Rethinking environmental determinism historically and speculatively for future geopolitics—Tübingen, EWIS, April 2016

I'm pleased to say that I'll be off to Tübingen in April for EWIS (European Workshops in International Studies). Specifically, a workshop on 'International Politics in the Anthropocene,' organised by Delf Rothe.

Very much looking forward to it. Here's my abstract:

Rethinking environmental determinism historically and speculatively for future geopolitics 

Geographically, climatically and environmentally deterministic forms of knowledge have ancient roots, often being traced back to Herodotus. As the likes of Mike Hulme have recently argued, such epistemic tendencies are evident in forms of climate science that project narrowly defined human futures on the basis of abstract and reductionist calculative practices. To so much as have a conversation about ‘the Anthropocene’ requires some degree of discursive absorption of the progressive produce of calculative rationality. However, there is equally an imperative not to turn the looming spectre of vast, inhuman forces into deterministic narratives that paralyse political possibility. This paper will build on a discussion session that I arranged at the RGS-IBG conference in September 2015. It will, first, set out a brief history of determinism and its critics and, second, engage with contemporary speculative philosophical debates around geophilosophy and geopolitics in order to begin to creatively re-articulate how determinism can be intellectually and politically overcome without lapsing into voluntaristic denial of the crushingly urgent facts of the Anthropocene. In short, it attempts to articulate an updated form of possibilism that might help to facilitate the production of future geopolitical analyses—and future geopolitics.

I'm also hoping that I'll have time to stop off in Karlsruhe on the way back to have a look at the 'Reset Modernity!' exhibition at ZKM to which I have contributed an essay.

Reflections on EISA 2015—Day 2

The first panel of the EISA conference on Thursday morning (after the Wednesday plenaries) that I attended was ‘Geographies of Violence—The Political Ecology of Violence,’ chaired by James Andrew Tyner of Kent State University.

Connor Cavanagh kicked off proceedings by talking about the history of the Ugandan protectorate and the imperialist knowledge produced by the likes of F.J.D Lugard, an Indian-born British colonial administrator and author. Connor also mentioned the POLLEN political ecology network, which I will have to investigate in more detail.

Second, the chair himself, James, gave an outline of his project of “the biopolitics of geophysical transformation,” particularly looking at the agricultural and canal building projects of the Khmer Rouge. Against the stereotype of the Khmer Rouge as being anti-technology and absurdly naive with regard to the agricultural possibilities of the land, James showed the importance they placed on engineering projects as part of their Great Leap Forward and also that their overly optimistic expectations with regard to agriculture were based, at least in some part, on US and UN research.

Esther Marijnen outlined her work on the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo and, particularly, the Oscar-nominated 2014 documentary film Virunga; tagline: ‘Conservation is War.’ She talked about conflicting perceptions of the work and position of the park’s director, the Belgian aristocrat Prince Emmanuel de Merode. Some see him as having appropriated the park but others apparently regard him as a saviour of sorts. She also reflected on her own position as a researcher, having been asked to go to Brussels to feed back discontent that local people were not able to communicate themselves, and on the difficulty of getting hold of the reports and documents being produced by international organisations.

Finally, Marijn Nieuwenhuis delivered a paper titled ‘Violence in the Air,’ which started off with Carl Schmitt’s definition of man as a “groundling,” that is, as essentially related to the earth (as suggested by the etymology of human). Interestingly for the work that I have been doing on environmental determinism, he then drew on the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache and argued for understanding eco- and geo-political relations through a conception of an emergent milieu rather than an Umwelt or environment. He concluded with a range of examples of how the air can be turned into an instrument of violence, through technologies such as tear gas and other bioregulators.

At every session there were at least 3 or 4 panels that I wanted to go to; however, next I decided to go  to ‘Environments of Violence,’ organised and chaired by Carolin Kaltofen of Aberystwyth University.

First up was Jakob Zahora who outlined the early stages of his research into the new architectures of Israeli checkpoints, comparing them to other kinds of systematised, rationalised spaces, such as factories and slaughterhouses (he was careful to admit the care needed in constructing this argument!).

Next, Jesse Reynolds gave a very useful overview of a forthcoming article, co-authored with Joshua Horton, on geoengineering. He lamented the lack of engagement so far by IR scholars in this crucial topic. It was an even-handed presentation of the risks, costs and potential benefits of these technologies.

Marta Abegón Novella and Matilde Pérez Herranz investigated the possible extension of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) to environmental issues in a paper titled ‘On the Responsibility to Protect the Individual from Environmental Degradation.’ They argued that environmental factors are neglected within discussions of human security. They were careful to emphasise the risks associated with R2P discourse, particularly with regard to justifying military interventions, which, they stated, should only be used as a last resort.

Finally, Audra Mitchell took us to a much more speculative and philosophical place with her thinking on extinction, drawing on the likes of Claire Colebrook, Jean-François Lyotard, Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux and Nigel Clark. She argued that, despite the popularity of discourses of extinction (e.g.), this is something that our received conceptual categories are currently unable to grasp. The philosophical relation between the ‘unthinkable’ and extinction was a thought-provoking one, although I think I’d need to read about it some more before I am quite convinced.

After lunch, I went to see ‘The Force of Lawyers: Authority, Lawyering and Expertise.’ I have no background in law but I wrote a little bit on it last year and am hoping to develop a project on it in the near future, so this was very useful for that. (I must admit that this session was in a very warm room, looking out onto the glistening Mediterranean and my note-taking noticeably waned as a result; however, I will see what I can recollect from the snippets.)

Gavin Sullivan of the University of Amsterdam (and soon, I believe, to be of the University of Kent) opened proceedings with a paper on ‘Global Emergency and the UN1267 Ombudsperson.’ Drawing on, among other resources, Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple, Gavin articulated a description of the actors creating the legal assemblage that constitutes the ombudsperson as a distributed entity. He particularly emphasised the role that some IR scholars have played in being branded as global security experts, playing a key part in the reconstitution of international regulatory regimes. Against some critical legal thinkers, he sees the processes he is researching as leading not to a loss of law but a jurisgenerative recalibration with regard to preemptive security logics.

Ioannis Kalpouzos talked about ‘New Weapons Technologies and the Administration of Violence,’ particularly with regard to the global administrative law of targeting. Immi Tallgren’s paper ‘The Birth of the Epistemic Community of International Criminal Lawyers’ wound a long and fascinating route between the many theoretical approaches that one might take in trying to understand the social and political place of the community of IC lawyers, settling, for the time being it seems, on the notion of the epistemic community.

Finally, Michelle Farrell and John Reynolds co-presented a paper on using linguistic and discursive analysis, understanding representative practices to be constitutive of legality. The first example they mentioned was the 'surgical strike' discourse of drone warfare. This immediately brought to my IR-trained mind works from the 1990s like James Der Derian’s Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War, which make similar arguments with regard to the representational techniques utilised in the 1990-91 Gulf War. As the discussant commented during the panel, it will be very interesting to see how this comes together in bridging IR and international legal points of view.

Finally, I attended a session run by more people from Aberystwyth University (my new institutional home from which I am typing these very words!) on ‘How methods shape how we know: The disciplining of knowledge production.’

Danielle Nicole Young and Andrew Davenport both presented papers on conceptualisations of history. Danielle asked ‘Where do you start?’, arguing that this question is crucial to the knowledge that results, particularly when it comes to origin stories such as, in IR, the infamous year of 1648. Her work comes out of training in medieval history but she is keen to stress that she is not interested in how to ‘do history better,’ as important as that question might be. Instead, she is interested in understandings of history as a construction that narrativises temporal experiences, opening and up and closing down various avenues of knowing.

Andrew, similarly, set out to explicate his critique of the use of history in IR. Particularly in his critical crosshairs was neo-realism and its systematic theorising. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck, he is thinking about the invention of historical time and what happens at the intersections of other conceptual oppositions (inside/outside, time/space, agency/necessity, etc.) when notions of history are taken into account. His concluding words: “What relation to the past would a new global subject have?” I suppose everything hangs here on what is meant by ‘new.’ Undoubtedly, there have been subjects declared ‘global’—typically, one would assume them to be characterised by a self-conceived detachment from the past and an embrace of some sort of humanist universality. Of course, the word ‘global’ is also crucially enigmatic.

This was all fascinating for my own budding project, although I take a slightly different view of how modernist conceptions of history might be undone. I was left wondering what place the trace has within these understandings of history that place so much weight upon experience abstracted from the rest of the world. History is a narrative art, of course, but I would argue that what it draws together, ties in bundles and patterns and filigrees is not experience in the abstract but concrete, entropic, experienced traces of the past from books, archives, oral accounts and even, in some cases, tree rings and ice cores (mediated via the relevant sciences). That said, I have only heard about a very small part of these projects so far and I’ll look forward to hearing more over the coming months.

Finally, Laura Sjoberg and J. Samuel Barkin gave a preview of their forthcoming book on heterodox, critical and progressive uses of quantitative and mathematical methodologies (an article on this subject is available here [paywalled]), a most welcome and overdue endeavour in a discipline where methods tend to be divided up according to politics (to the detriment of both).

Having been away from IR as a discipline for a long time (since 2006, formally), this was a very exciting and reassuring day for me. While I am very glad to have received the studentship that I have and to have three years ahead of me in one of the best International Politics departments in the world, I did wonder how well my own interests, which have meandered rather a long way from traditional IR in the past few years, would fit into the state of this discipline today. I needn’t have worried.

By the end of day 2, I had realised that my epistemic idiosyncrasies were amply accommodated within what this discipline has become, at least in some quarters: an open-minded forum for ambitious intellectual work that is connected more by shared passions and concerns than by the strictures of method or domain. This conference was perhaps exceptional in this regard—by no means is everywhere so free-thinking! However, the fact that it happened and that it was so overwhelmingly successful (far more participants than previous years) was and is deeply reassuring.

Determinism, environment and geopolitics: a conversation initiated?

After much ado about many things, the session Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation finally went ahead in the last time-slot of the RGS-IBG conference on Friday. Being at the end of a very long week (and having been shifted around several times), the group that assembled to converse was, shall we say, select. However—quality over quantity!—, we had an excellent conversation and one that emboldens me to persist with this line of enquiry. Indeed, both the theme and the format were roundly appreciated, which bodes well for the future of this project.

Most pleasingly, around half our number identified as being environmental or physical geographers of some kind rather than simply social or human geographers (RGS-IBG tends to be overwhelmingly dominated by the latter).

Gwilym Eades spoke about his fascinating on-going work on place, naming and counter-mapping. With a background in physical geography and GIS, Gwilym is exemplary of the cross-boundary thinking that is possible within geography. He drew attention to the novels of Thomas Hardy, the interesting point of which here is that they were almost obsessively topographically planned out and mapped.

This fictional Wessex, very closely tied to but nevertheless distinct from the historical Wessex, has become a matter of concern for campaigners who wish to preserve the fictional-historical landscape. When these cosmopolitical clashes come to concern, for example, wind farms then we do indeed witness a very distinctive Anthropocenic politics coming to the fore—one that eludes any easily disciplinary categorisation.

What is useful about this, for me, is that it draws attention to the importance of representation and mass mediation for these debates. Determinism is as much about epistemic politics as it is about the workings of things. There Is No Alternative—this is the fundamental maxim of determinism. How do fictional-environmental matters of concern, fictive landscapes, come to compel assent to this or that political campaign? What possesses people to pursue this bond or allegiance and not that one?

One related issue that came up was that of affect and political passions. I am particularly interested in Albert Hirschmann's 1977 book The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. It seems to me that many discussions of affect in geography could benefit from a connection with this sort of work.

It is part of what I am trying to get at with the concept of 'possession'—what if, to quote the book/film Fight Club, the things you own end up owning you? That is, what if we become possessed by our possessions? This seems to me to be intrinsically tied to the problem of possibility and possibilism. Any reconception of possibilism must also reconsider property and properties (in legal-social and metaphysical senses, both). (See this wonderful article on the genealogy of spirit possession for the importance of this concept in relation to colonial geopolitics.)

This sense of being a container for something other than us (and yet not altogether other) is the unsettling experiential condition that derives from social existence and 'ecstatic' phenomenality (i.e. the sense in which, in experiencing the world, we are somehow 'outside' ourselves). There is a great deal of work being done on affect, emotion and phenomenal experience in human geography; however, little of it connects, as Hirschmann's work does, with considerations of mass mediation (cf. the geopolitics of Hardy's Wessex), mass manipulation and the basic concerns of war, peace and social order.

Among the other issues discussed were mental health and the pressure put on climate scientists by researching such frightening futures; the ways in which the discursive practices of consultancy combine deterministic and possibilistic statements (with apparent impunity to consistency!); the etymology of optimism (a concept that I have written about a little), emerging as it does in Voltaire's famous satire of Leibniz; the production of 'false' or artificially generated datasets in order to test algorithms against other worlds than this one (I know of this in epidemiology research but apparently it is also being undertaken in climatological research too); the limitations of 'assemblage' thinking with regards to overemphasising degrees of freedom.

There was more but these are the points that have stuck in my mind (and to my page)!

All of this brings me to reflect on my last post and the fact that, even in geography—as open to interdisciplinarity as geography is, perhaps more so than any other discipline—there is still an extreme pressure to specialise in this or that field, whether it is defined formally or by invisible lines that are navigated as if semi-consciously, as if by scent trails!

It has been repeated to (and perhaps beyond) the point of cliché that the Anthropocene razes old disciplinary distinctions and compels much greater communication between specialisms. We are definitely not there yet. However, there are enough talented scholars that recognise the problem to convince me that we might get there in the coming years.

One final thought that comes from one of the participants who remarked that human geographers can be very intimidating to those coming from the outside. I hope that the way in which I have presented my ideas was accessible—albeit idiosyncratic and of course slanted towards my own peculiar interests. However, I think that it is an important point. (It also came up in a less explicit way in the Verticality and the Anthropocence: politics & law of the subsurface [in collaboration with the British Geological Survey] sessions on Thursday.)

There is also great pressure amongst human geographers (and those working in the humanities and social sciences generally) to cultivate a kind of aura of supreme intelligence (which often leads, ironically, to supreme unintelligibility!). Perhaps because we can so rarely point to experimental objects, hard numbers or established principles, we adopt a form of sublime self-justification, in the sense of the sublime described by Iver Neumann in his article on Sublime Diplomacy: Byzantine, Early Modern, Contemporary. We attempt to create an effect (and indeed an affect) of knowingness that can, in fact, get in the way of talking with others who justify their works in quite different ways. (On Justification: Economies of Worth by Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot might be useful on this point.)

There is a degree of self-criticism needed here that recognises the distinct truth regimes involved and attempts to find ways to, as Isabelle Stengers would put it, make them 'contrasting rather than contradictory.' This diplomatic work is extremely difficult but I am surer than ever that it is worthwhile.

Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation (now with words and pictures)

[As the year speeds onwards at a frankly alarming rate, the RGS-IBG conference for 2015 is now only a week away. For my part, I'm organising a round-table discussion session on the subject of geographical determinism. My introductory remarks and slides follow.]

Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation

RGS-IBG, University of Exeter, Friday 4th September 2015.

[If these images appear very low quality, click on them to see a higher resolution version.]

Introduction

As David Livingstone put it in the conclusion to his 2010 BBC radio series The Empire of Climate: “Climate determinism is the alter ego of climate change.” Seldom have the two been separable. So it is today.

Herodotus and Hippocrates; Bodin and Montesquieu; Gilpin and Buckle; Semple and Mackinder; Huntington and Haushofer; Diamond and Kaplan – the lineage of deterministic thinking is long and will be familiar to historians of geographical thought.

Long, familiar and, as the likes of Mike Hulme have recently argued, renascent. Hulme finds determinism alive and well in what he calls the “transfer of predictive authority” effected by institutions such as the IPCC that define human futures in terms of climatic calculations.

“If not quite the inexorable geometric calculus of Malthus,” he writes, “it nevertheless offers a future written in the unyielding language of mathematics and computer code.”

To paraphrase the post-punk band Mission of Burma, how might we escape this certain fate?

Plan

This session consists of four open, conversational roundtables, with four excellent, expert chairs!

It is motivated by the conviction, first of all, that these issues are of pressing contemporary importance but also, secondly, that while many scholars, within geography and elsewhere, are working on such matters, they are doing so rather disconnectedly. This session attempts to initiate a more cohesive conversation.

1: Representation and Determinism

In his 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, the travel writer-cum-geostrategist Robert Kaplan caused something of a stir amongst geographers by reintroducing the principal tropes of late-nineteenth century geopolitics to popular discourse.

“The only enduring thing is a people’s position on the map,” he writes. “With the political ground shifting rapidly under one’s feet, the map, though not determinative, is the beginning of discerning a historical logic about what might come next.”

While disavowing determinism per se, he wholeheartedly embraces “partial,” “hesitant” and “probabilistic” determinisms, approvingly attributing these varieties to Herodotus, Halford Mackinder and Raymond Aron, respectively. One is reminded of Mackinder’s famous line: “Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls.” Human possibility is present but it is radically attenuated by ‘The Map.’

Reading texts like this, it can seem as though we have scarcely budged since the era when speculator-futurists like William Gilpin were mapping out the climatic regions deemed, from the eye of Apollo as Denis Cosgrove had it, hospitable to civilisation.

Against this, I do not doubt, all too familiar geo-ocular sensibility, we are very lucky to be able to pose Gwilym Eades, armed with his new book Maps and Memes: Redrawing Culture, Place, and Identity in Indigenous Communities. It is also worth mentioning his 2011 article in Progress in Human Geography, titled Determining environmental determinism. This short piece, written in response to a forum published two issues previously, confronted both the determinisms and the anti-determinisms then under discussion.

Gwilym, usefully I think, both challenges geographers’ preconceptions of their own openness to other points of view and, at the same time, draws attention to the many epistemic determinisms that we can all wittingly or unwittingly entertain.

2: Possibilism and Historical Geography

But what of our response to determinism? What of the alternatives?

Possibilism is a term attributed to the historian Lucien Febvre [though it has a prehistory in French radical politics]. He, in turn, ascribed it to the geographical works of Paul Vidal de la Blache and his followers. In contrast to the likes of Friedrich Ratzel in Germany and Ellen Churchill Semple, who interpreted Ratzel for an Anglophone audience, the ‘French School,’ it was claimed, eschewed determinism and adopted an ethos of possibility.

Although largely forgotten today, possibilism was a common talking-point of geographers throughout the middle decades of the twentieth-century. Much more recently, it has been taken up by Simon Dalby, who has called for: “A reworked notion of possibilism, one shaped by the much more comprehensive understandings of both earth system science on one hand and political ecology with its focus on lived environments on the other […].”

I, for one, can concur. However, in order to rebuild possibilism, I think that it’s necessary to understand what possibilism has meant in the past, in rather different geopolitical and geo-ontological circumstances – and this is not at all clear.

Is possibilism, as Gordon Lewthwaite had it in 1966, a matter of erring on one side of a “continuum” that has free-will at one end and determination at the other? Is it, as Vincent Berdoulay wrote in 1976, a form of neo-Kantian philosophy? Perhaps the most interesting interpretation for me, particularly if noted in relation to Kaplan’s embracing of Aron’s ‘probabilistic determinism,’ is Fred Lukermann’s argument in 1965 that the possibilists were really heirs of Antoine Augustin Cournot. Contrary to the likes of Pierre-Simon Laplace, Cournot argued that it was not human ignorance that necessitated probabilistic calculation; rather, reality itself was indeterminate – and geographies were, therefore, to quote Lukermann, “explanatorily describable only by a calculus of probabilities.”

In short, possibilism demonstrates, I think, that ‘interdisciplinarity’ must mean not only putting critical geopolitics into conversation with physical, environmental and climatic sciences but, also, with the history of ideas.

And speaking of calculation…

3: Calculation and Environmental Science

For many years now, the critical thinker has been an ally of the indeterminate. This relationship was more or less straightforward. To critique was to open up, to destabilise; the oppressive was the closing down, the narrowing, the determining; liberation was to be found in the embrace of radical potentiality, in the incalculable.

I do not wish to suggest that we should undo this legacy; however, this relationship can no longer be so straightforward. To have so much as a conversation about ‘the Anthropocene,’ ‘the climate’ or even, simply, the future, today necessitates, at the very least, some discursive absorption of the progressive produce of calculative rationality.

How can we resist “transfer[s] of predictive authority,” in Hulme’s words, while not, at the same time, becoming ‘Merchants of Doubt’? How can we integrate the biological, climatological, geographical and environmental sciences in a more cohesive way, eschewing, as Gwilym advises, any complacency with regard to geography’s interdisciplinary achievements? How do we engage with probabilistic thinking without reproducing the kinds of conservative politics promoted by the likes of Kaplan and Aron? How are we to grapple with a world that is, after Cournot, unpredictable in itself?

When to calculate and how? This is a question that Lauren Rickard’s work on scenario planning may well help us to answer. In her 2010 paper Governing the future under climate change: contested visions of climate change adaptation, Lauren writes that scenarios represent “a momentous epistemic and epistemological shift”. Ridding us of the “idea of a singular most likely [or, we might add: most probable] future,” scenario exercises, at least in some of their iterations, facilitate co-produced climatic futures in a way that pluralises and democratises the process of envisagement.

“In scenario approaches,” she continues, “the future is refracted by uncertainty into multiple possibilities.”

And so, finally…!

4: Complexity and Potentiality

Rethinking the role of geographic and climatic knowledge in relation to Anthropocenic political pressures is plainly a vast task – one that brings into question some of our most fundamental concepts: earth, world, environment, history, time…

There is no avoiding it: the spaghetti junction of interdisciplinarity to be constructed on and around a reformed environmental geopolitics must include a well-paved road to philosophy.

We might look, then, to works such as Jason Dittmer’s 2014 article Geopolitical Assemblages and Complexity. Drawing on the works of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Manual DeLanda, among others, Jason attempts to articulate “a materialism without determinism” – a materialist ontology for geopolitics that sidesteps the dualistic bifurcations of modernism.

Complexity theory, he writes, “enables us to incorporate the environment and materiality into geopolitical analyses of change without lapsing into any of the determinism that plagues early geopolitical thought.” Following, in fact, in the footsteps of Cournot, this ontology refuses any mechanistic or reductive model of causality – everything is observed to depend on everything else and every explanation is, therefore, necessarily a simplification of a more complex and dynamic reality.

But we could, I think, gainfully go back further than Cournot, to another crucial figure in the history of probability: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz famously argued that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Crucial to his Théodicée was the concept of ‘compossibility’: a possible world is composed of beings that are compossible.

Setting aside the excesses of Leibniz’s peerless optimism, we can turn his concept to our purposes. To state it most plainly indeed: the present composition of carboniferous civilisation is incompossible with the Earth.

What we need, then, is not the possibilism of fin de siècle French idealism, as Vincent Berdoulay identified it. Rather, we need a possibilism, or a compossibilism, that can assume indefinite multiplicities of open possibilities but that is also pressingly and incessantly aware of the unavoidable facticity of vast, inhuman forces utterly beyond our ken and control.

A possibilism fit for the Anthropocene.

Discussion

e-flux superconversation: "More than Two Cities: Extinction | Optimism | Austerity | Possibility"

A few days ago, I was asked to write a response to Rory Rowan for the e-flux superconversation series. Both pieces have materialised on the e-flux site this morning:

Rory: "Extinction as Usual? Geo-social Futures and Left Optimism"

Me: "More than Two Cities: Extinction | Optimism | Austerity | Possibility"

This was put together in a bit of a hurry but it was fun to write (sometimes it helps to not over-think things). I'm delighted to have made this small contribution to the series, in any case. Among the many excellent contributions, I can particularly recommend:

Lesley Green: "The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene"

Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: "Is there any world to come?"

Reassembling geopolitics—a brief synopsis of my long-term project

For the past 8 or 9 months, I've been plotting and planning the long-term research project that, one way or another, I will pursue for the next several years. (In fact, this plan has been more or less complete since January but I'm just getting around to sharing it now.)

It takes Bruno Latour's work on geopolitics as its starting point but also departs from it in various ways. My recently published article Back down to Earth: reassembling Latour's Anthropocenic geopolitics is essentially a (very) long preface to this larger work.

The project is divided into six parts, each of which are substantially independent but also follow on from each other:

1. Earth and Cosmos
2. Geopolitics and Environment
3. Spherology and Fortification
4. Diplomacy and Territory
5. Possibilism and Possession
6. Geohistory and Geodesy

The first two parts suppose that if we are to reimagine what geopolitics might mean 'in the Anthropocene' or 'facing Gaia,' etc. then we really need to understand what some key terms mean (and have meant) in a broader historical context: Earth, first and foremost, but also the inherited Latin and Greek parallels of that Germanic term, terra and geo. Following on from Peter Sloterdijk's grand conceptual histories, Earth also has to be understood in its historical geo-ontological relation with cosmos. Geopolitics, as I've written in Back down to Earth, was coined in 1899; however, it has to be related to the much longer history of geography and then, in turn, to the entangled histories of words such as environment, climate, milieu, and so on. By the end of these first two parts/chapters, the various conceptual-historical issues surrounding 'geopolitics in the Anthropocene' should be well understood and a thorough reconstruction should therefore be possible.

The middle two parts focus on different sorts of techniques and technologies and how these produce differing configurations of exclusion and belonging. Techniques of fortification—walls, fences, barricades, etc.—carve up space and cement geopolitical arrangements. We are used to understanding such constructions along borders and on strategic high grounds as being geopolitical but increasingly it is not only humans that must be kept in/out: flood defences, dykes, geoengineering projects—these are all geopolitical forms of fortification in the new sense that I would like to articulate. Diplomacy, meanwhile, is not a technique of exclusion but a 'technology of belonging,' as Isabelle Stengers puts it. How differing forms of territory are negotiated (or not) is crucial to understanding the possibility of new forms of coexistence given mounting Anthropocenic pressures.

The final two parts investigate the role of the sciences in this nascent geopolitics in more detail, particularly focusing on problems of calculation, possibility and deep time in relation to matters of land, dispossession and resistance. Possibilism is a term taken from the historian Lucien Febvre. He opposed it to the alleged environmental determinism of the previous generation of geographers from Germany, such as Friedrich Ratzel. Linking to abovementioned investigations, I also want to think about compossibility in the sense of Leibniz and the concept of compossibilism as a diplomatic form of thought about possibilities of coexistence. Possession I take to mean both possession of and possession by—I want to relate geopolitics particularly and inextricably to matters of expropriation but also to mass movements and political passions. Geohistory I mean both in the sense of Fernand Braudel's geographical histories and of Martin Rudwick's history of the geological sciences. Related to the latter, geodesy is a somewhat archaic term meaning the science of measuring the shape of the Earth. However, etymologically the '-desy' also suggests division, which relates back to matters of apportionment, appropriation and nomos, in the sense of Carl Schmitt.

There is an enormous amount of work to be done on all of the above; however, I've already made a start on some of it.

My work-in-progress paper Varieties of diplomatic experience (with particular attention to the problem of territory), presented at a workshop in Windsor this week, investigates the conceptual side of the diplomacy/territory conundrum. I intend to do more empirical work on these issues, taking Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 as a starting point; however, working out some of the conceptual problems is a first step.

On possibilism and determinism, I've arranged a roundtable conference session at RGS-IBG in Exeter later this year: Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation. I'm hoping to assemble a variety of geographers and environmental scientists to talk through these issues from different perspectives and to form, however modestly, a research agenda on these topics that are so crucial for political geographers and earth-concerned thinkers of all sorts.

As the project develops over the coming months/years it'll be interesting to see how it changes relative to this initial envisagement!

Speaking of determinism and possibilism... (and ecomodernism)

Speaking of determinism and possibilism, Simon Dalby has just uploaded his paper to be presented at the AAG 2015 annual convention in Chicago. It's titled "Framing the Anthropocene: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."

He examines, zeitgeistily enough, the ecomodernist movement and its critics before closing with remarks on determinism and possibilism:

Determinism has been finally demolished by the earth system discussions of the Anthropocene; insights from the earth system framing of current options now need much more attention from scholars in the humanities. 

A reworked notion of possibilism, one shaped by the much more comprehensive understandings of both earth system science on one hand and political ecology with its focus on lived environments on the other, offers a much better encompassing interpretive frame for present circumstances. It does so because it demands political action to shape the future, recognizing that we live in a world that, in William’s Connolly’s terms, is about fragile things and self-organizing processes that now urgently require democratic activism in the face of persistent neoliberal fantasies. Naomi Klein’s arguments for linking various forms of political activism in a coalition of fossil fuel divestment, protest against mines and pipelines and a reconstruction or rural economies using renewable energy, offers a broad outline of what is needed. Climate change adds urgency to activism in a world where opposition to fossil fuel production is obviously necessary if the majority of those fossil fuels are to stay in the ground and the planet not push pass 2 degrees Celsius heating.

Well worth reading.

'Determinism, environment and geopolitics: an interdisciplinary conversation' — RGS-IBG 2015, Exeter

I'm pleased to announce that my proposed session for the RGS-IBG 2015 Conference on 'Geographies of the Anthropocene' has been accepted. The conference will be held on 1st – 4th September at the University of Exeter.

It differs a little from the original CfP; however, I'm very pleased with how it's turned out. The abstract is as follows:

“There are no necessities, but everywhere possibilities; and man, as master of the possibilities, is the judge of their use. This, by the reversal which it involves, puts man in the first place [au premier plan] – man, and no longer the earth, nor the influence of climate, nor the determinant conditions of localities.” — Lucien Febvre, A Geographical Introduction to History ([1922], p.236)

Issues of environmental determinism and possibilism have structured human geographical debates since at least the 1920s. However, in recent decades these concepts have become more a matter for disciplinary textbooks than intellectual debate. This session is motivated by the conviction that, given the challenges of the Anthropocene, this must change. Febvre’s response to determinism, now nearly a century old, is plainly inadequate. ‘Man’ can no longer be considered either ‘judge’ or ‘master.’ The ‘influence of climate’ will not be washed away by 1920s-style humanism. And yet, for all human geography’s theoretical riches, the alternative is not obvious. 

Our challenges are vast, complex and ineluctably interdisciplinary. Bearing this in mind, this experimental session consists of four diverse, open and conversational roundtables on interrelated but distinct themes:

• Determinism and representation (chair: Gwilym Eades)

• Possibilism and historical geography (chair: Simon Dalby)

• Calculation and environmental science (chair: Lauren Rickards) 

• Complexity and potentiality (chair: Jason Dittmer)

These roundtables will debate their respective matters of concern individually before presenting their findings to the group. The session has two major goals: first, to collectively sketch ‘the state of the art’ of environmental geopolitics with regard to these issues; and, second, to discern the major contours of agreement and disagreement between the interested parties. We will not pretend to produce any definitive conclusions but, rather, attempt to more broadly outline the problematical terrain that requires further collective exploration. 

This session is, of course, open to all; however, we would particularly welcome participants from physical geography and the environmental sciences.

Call for Papers, RGS-IBG 2015: 'Rethinking possibilism for an Anthropocenic geopolitics'

Because I don't have enough going on in my life already, I've decided to put together a session proposal for the RGS-IBG* conference next year on 'Geographies of the Anthropocene.' Despite having a perfectly serviceable blog (and the conference organisers putting calls up on their own site), I've given the CfP its own page:

http://rethinkingpossibilism.blogspot.co.uk/

Looks much nicer that way (and doesn't really take any more time than posting it on here).

In brief:

Possibilism, as opposed to environmental determinism, is a concept perhaps better known to writers of disciplinary textbooks than debaters of cutting edge theory. This session is motivated by the conviction that, given the geopolitical challenges of the Anthropocene, this should change.

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*That's Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, for the uninitiated.