Seeking shelter in the anthropocene: challenges and opportunities for Taiwan

Abstract

The Anthropocene is an emerging concept that defines the challenges for international relations due to human activity altering the Earth on a planetary scale. The debates around the Anthropocene as a study of international relations are in infancy without a comprehensive theory to articulate its ramifications on the foreign and security policies of nation-states. This study aims to examine the challenges and opportunities posed for Taiwan in the Anthropocene. The research concludes that the Taiwanese foreign and security policy in the Anthropocene can find opportunities by seeking new social, economic, and political alliances as proposed by the Shelter Theory. These opportunities could help mitigate the dangers of this new phenomenon and allow Taiwan to reach its economic and foreign policy aims without exposing itself to future shocks.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• shelter theory
• Taiwan
• international security

Acknowledgements

The author grateful for the greatest hospitality of Professor Frank Liu, the director of the Institute of Political Science at the National Sun Yat-Sen University, and the amazing staff of the Chinese Studies Center for their support. He would like to extend my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers, whose constructive feedback greatly strengthened this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The data used in this research is retrieved from the International Monetary Fund and British Petroleum’s publicly available records. The data processed data and visualizations curated is deployed to a public repository along with the accompanying R computer language code. Both are accessible here: https://github.com/edbezci/GHGecon

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Research Grant no. MOFATF20190101.

Notes on contributors

Egemen Bezci

Dr. Egemen Bezci holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Nottingham. He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm University, Massey University, and the National Sun Yat-Sen University. He has published a monograph at Bloomsbury, and chapters at Stanford University Press and Lexington Books. His articles appeared at the Pacific Review, Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Critique, and Journal of Intelligence History. He is currently working as a Data Scientist in Toronto, Canada.