Abstract
Providing a cross reading of political economy, the transformation of the biosphere, and geopolitics, Simon Dalby’s Anthropocene Geopolitics carries the long-standing theoretical discussions about geopolitics into new terrain. Accordingly, the rapidly changing climate, rising sea levels, and the accelerating extinction rates are “the new context of geopolitics” (p. 10). In a nutshell, the book deals with the question of how to revisit geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene.
Emerging in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the classical understanding of geopolitics addresses the territorialization of political space. In this perception, the world system depends on diplomacy, competition, and bilateral relations among sovereign states whose territories are demarcated through political boundaries. More nuanced versions of geopolitics were articulated during the 1990s by the scholars who drew inspiration from critical and post-structural intellectual traditions. Highlighting how global political and economic spaces are produced through discourses of (in)security and realpolitik, these scholars conceptualized geopolitics as another technology of power and dismantled classical geopolitics’ reality claims. These critical approaches have later been developed by feminist scholars who argued that geopolitical processes do not merely operate by and occur between big actors of international relations but are made, unmade, and challenged by everyday life interactions, affects, and practices of ordinary people. Simon Dalby’s Anthropocene Geopolitics adds a further layer to these discussions by bringing a geophysical dimension to the table.
Dalby’s argument revolves around the idea that the simple geopolitical conceptualization of the international system depending on competition, separation, and conflict among territorial powers is anathema to the world’s new geophysical reality. Critical environmental values, such as the carbon emission levels, acidification of oceans, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss, are all-encompassing threats to life on earth, and this requires a paradigm shift in the perception of global governance. Dalby states that despite a general awareness about these global matters, the classical geopolitical mentality prevails in international political and economic management. On the one hand, various populist, nationalist, and fascist politicians who secure their place through artificially produced security concerns and xenophobic fears are on the rise across the globe. Since they invoke foreign economies and migration as the primary threat to domestic order and prosperity, they prioritize strengthening territorial sovereignty through walls and borders. Simultaneously, some proposed solutions to counter the massive transformation of the biosphere are in the hands of market rationality and individual environmentalism. By using forests in specific regions of the world as carbon offsets, buying and selling carbon credits, and outsourcing the pollution-intensive industries to less regulated societies, this neoliberal mentality also approaches the issue through a territorial framework. Dalby states that instead of changing economy and corporate behaviors, these activities generate more business areas by “further manipulating the environment” (p. 111), casting aside solving Earth System’s problems. Dalby argues that the new context in the age of Anthropocene requires a conceptual shift from the insight of territorial, stable, and autonomous spaces to a truly global scale of governance that takes the biosphere’s unprecedented transformation into account.
The book consists of ten chapters. The first two chapters serve to introduce the Anthropocene and geopolitics, and the last two chapters are allocated to wrapping up the book’s main arguments. In between, each chapter discusses an aspect of geoecology by bringing the Earth System transformations into conversation with geopolitics and political economy. While depicting how planetary boundaries have been exceeded through fossil energy-based economies and urban systems, these chapters simultaneously discuss the persistence of territorial and market-based solutions and their limitations to address these problems. For instance, a discussion in Chapter 4 about low-lying countries under threat being swallowed by sea-rise and coastal erosion reveals how global environmental change now challenges “a politics of separation, of sovereign states with fixed boundaries and exclusive jurisdictions” (p. 11) . When climate refugees enter the picture following the sinking of low-lying states in the face of rising sea-levels, this challenges modern political assumptions about what makes a state stable. The classical understanding of failed states, which defines a situation in which a state loses its ability to govern and control its population, does not readily apply when a state is compromised due to rising sea levels. At this point, Dalby asks how international systems built upon the understanding of fixed cartographies will deal with such anthropogenic destruction of a country? Moreover, this situation brings to light a more complicated issue in relation to sovereignty. As Dalby argues, sovereignty is defined through territorial fixedness in the classical geopolitical understanding. What will happen to the sovereignty of those who lose their territories to environmental factors? If global warming and climate change are the international system’s shared responsibilities, do the states have obligations to the people of endangered states? Which states will have the major responsibility for disappearing territories considering the unevenness in carbon footprints? Although the possibility of inundation is relatively low for most countries, these discussions reveal how “the political ontology of territorial states, human collectivities, Lockean notions of property rights, and the modern assumptions of autonomous sovereign entities are increasingly ill-suited categories for grappling with contemporary transformation.” (p. 69)
In short, traditional conceptions of territory and perceptions of security that see enemies as always somewhere outside of fixed national boundaries are limited in grasping the new geopolitical reality of the Anthropocene. In this new era, Dalby states that traditional forms of geopolitics that prioritize reaching key fossil energy resources and having a comparative advantage in the international arena through firepower and industrial growth should give way to new mindsets that prioritize adapting and reimagining security in ways to slow down climate change. In the Anthropocene, geopolitical decisions in the sense of energy resources, consumption patterns, and infrastructural choices are candidates for “shaping future climates” (p. 8). Then, geopolitics must be about global governance that initiates new ecological production decisions, urban systems, and energy sources, rather than merely relying on territorial rivalries and short-term capitalistic gains.
Considering how the Covid-19 pandemic has not only been a global health crisis but also presented challenges to the international status quo by disrupting worldwide trade and financial infrastructures, Simon Dalby’s Anthropocene Geopolitics is a recent and timely contribution to the discussions of geopolitics within geography and across multiple disciplines. The book calls for reconsidering the interconnectedness and interdependence of the international political and economic system through a geophysical perspective. At the same time, in an age in which the transformation of the Earth System has the potential to displace people massively and change all the boundaries and environments as we know today, the new geopolitical framework Dalby formulates urges us to review the concepts of citizenship, nationality, and sovereignty that are traditionally defined through fixed boundaries and territories. Overall, Simon Dalby presents substantial evidence to support his arguments and convinces readers of the necessity of linking geopolitical matters to Earth System thinking. Anthropocene Geopolitics is a must-addition to the syllabi of undergraduate and graduate-level courses in political geography, environmental studies, international relations, and related disciplines.
