Anarchy, Scarcity, Nature: Rousseau’s Stag Hunt and the Arctic Walrus Hunt Compared

Mark B. Salter

American Political Science Review, 2024, vol. 118, issue 3, 1145-1157

Abstract: Under conditions of anarchy, the predominant assumption is that scarcity leads to conflict. I contrast traditional Inuit walrus hunt practices to Rousseau’s stag hunt to demonstrate how mainstream international relations has it wrong on three counts: (1) radical scarcity need not lead to conflict-prone outcomes, (2) the historical eighteenth-century context of the stag hunt does not prove a predisposition against cooperation, and (3) the conditions of anarchy are irreducible to cultural institutions or to material constraints alone. I leverage Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology” to demonstrate that ideas and things have an equal potential to structure the culture of anarchical relations and to build on the literature which has established that comparative cultural data can be used to theorize anarchy. Rethinking the logic of anarchy is especially important in the age of the Anthropocene, given the prospects for radical ecological change in the near future.

Date: 2024
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