Call for papers for a panel at the European International Studies Association Pan-European Conference (EISAPEC 2022)

The Lorax team is putting together a panel to submit for consideration to the section on  ‘International Relations of the Anthropocene’ for the upcoming (September 1-4 2022). For more information on the conference, click here. We are looking for up to 5 additional papers, as well as those who might be interested in chairing or being a discussant.

The panels will focus power political repertoires around what actors acknowledge as ‘shared ecosystems’ at the sub-global/regional level. Papers should also make a broader contribution to conceptual thinking/development as it relates to the Anthropocene to fit the broader profile of the section. See draft panel description below.

Please get in touch with Lorax PI Elana Wilson Rowe (ew@nupi.no) with an expression of interest or abstract by 28 February. We will get back in touch quickly with an answer/update by 2 March. The deadline for submitting individual papers/panels/roundtables is 16 March.

Draft panel description

As Simon Dalby aptly puts it, the Anthropocene is not about the ‘end times’ as it sometimes resonates, but rather the beginning of a ‘new time’ (albeit a challenging one) in which the division between nature and humanity fades irrevocably. While the sub-discipline of environmental politics and scholars at the climate-security nexus have generated strong scholarship on the consequences of environmental change and how they can be effectively governed (or fail to be), we do not yet have sufficient consideration of how states – well aware of the ‘new times’ that the Anthropocene ushers in – activate along and navigate this blurring of the nature/humanity divide. What are the new (or old) repertoires of power politics that states are using to respond to the Anthropocene? What new forms of political capital does environmental crisis and the breaking down of the human/nature divide bring to longstanding policy fields?  

This panel directs attention to political disputes for authority over nature and directs particular attention to the sub-global/regional level. Papers will explore the multiple consequences of states raising border-crossing ecosystems as objects of political governance. What are the core state practices and discourses aimed at speaking authoritatively on behalf of or taking responsibility for adjacent nature and border-crossing ecosystems? What are the consequences for other actors – not adjacent to the ecosystem or non-state  – of such ecosystem-anchored forms of cooperation? Taking examples from the Arctic, the Caspian Sea and the Amazon, as well as other sub-global cooperation around border crossing-ecosystems, this panel also lays the groundwork for discussing if and how these regionally-anchored efforts are part of an emerging Anthropocene political repertoire.