Virtual Issue: Climate, Nature and Contestation

This virtual issue presents a selection of works addressing the various contestations over climate change, environmental politics and the changing role of nature. As these articles demonstrate, combining insights from International Relations, Political Theory and Sociology opens up new ways to interrogate the constitutive tension over nature / culture that continues to shape the global register. This collection reveals the careful, complex and often difficult mediations that emerge when human actors consider (or don’t consider) their responsibilities to the earth they inhabit. While climate change and environmental degradation may appear to be ‘obvious’ problems requiring concrete and consensual solutions, these articles show that such assumptions are belied by the transversal and disruptive character of ecological life-worlds. How is the natural world commodified, used, controlled and managed? What happens when ‘nature’ is not objectified as an inert and passive entity, but is instead given an active role – and indeed agency – in our efforts to address climate change? What happens when environmental degradation is understood as central to other more explicitly ‘political’ problems such as forced migration, militarization and the erosion of human rights? This virtual issue pays close and critical attention to these questions and more, while problematizing the constitutive logic of nature / culture that underscores the terrain of the international.


Personhood and the Rights of Nature: The New Subjects of Contemporary Earth Politics
Rafi Youatt
Volume 11, Issue 1

Visualizing Climate-Refugees: Race, Vulnerability, and Resilience in Global Liberal Politics
Chris Methmann
Volume 8, Issue 4

Climate Anarchy: Creative Disorder in World Politics
Hugh C. Dyer
Volume 8, Issue 2

Chaotic Climate Change and Security
Maximilian Mayer
Volume 6, Issue 2

From Defense to Resilience: Environmental Security beyond Neo-liberalism
Olaf Corry
Volume 8, Issue 3

Militarism in Environmental Disguise: The Greenwashing of an Overseas Military Base
Peter Harris
Volume 9, Issue 1

At the Crossroads of Autonomy and Essentialism: Indigenous Peoples in International Environmental Politics
Marjo Lindroth; Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen
Volume 7, Issue 3

Blurring the Pipeline: Energizing an Account of the Urban
Jennifer Jean Bagelman
Volume 9, Issue 1

Narratives of Redemption: The International Meaning of Afforestation in the Israeli Negev
Yoav Galai
Volume 11, Issue 3