Climate Change and Order: Mapping the Scope of International Relations in Studying Climate Politics

Isha Sharma

International Studies, 2020, vol. 57, issue 4, 361-374

Abstract: As globalization gained currency in international politics, multilateral negotiations increasingly expanded their scope to include environmental issues. Still, the political dimension of environmental change remains underrepresented in international relations (IR) theorization. This article aims to focus on the theoretical fortification in the mainstream IR when it comes to transboundary environmental threats. Since the threats of climate change and environmental degradation cannot be contained within the sovereign territories of states, the state-centric conception of the political order in the conventional approaches to IR fails to respond to the threats that are planetary in nature. The article seeks to answer two questions: (a) What are the inadequacies in the realist and liberal concepts of political order vis-Ã -vis climate change? (b) How to destabilize the conventional assumptions of political order with the aim of making it more receptive to the concerns associated with climate change? To do the latter, the article delves into the work of Robert Cox in order to delineate his intersubjective approach, which combines the material basis of political order with social relations of production. By doing so, this approach also sheds light on the transnational variants of hegemonic power, making it a useful explanatory framework for political implications of climate change.

Keywords: Order; Robert Cox; problem-solving; critical theory; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:intstu:v:57:y:2020:i:4:p:361-374

DOI: 10.1177/0020881720965044

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