Politics

After asserting that the title of Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age is misleadingsince around the world religious communities of belief are still quite robust-this paper argues that the most important tension in contemporary societies, is not, as Taylor thinks, that between believers and so-called unbelievers, but rather that between monists and pluralists, between advocates of closed communities and advocates of open communities, be they religious or secular.

Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical management.

Since its inception in the 1980s, biodiversity’s political power has also hinged on its affiliation with a series of political concepts. Biodiversity was initially articulated as a moral crime against the intrinsic value of all species. In the 1990s and early 2000s, biodiversity shifted toward an association with service provision in a globalizing world economy before attaching itself more recently to the discourses of security and resilience.

Even as species extinctions continue, biodiversity’s role in environmental governance has become increasingly abstract. Yet the power of global biodiversity is eventually always localized and material when it encounters nonhuman life. In these encounters, Youatt finds reasons for optimism, tracing some of the ways that nonhuman life has escaped human social means. Counting Species compellingly offers both a political account of global biodiversity and a unique approach to political agency across the human–nonhuman divide.

This article evaluates the emergence of rights for nature in global politics, focusing particularly on questions surrounding the politics and ontology of collective personhood in Ecuador and New Zealand. Rather than assuming international space to be largely populated by state persons who in turn grant personhood to nature, these cases suggest that it is more productive to start by asking what kinds of collective persons populate world spaces, and in what ways they are made political. Augmenting conceptions of Westphalian personification rooted largely in human symbolic practices, the article advocates for an understanding of persons as figures that are sometimes produced by relations between human and nonhuman actors. It then suggests that the rights of nature are, paradoxically, not a politics over whether a singular nature should be a rights holder, but rather, are partial challenges to the universality of secular law and the sovereign state. As such, they raise important questions about the politics of translation and the commensurability of multiple conceptions of collective personhood.

Mountain governance has emerged as new node of planetary management of non-human nature. Referencing the common ecological fates suffered by mountains around the world because of climate change, it aims to fuse ecological, political, and cultural perspectives together in a new political object. One of its central organizing categories is the sacred landscape, which is neither a purely natural object nor a socially valuable one, but rather, an exceptional sacred one to be protected, conserved, and/or developed. This chapter enquires into the production of global mountains by secular governance regimes. Against a number of accounts of environmental governance, it first argues that mountains are multiple objects, not singular natural ones. It then suggests that sacredness is a particularly problematic way of rendering these multiple mountains as singular, in ways that undermine the very ends of mountain governance. Instead, in the service of finding a more politically plural, but also more multinatural, planetary politics, the chapter proposes an analytic and political focus on routes and routing, which better show the multiple mountains that are in play in these regions, drawing on the transboundary region surrounding Mt. Kailash in the Himalayas as a case study.

Rats tend to thrive wherever humans do. In recent centuries, the growth of human populations around the planet has meant the growth of a nearly equivalent global population of rats, particularly in cities, where they thrive on trash, food scraps, and infrastructure, and widely stymie human efforts to get rid of them. This forced coexistence has inspired a wide range of human responses, ranging from revulsion and extermination efforts as vermin, to religious veneration and use as experimental lab animals. At the same time, the political figure of the rat has played a constitutive role in violence and experimentation against human populations who are deemed as rat-like. To understand these linked dynamics, the article frames the idea of interspecies internationality, against both Anthropocene and geopolitical readings of the planetary condition. It then elaborates three axes around which rat assemblages have been formedexterminative, experimental, and ecological. The article concludes by arguing that the rat, as interspecies figure of politics and as living creature, allows us to understand important dynamics around the generation of disposable life, political difference, and conditions of coexistence, in ways that are critical to the entwined politics of life on the planet.

Climate change is driving species to move. Alongside climate-driven human migrations and mobility, nonhuman species are changing where they live, in response to anthropogenic destruction of the climate and the biosphere. The article examines this less considered element of the current and future mobile planet, in search of framings that can better help us grapple with the transformations underway. It first presents some general global projections of species mobilities and presents some of the key issues raised around intersection of human and nonhuman mobility. It then turns to two elemental forces-fire and ice-whose power is increasingly visible in contemporary planetary politics. Both elements call for a consideration of deeper time horizons, alongside the immediate emergencies that these forces also bring about. The final section turns to think about the ethics, time scales, and differential politics of a fully mobile planet-one that is mobile from geological forces to earthly elements, from nonhuman species to human lives and cultures, drawing on recent work on earth mobility and speculative kinetic ethics.

Walking is a nearly universal activity, even given the many contrivances in- vented to avoid it, yet it is widely absent from the sedentarist disciplines of politics and international relations. This absence is perhaps not surprising, given that so much political thought and practice are deeply tethered to the inventions of the boot and the chair that remove walking from our view, as Tim Ingold has observed. Yet, given the significance of events such as forced death marches as parts of war and genocide; formative collective walks such as Gandhi’s march to the sea, the Long March in China, or the Selma to Montgomery marches; or the everyday politics of walking in global cities, such absence might be mistaken. This article suggests instead that walking be understood as integral to the operation of internationality. In particular, it argues that walking is part of a mobile field of power and agency that generates, stabilizes, and unsettles internationality in equal parts. The article diagrams some key conceptual nodes of walking and political power, and then traces their operation in the case of the Long Walk of the Navajo.

The way we work is rapidly changing. This is a feeling is shared by those both elegizing American manufacturing and prophesizing a new era of labor empowerment brought on by the "gig" or "sharing" economy. AirBnB and Uber transform private possessions into rentable property through their apps but their business models also render workers precarious, without the protection afforded salaried employees. Global supply-chains and logistics are transforming the Earth into a space of unlimited movement for goods and of immediate digital connection, yet, these new forms of distributed production entail novel modes of bordering that strategically divide the global working class. Data-driven management automates decision-making: corporate management now a scalable, individuated entity. Work today, is characterized by the idea of the hustle, freelancers in charge of their own branding, promotion, and exploitation.