Join the seventh meeting of the Interdisciplinary Research Cluster on 'International Thinking and Planetary Futures' with Professor Andrew Hurrell (University of Oxford)
A major part of the complexity of the present problematique of global order, bearing heavily on belief in even the possibility of any comparable future ordering, has to do with the interaction of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’.
On one side, the move from global challenges to planetary imperatives and the impact of new technologies and of new forms of scientific knowledge (on economics, on weapons systems, on patterns of connectivity); and on the other, the ‘old’ logics and dynamics, especially the dynamics of international political competition, geopolitical rivalry, regime insecurity, nationalist self-assertion, authoritarian tendencies, and war. It is clear that many of the most fundamental assumptions about law, order and governance are being called into question.
These developments challenge the theoretical and practical viability of the kinds of incremental global governance that dominated much debate in the post-Cold War world. ‘Planetary’ is increasingly put forward as an additional – or alternative – frame to overcome insufficiencies of ‘international’ and ‘global’ or escape from aversions to these.
Awareness of planetary-scale phenomena has layered onto existing socio-political challenges a raft of new concerns about knowledge-making, institutions and governance, and the durability of arrangements capable of sustaining and improving common life. Planetary referents are moving from science (and specific group cosmologies) into much wider societal awareness and policy – and into political fluxes and mobilisations. These moves involve changing temporalities – compression so that deep geological time figures within the short timeframes of human agency and practical reason – and reconfigurations of spatiality and of scalar relations. ‘Planetary’ knowledge and infrastructures pose questions of how the relevant phenomena are characterised and specified, and how sense is made of them collectively.
Multiple entanglements seem to disrupt older categories (of nature or society), while uncertainty, precarity, and arguably resignation contend with programmes' aims at causal analysis, rational calculations and ‘solutions’. Planetary issues also invite attention to questions of scale in distinctive ways. Planetary sense-making and scalar framings have major implications for law, institutions, and forms of action – and for ordering projects more broadly.
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