International Relations and their animals

Coulson-Thomas, Colin (2024), Recognising and Preparing for Existential Threats, Management Services, Vol. 68 No 2, pp 22-29, Summer, 2024

In addition to activity, business and context related risks that people and organisations may monitor and seek to mitigate, there are background global risks and an unprecedented number of existential threats that could have catastrophic consequences for social and economic systems. Conditions on earth that support contemporary lifestyles, communities and societies are fragile and increasingly threatened by human activities. Certain risks and threats pose a significant danger to human life with the potential for large numbers of casualties, and which might significantly affect the livelihoods, lifestyles, contexts and prospects of those who survive their first or early impacts. While potentially devastating for many people, existential threats may be accompanied by opportunities for the agile, flexible and entrepreneurial to protect others from some of their impacts. This article examines existential threats and their consequences, and especially nuclear weapons and threats, biosecurity risks, threats, vulnerability and preparedness, global warming and climate change, and artificial intelligence and its regulation, which require responsible governance, thoughtful handling and collective responses. Responsible leaders need to increase awareness, preparedness, and understanding of challenges and vulnerabilities, review and test roles and responsibilities, and confront the consequences of human behaviour. Human aspiration, ingenuity, inventiveness and activities are already resulting in a mass extinction of other life forms. Doing things differently is now a pressing imperative. Human creativity and innovation should be focused on less resource intensive and more responsible alternatives and ensuring our collective survival.

Seybold Report, 2022

In this scientific paper the main topic is related to the issue of global problems, which one day in the future will affect life and the entire planet earth. This problem of global issues is (problem, risk) that negatively affects the global community and environment, with catastrophic proportions, including environmental issues, political crisis, health crisis, social issues and economic crisis. Solutions to global issues generally require cooperation between nations. Bhargava, vinay (2006), hite and seitz, point out in their book global issues, (2012) that global issues are defined differently from international issues, and that the former arise from the growing international interdependence, which which makes the issues themselves interdependent. I do not understand that our interconnectedness on global issues sometimes makes us feel more vulnerable to global catastrophes, rather than making us more adaptable to our circumstances. I ask myself, is the human factor the main cause of climate change? I would never claim that man is the main destroyer of nature and climate change, with his reckless actions that one day the planet earth will become uninhabitable.

European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2021

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

dePICTions, volume 3: Critical Ecologies, 2023

A basic assumption underlies the thesis put forward by the two authors of this at once alarming and inspiring book: our war against nature is inevitably a war against ourselves.The animal crisis they describe and analyze is a crisis of all animals, including—and, in a sense, above all—the human animal, whose attitudes and actions in the past few centuries, and with a frightening acceleration in the last hundred years or so, have brought the earth to a state of impending catastrophe. Defining our time as the age of environmental catastrophe does not mean succumbing to a defeatist and apathetic apocalypticism; it is instead a call to face our predicament beyond the false optimism and utter impotence of the philosophical, ethical, and political structures that are ultimately complicitous in and responsible for the catastrophe itself. The catastrophe has already happened, and we are out of time, but this means that new tools of resistance and action must be devised. https://parisinstitute.org/critical-tools-for-the-animal-crisis/

The Representation of External Threats. From the Middle Ages to the Modern World, 2019

In The Representation of External Threats, Eberhard Crailsheim and María Dolores Elizalde present a collection of articles that trace the phenomenon of external threats in a multitude of settings across Asia, America, and Europe. The scope ranges from military threats against the Byzantine rulers of the 7th century to the perception of cultural and economic threats in the late 19th century Atlantic, and includes conceptual threats to the construction of national histories. Focussing on the different ways in which such threats were socially constructed, the articles offer a variety of perspectives and interdisciplinary methods to understand the development and representations of external threats, concentrating on the effect of 'threat communication' for societies and political actors. The Representation of External Threats. From the Middle Ages to the Modern World, ed. with María Dolores Elizalde, History of Warfare 123 (Leiden, Boston, Mass., Brill 2019) (ISSN: 1385-7827, ISBN: 978-90-04-39242-7).

Global risks are both recent and very old realities. They range from financial crises to the threat of an asteroid impact through pandemics or climate change (e.g. global warming). The aim of this chapter is to offer a way of ordering this diversity of topics related to global risks into a coherent view based on an analysis of the emergence of this new category in the past three decades. From a sociological point of view, one could expect Beck's 'world risk society' to provide the intellectual background for this discussion but the chapter suggests instead to start with another sociologist, Perrow. The chapter borrows analytical notions from Perrow, tight coupling, interactive complexity, negative externalities, society of organisations and 'error prone' versus 'error avoiding' large technical systems (LTS) to explore some of the properties of global risks. If Perrow studied in the 1980s onward a type of global risks through the advent of LTS such as aviation or nuclear power plants and weapons, other authors (e.g. Giddens, Goldin, Guillén) have introduced and discussed systemic risks in relation to globalisation (e.g. financial crises, pandemics, terrorism) in the 1990s onwards while other authors (e.g. Bostrom, Smil) framed the notion of existential risks in relation to extreme events (e.g. asteroid impact, doomsday war, climate catastrophe) in the 2000s. The chapter uses Perrow's ideas to explore this topic. Indeed, it is argued that, to analyse, anticipate, prevent and respond to global risks consists in, quite fundamentally, assessing, (re)designing, managing and regulating the coupling and complexity of LTS. Covid-19 is introduced throughout the chapter, as an example of global risks, among others.

abStract Threatening predators and pernicious beasts continue to play significant roles in the human imaginary even as human threats to other species increase exponentially in the age of Anthro-pocene. While posthumanist animal studies and material ecocriticism sync human and other animals within the biosphere's living interactions, our shared material reciprocity is currently skewing ever more towards the human threat to other species – and so to ourselves as co-dependents. This essay explores the meaning of " threatening " and " threatened ". Five German texts presenting human-animal interactions in the Anthropocene's span by Goethe, Kafka, Stifter, Duve, and Trojanow unsettle expectations of threats. In Goethe's " Novella " , an escaped lion and tiger enter German forests and are subdued, whereas Stifter's " Brigitta " depicts a pastoral peace threatened by wolves. Kafka's " Metamorphosis " reshapes David Abram's idea of " becoming animal " , and Karen Duve's " Rain Novel " and Ilija Trojanow's " Melting Ice " , recent climate change novels, juxtapose the human threat to the world's climate with the onslaught of endless slugs and a biting penguin. Finally, the resurgence of wild boars in Berlin's urban space in the past few years renegotiates human, nonhuman, and posthuman boundaries in an urban ecology. The crocodile's terrifying death roll pulled Val Plumwood repeatedly into the murky water, as she describes in her now famous crocodile survival tale, Being Prey. Yet her primary concern after living to tell this story was that the crocodile should not be hunted down and killed in response to the attack since she had ventured into its space in the main tributary of the river in Kakadu, in the Australian Northern Territory. Indeed, the most dangerous and threatening animal/predator on the planet in large numbers is not the ancient crocodile, nor the iconic white shark, nor even the fet-ishized large cats, but rather humanity en masse even though many literary works continue to portray human-animal conflicts in terms of hunter-prey relations. The impact of human beings as a vast population is now that

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014

The contemporary global community is increasingly interdependent and confronted with systemic risks posed by the actions and interactions of actors existing beneath the level of formal institutions, often operating outside effective governance structures. Frequently, these actors are human agents, such as rogue traders or aggressive financial innovators, terrorists, groups of dissidents, or unauthorized sources of sensitive or secret information about government or private sector activities. In other instances, influential "actors" take the form of climate change, communications technologies, or socioeconomic globalization. Although these individual forces may be small relative to state governments or international institutions, or may operate on long time scales, the changes they catalyze can pose significant challenges to the analysis and practice of international relations through the operation of complex feedbacks and interactions of individual agents and interconnected systems. We call these challenges "femtorisks," and emphasize their importance for two reasons. First, in isolation, they may be inconsequential and semiautonomous; but when embedded in complex adaptive systems, characterized by individual agents able to change, learn from experience, and pursue their own agendas, the strategic interaction between actors can propel systems down paths of increasing, even global, instability. Second, because their influence stems from complex interactions at interfaces of multiple systems (e.g., social, financial, political, technological, ecological, etc.), femtorisks challenge standard approaches to risk assessment, as higher-order consequences cascade across the boundaries of socially constructed complex systems. We argue that new approaches to assessing and managing systemic risk in international relations are required, inspired by principles of evolutionary theory and development of resilient ecological systems. complex adaptive systems | systemic risk | risk analysis | contagion | resilience

Las Normas Internacionales de Información Financiera son un conjunto de normas contables emitidas por el International Accounting Standards Board. El objetivo del IASB es el desarrollo, en interés general, de un cuerpo único de normas contables de alta calidad, asequibles y prácticas que favorezcan la transparencia y comparabilidad de los estados financieros. El IASB coopera con los normalizadores contables nacionales para lograr así la convergencia de las diferentes normativas contables en todo el mundo. En 2002, la Unión Europea ha acordado que los grupos de sociedades que cotizan en mercados de valores presenten sus estados financieros consolidados a partir del 2005 de acuerdo con un mismo cuerpo de normas, las Normas Internacionales de Información Financiera. El objetivo es claro: mayor transparencia y comparabilidad de la información que se utiliza en nuestros mercados financieros. El IASB, ante la importancia de este proceso, inició en 2001 un proceso de revisión de sus normas con tres claros objetivos: simplificar, converger y completar.