Stefanie R. Fishel

Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR:

Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.

Theorizing violence in the Responsibility to Protect

This article argues that the guidelines in the Responsibility to Protect, and the later findings of the High Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, do not substantively explore the problematic relationship between intrastate violence, the sovereign state, and humanitarian interventions relationship to war in the violence to which it is responding. Without looking at these complex relationships, international intervention for humanitarian purposes, as defined by the Responsibility to Protect, will not be able to truly answer sovereign intrastate violence, as it never fully identifies the processes that are producing that violence.

Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for teaching IR theory in an engaging manner, and have used zombie outbreaks to analyse the responses of the international community during catastrophe, invasion, and natural disasters. The authors of this article would like to unearth another aspect of the zombie that is often left unsaid or forgotten: namely, that the body of the zombie, as a historical phenomenon and cultural icon, is deeply imbricated in the racialisation of political subjects and fear of the Other. Through a critical analysis of biopower and race, and in particular Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, we suggest that the figure of the zombie can be read as a racialised figure that can provide the means for rethinking the relationship of the discipline of IR to the concept of race. We read The Walking Dead as a zombie narrative that could provide a critical basis for rethinking the concepts of bare life and the exception to consider ‘living on’ in apocalyptic times.

Remembering nukes: collective memories and countering state history

Debating the utility and ethicality of nuclear weapons has often centred on the “unspeakability” of nuclear war, often drawing this silence from the apocalyptic power of nuclear technology. This can manifest itself in greater secrecy in policy decisions concerning nuclear technology and the phenomenon of “nuclear reclusion” in the public realm. This article compares the memorialization of nuclear weapons in Japan and the US, and explores how remembering the attack on Hiroshima from multiple viewpoints could lead us towards different policies or support more open debate about nuclear weapons and power.

Defending Planet Politics

Since the article ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’ (hereafter the Manifesto) was published in 2016, it has provoked discussion and debate in multiple forums.2 Sessions have been dedicated to it at the 2016 European Workshop on International Studies on ‘Politics in the Anthropocene’, the R.J. Vincent Colloquium at the Australian National University, the Oceanic Conference on International Studies in Brisbane, in two roundtables at the 2017 ISA in Baltimore, and this October at the Earth System Governance Conference. In May 2017, Joseph Camilleri dedicated a web forum with 12 contributors to the question, ‘Can world politics save planet Earth?’3 The 2017 Millennium Conference drew another reference in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s keynote. These