Environmental Geopolitics in the Twenty-first Century

Rising concerns about climate change and the growing realization that humanity has become a geological agent shaping planetary systems have led to the adoption of the term Anthropocene as an overarching term for the current period of planetary history. The growing disjunction between traditional geopolitical specifications of territorial and spatial categories of politics and the new geological circumstances require a reconsideration of the material context for politics. Having taken our fate into our own hands, governance mechanisms have to grapple with novel matters of production and energy challenging modern assumptions about an autonomous humanity playing out its political drama against a stable natural background. While governing climate is generating new spatial categories of politics, it is far from clear that these devices can reassemble the human and natural systems into a sustainable configuration for the next period of the Anthropocene. One of the key dichotomies that structures modern thinking, the division between human and nature, is no longer tenable. We are literally making our own future, and the consequences of these reconsiderations are profound for politics in general and security in particular.