements of a complexity-based approach are examined, and it is argued that these provide a novel way of considering issues of agency and structure. They also raise issues for the analysis of agency and the link between actions and outcomes. Complex systems can present problems of analysis related to unpredictability, causality and non-linearity. Having laid out a framework for thinking about action and context in international politics, the article turns to questions of agency and practice within complex systems. Perhaps the most significant claim here is that it is possible to conceive of agency beyond the human. Drawing upon Margaret Archer’s discussions of primary and corporate agency, a threefold approach to thinking about structure and agency is developed, which allows us to think about agency beyond the human. Finally, an explanation is given as to why a complex approach to thinking about international relations ultimately implies a posthuman perspective.

Complexity, ecologism, and posthuman politics

Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and ‘things’. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of international politics. By posthuman, we mean an analysis that is based on complexity theory, rejects Newtonian social sciences, and decentres the human as the object of study. We argue for a decentring of ‘the human’ in our scholarship as imperative to understanding the complexity of the world. However, this approach also has a political incentive, which we describe as ‘complex ecologism’.

Armed conflict, insecurity and gender: the resilience of patriarchy?

Perhaps one of the most important legacies of Marx for contemporary critical scholarship has been the understanding of the dynamic, adaptive and resilient qualities of that system of social relations we call capitalism. Feminists have used an array of conceptual models in an attempt to capture the systemic and structural qualities of gender relations and the ways in which these are reformed and recast – gender orders, gender regimes and patriarchy, to name a few. Mapping these relations and paying attention to the ways these are spatialised and temporalised is made more difficult by the increased attention of recent work to understanding formations of gender as intersectionalised by other forms of inequality and difference (of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age and so on). This essay considers a variety of feminist attempts to understand, in a contextualised and intersectionalised way, the adaptation, resilience and often also the intensification of patriarchal relations in the context of armed conflict. This selection of books falls within the critical underbelly of scholarship in international relations (IR). In a discipline often pre-occupied with warfare, feminist interventions have made abundantly clear that the institutions and practices of warfare are gendered at every turn. Once viewed with the lense(s) of gender analytics, it is difficult to look at armed conflict any other way. There is also a minor narrative running throughout these books of the resilience of humankind, particularly women and girls, in the face of dramatic insecurity and horrific violence and of innovative and resourceful practices in the gender politics of peace-building and postconflict reconstruction.

The Foundations of Complexity, the Complexity of Foundations

A debate over the possibilities for foundations of knowledge has been a key feature of theoretical discussions in the discipline of International Relations. A number of recent contributions suggest that this debate is still active. This article offers a contribution to this debate by suggesting that the study of complexity may provide a contingent foundation for the study of international relations. We examine the grounds on which such a claim might be made, and examine the implications for taking complexity as a foundational claim.

Beyond environmental security: complex systems, multiple inequalities and environmental risks

The development of environmental security as an academic project is an important contribution in theorising the politics of global environmental change and shifting security contexts, but there are significant problems with the ways in which environmental issues have been incorporated into security discussions. Approaches to theorising environmental questions in international politics in terms of environmental conflict or environmental security tend to reproduce a dualistic understanding of human relations to ‘the environment’ in which humans are either threatened by or pose a threat to ‘nature’. An approach in terms of ecological security does account for changes in the biosphere resultant from human endeavours and understands social relations as ecologically embedded, but it underplays the extent to which multiple and complex inequalities shape the environmental impact of different populations. Drawing on concepts from complexity theory, alongside different elements of political ecologism, it is argued that human relationships with environments are characterised by social intersectionality and complex inequalities. Complexity approaches can help capture the patterns of these relations and understand the co-constitution of human communities and the ‘natural environment’.

Anarchy and Anarchism: Towards a Theory of Complex International Systems

The use of ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory appears very different from its incarnations in political philosophy. Whilst realist scholars have used anarchy to describe an absence of centralised political authority in which states wield differential power, political philosophers in the anarchist tradition have mounted a critique of the coercive and compulsory powers of states themselves. This article argues for reconceptualising ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory using insights from complexity theory. We would describe the international system as a complex adaptive system which has a tendency to self-organisation. Furthermore, in distinct contrast to Waltz, we argue that the international system has to be seen as embedded within a range of physical systems, and other social systems including those which reproduce a range of (gendered, racial, class-based, colonial) relations of domination. Here insights from anarchist social ecologism can be utilised to further accounts of hierarchy and dominance within International Relations.

The posthuman way of war

Recent interventions from a ‘posthumanist’ or ‘new materialist’ perspective have highlighted the embedded character of human systems within a ‘panarchy’ of human and non-human systems. This article brings attention to a very particular element of materiality, one with a profound significance for issues of security – relations between human and non-human animals in instances of conflict. It is an indication of the deeply human-centred character of both international relations and security studies that almost none of the central texts mention the very significant roles that non-human animals have in the conduct of war. We argue that the character of war would have been radically different but for the forced participation by an enormous range of non-human animals. Even though, with the improvements in transportation over the last century, non-human animals are less evident in the context of the movement of people and equipment, they still play a significant number of roles in the contemporary war-machines of wealthy countries. Drawing on literature from critical animal studies, sociology and memoirs, this article discusses the enormous variety of roles that non-human animals have played in the conduct of war, and examines the character of human–non-human animal relations in times of war.

Civilisation and the Domination of the Animal

Underlying claims about a ‘standard of civilisation’ are questions about what it means to be human. Those that assert membership of a higher civilisation do so on the basis of the extent to which a particular grouping has been able to separate itself and become independent of nature. Such contentions reproduce the duality between the human and non-human nature in that the civilised are considered as separate/superior to the non-civilised, and on the grounds of that superiority have a right of dominion over them in ways that parallel human relations with non-human nature. The process of othering that any claim of civilisation requires thus involves a claim about the less than human status of the other. Following a brief discussion of posthumanism, we assess the considerable literature on the ‘standard of civilisation’ and, focusing on the language of race, consider the ways in which claims about civilisation are based on notions of a separation from nature. In the third section we assess the implications of such a separation. In the final section we turn the notion of civilisation on its head, by pointing to developments that suggest that those groupings who make the claims to be most separated from nature are those posing the gravest ecological threats.