Peace Needs to Embrace the Anthropocene

Abstract

The current climate crisis and related extreme weather phenomena massively influence everyday human life and thus also armed conflict and peace. Acknowledging the human origin of these biospheric instabilities introduces the geological era of the Anthropocene. While it is built around the acknowledgment of the human ability to indelibly alter Earth’s physis, it does not celebrate humanity’s sovereignty, but rather indicates the dissolution of agency within the complex interrelationships between the human and the nonhuman world. The Anthropocene and the issue of peace obviously interrelate. This essay describes the Anthropocene not only as a useful conception in approaching peace, but as its conditio sine qua non. Its ontological implications highlight the substantial share of nonhuman agency and complexity through extreme weather phenomena in armed conflict and peace, while its epistemological innovations reveal the indispensability of the dissolution of the modernist transcendental ego for reasoning about and practicing peace. Peace in the Anthropocene means to let the world and its myriads of human and nonhuman inhabitants speak and to take them seriously.

Human-caused damage to Earth’s ecosystems led to a significant rise in the frequency and intensity of climate and weather extremes on land and water, such as heavy rainfalls, droughts, and fires. These have been affecting human and nonhuman mortality directly, but are also of indirect and long-term relevance through a related increase in food insecurity, water scarcity, and through the loss or forced migration of livestock. Climate change did substantially affect life in urban areas, but also beyond, hitting highly vulnerable people the hardest and thus further driving and complexifying humanitarian crises. Regionally, small island states, Africa, and Central and South America are disproportionally affected (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022). Emphasizing the fact that human vulnerability is inextricably linked to socioeconomic development, unsustainable use of soil and water, and social and political inequality, the relevance of the current climate crisis for armed conflict and peace cannot be underestimated.

Acknowledging the human origin of these biospheric instabilities introduces the geological era of the Anthropocene. Accordingly, humans at some point in history have gained the ability to indelibly alter the materiality of Earth and affect fundamental physical processes. Whether it first happened in a significant way through deforestation, urbanization, overfishing, the mass extinction of life, or the enormous rise in carbon dioxide emissions, whether it happened in the global north or south, humans have undeniably inscribed themselves into Earth’s physis (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Ironically, the human assertion of autonomy that emerged from European humanism and modernity, which was paved by the extensive use of fossil fuel, led to the erosion of its very preconditions. Rather than affirming humanity’s claim as a sovereign actor, these alterations threaten its very survival and therefore unveil that nature has never been an empty stage for any species to act at will: While we move earth, Earth is also moving us. Therefore, embracing the Anthropocene unveils that human sovereignty is a presumptuous modernist delusion that conceals that humans have always been constitutively entwined with an infinitely complex web of human and nonhuman materialities. In other words, affirming the condition of the Anthropocene acknowledges that humankind shares agency with the nonhuman world in doing and thinking. A related ontology rejects any clear separation of a human from a nonhuman realm, which makes classic human domains such as politics infinitely more complex. Finally, embedding and dissolving human agency within the complex web of Earth’s myriads of dwellers and inhabitants has crucial epistemological implications, as it denies the possibility of independent and universal human reasoning. Rather, human thinking is fundamentally positional and context-bound (Braidotti 2013, 55–104; Haraway 2016; Latour 1993).

This essay will elaborate on the Anthropocene and the issue of peace. In doing so, it will not describe the former as a merely useful or helpful concept; rather, the text will introduce the condition of the Anthropocene as the conditio sine qua non of any intellectual and practical approach to peace. Specifically, its ontological and epistemological implications will be depicted as constitutive conditions that peace necessarily has to reflect regardless of its distinct conception, whether it relates to a positive, negative, utopian, idealist, antiutopian, (neo)realist, contextual, relational, or entangled understanding. In a first step, the text introduces the ontological implications of the Anthropocene regarding the undeniable relevance of extreme weather phenomena for armed conflict and peace. The next part scrutinizes the epistemological implications of the Anthropocene regarding the dissolution of the modernist transcendental ego as indispensable for peace.

ONTOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

The fact that peace fundamentally relates to its very context, its circumstances, dynamics, or actors has been widely acknowledged (see Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Richmond 2016). Yet embracing the condition of the Anthropocene goes a step further into the ontological dimension of localities by acknowledging the crucial relevance of not only human, but also nonhuman dynamics such as biospheric imbalances for everyday human life and thus also for (armed) conflict and peace. After all, droughts, water scarcity, floods, storms, or fires crucially affect human well-being. And, as they do so to a larger extent, the more precarious are the living conditions of human beings and thus the less is their possibility to adapt to extreme weather phenomena; they are risk multipliers, as United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres stated (UN 2021). As a result, these disasters dramatically increase inequality, decrease the availability of basic human needs, as well as reducing the legitimacy of governing mechanisms. Because these are all issues that particularly haunt (post)conflict societies, the fundamental relevance of current climate crisis for peace and (armed) conflict can hardly be denied (International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] 2020a, 15–19).

The term Anthropocene highlights the codependency and inextricability of human and biospheric dynamics. It thereby provides an ontological framework for the vicious circle of climate crisis and armed conflict that makes the issue of peace even more obscure and complex. After all, not only do extreme weather phenomena and related natural disasters increase the likelihood of armed violence in conflict-affected areas, but also the other way around: Warfare increases the likelihood of weather events endangering the livelihoods of humans. That is often because of the war-related physical destruction of infrastructure catering to basic human needs as well as to related acidifications of soil, water, and air on the one hand. On the other hand, armed violence massively increases vulnerabilities by crucially diminishing physical and emotional resilience and means of adaption. Not unexpectedly, most protracted armed conflicts are haunted by this complex and self-enforcing vicious circle of extreme weather phenomena and armed violence (Gilmore and Buhaug 2021; ICRC 2020a). In the Horn of Africa, droughts, storms, floods, and continuous violence in Ethiopia and Somalia often subject the population to permanent migration, which increases the risk of suffering conflict-related physical hardships, violence, or death (ICRC 2020b). In the Sahel, armed violence and climate emergency in the form of a tremendous rise of average temperature to 1.5 times above the average only in the last few years has led to poor harvest, water scarcity, and thus food insecurity. Food insecurity and violent conflict in the background of massive climate crisis are the two vicious poles that enforce each other (ICRC 2019). These dynamics also further exacerbate the protracted conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where floods, landslides, droughts, and volcanic eruptions intersect with intercommunal violence (World Bank 2021). In Haiti, in addition to droughts, storms such as cyclones, floods, and landslides intermingle with organized violence (World Bank 2022).

Rejecting the Anthropocene as a fundamental condition in approaching peace would mean to neglect the crucial interplay of extreme weather phenomena and everyday human life, which is of fundamental relevance in precarious situations and thus armed conflict. Many protracted armed conflicts cannot be sufficiently explained without referring to the dramatic interrelations of storms, heavy rainfalls, floods, droughts, landslides, food and water scarcity, and, finally, violence. Embracing the Anthropocene therefore makes any peace-oriented endeavor more realistic, but at the same time also uncertain and contingent. After all, humans share agency with various entities and phenomena that are beyond their control and reach. This ridicules any linear approach toward peace understood as a constant progression toward a utopian (even if eventually unachievable) goal (Chandler 2018, 127). Not least, among various other dynamics, these extreme phenomena interfere with the sphere of politics and reveal that it is anything else than clearly separated from the biosphere. Rather, it is inextricably entangled with it, such as its supposedly neat and binary concepts of peace and war. After all, hardly any (post)conflict context adheres to these distinctions. Thus, taking into account the messy ontology of the Anthropocene allows us to grasp the many pieces of the complex puzzles that approaches toward peace have to bear in mind. In the end, embracing the Anthropocene unveils the dramatic extent to which modernity has misled humans in their approach toward the world—which leads to the epistemological argument for the necessity to embrace the condition of the Anthropocene in approaching peace.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

Modernist thinking draws from the humanist assumption of a sovereign subject built on a Cartesian dualist ontology with human thinking described as independent from the material world. On this foundation, all nonhuman was taken together and reintroduced as nature in the form of a neutral stage for human history; a history to be written by humans and humans alone. Putting humankind in the center of thinking and doing pushes the entire nonhuman world into the periphery from where its whole purpose and value is to be defined and mediated by and through humans. Thereby, the nonhuman world was subjected to being an ontological inferior to humankind without any purpose and value of its own. However, embracing the condition of the Anthropocene and acknowledging the fundamental interrelationships of humans with the biosphere and its many living and nonliving inhabitants and phenomena shatters the idea of autonomous and independent human agency in the world. It pushes the human out of the conceptual center of the world again. So, in the Anthropocene, humans and nonhumans are ontologically equal (Braidotti 2013, 55–104).

The constitutive entanglements of the human and nonhuman world in the Anthropocene present human thinking as a deeply contextual and positional endeavor. As a consequence, any kind of universalization necessarily bears the stain of positionality. In other words, thinking and doing in the Anthropocene are explicitly positional, contextual, antiuniversalist and antiessentialist. Claims to represent and speak about or for another entity that is not oneself therefore are not only a deception, but an epistemological subjection from a certain position. Bearing the world-building weight of normativity, modernist universalization buried myriads of human and nonhuman speeches from an infinity of incommensurable positions underneath a pale and hollow allegedly universalist narrative. While the veiled world appears to be a neat, clean, and shiny place that is intelligible and controllable by human beings, the suppressed and silenced voices keep arising from underneath and strike against the oppressive layer of order. Due to the power asymmetry between the epistemologically dominating and the suppressed entities, these strikes appear as irritations of a legitimate order rather than as authentic articulations of subaltern speech (Serres 1995).

In essence, epistemological subjection turns into ontological inequality and thus physical subjection. Human and nonhuman entities that are mediated through the dominating allegedly universal human subject are not only at the disposal of verbal but also physical appropriation. That allows for unrestricted exploitation of the planet’s soil, water, and air for human purposes and thereby paves the way for the current climate crisis. But it also resonates with the physical confinement of allegedly irrational humans in the late eighteenth century that Michel Foucault described in his Birth of the Clinic (2005), which is on the same path as colonial subjection and slavery of allegedly minor humans. The German word Naturvolk [people of nature] bears witness to an understanding of Indigenous communities beyond the context of European industrialization as representants of the passive entity of nature that is to be appropriated. It justifies the use of human beings as a resource in service of a humanist civilization that utilizes the nonhuman world in order to build a better place for (a part of) humanity. Not unexpectedly, colonialism and extractivism of natural resources intersect. Accordingly, slavery and serfdom become necessities for the greater good of (a certain part of) humanity (Yusoff 2018, 13–31).

It might appear that in order to consider unrestricted natural resource exploitation, slavery, and serfdom an obstacle to peace, a bigger paradigm shift, such as the one toward the Anthropocene, might not really be needed. Too obviously are violence, discrimination, and injustice involved. Yet the ontological qualities of the Anthropocene conceptually reject the seeds of subjection and domination. They invoke a primordial ontological equality that prevents epistemological and ontological elevation from arising in the first place. After all, fostering subjection and domination might be unintended or even explicitly rejected, yet might still be the consequence of tapping into the very same modernist traps such as colonialism and social exclusion. They are built around the conviction of being entitled to declare someone or something oppressive. However, such an act reasserts oneself as epistemological and thus ontologically superior and thereby disregards the fundamental ontological equality of human and nonhuman beings. At the same time, it ignores the positional entanglement of thinking and imposes another universalist deception of its own. Declaring the oppression of someone that is not oneself often silences other entities that are simply not accessible from one’s position. In turn, embracing the condition of the Anthropocene prevents epistemological as well as ontological self-elevation and thereby upholds fundamental equality, which is also the sine qua non of any peace.

Following her distrust in the possibility of adequately understanding people across power asymmetries, Spivak (1988) proposed to essentialize the subjected and oppressed humans respectively the subaltern as such along the characterizations ascribed to them in order to lay the ground for their empowerment. This strategic essentialization accepts an ontological hierarchy for the sake of empowerment. Various approaches toward the Anthropocene follow these lines when they implicitly or explicitly invoke strategic essentialism with the subjected nonhuman world (see Burke 2022; Burke and Fishel 2019; Cudworth and Hobden 2018). This strategic identification with the nonhuman brings to the fore the crucial flaws of strategic essentialism, which is the concealment of domination and subjection beyond the focus of interest. In doing so, the inner-human relationships are often disclosed for the sake of the nonhuman world. This theoretic flaw accompanies, among others, the term of the Anthropocene itself, which implies the deprivation of Earth’s resource by humankind as such and thereby conceals the dominant European share of the related endeavor that was on top linked to colonial subjection and domination—a twofold concealment (Whyte 2017). In essence, a strategic essentialization is based on a very specific perspective on subjection that lays ground for particularistic morals and ideas of justice that guide the political process of empowerment and thereby reassert constellations of domination. It might eventually bring up more theoretic problems than it solves.

Taking seriously the epistemological and ontological implications of the Anthropocene rejects any kind of essentialization and universalization as an act of epistemological and ontological appropriation and domination. Embracing the Anthropocene means to conceptually refrain from the sheer possibility of creating constellations of domination and power asymmetry. All too often, well-meant international endeavors to foster peace approached contexts of armed warfare or its aftermath that were too reductionistic, universalist, and essentialist and thereby mostly did more harm than good. By disregarding the fundamental equality of humans and nonhumans and the positionality of thinking and doing, they were not only unable to adequately grasp the context in which they wanted to foster peace, but at the same time created allegedly universalist deceptions that silenced local human and nonhuman inhabitants (Pospisil 2019; Torrent 2021).

There is no way to approach peace without affirming the condition of the Anthropocene and embracing its implications. Taking seriously its implications presents it as the conditio sine qua non of grasping the complex human and nonhuman interplay in dealing with armed conflict and of maintaining a fundamental ontological equality in engaging with the world. Peace in the Anthropocene means to let the world and its myriads of human and nonhuman inhabitants speak and to take them seriously. That brings up the obstacles of detecting and understanding these articulations, which is already difficult within the human realm, let alone in the nonhuman world where verbal speech is not viable. Patience and modesty are therefore indispensable modes in approaching the world. Accordingly, other ways of knowing are necessarily to be taken into account, which concerns natural sciences but also traditional and Indigenous local ways of knowing. They are beyond modern episteme and might very well provide ways to grasp the articulations of nonhumans, such as oceans, reefs, glaciers, or woods.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author acknowledges the financial support by the University of Graz.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

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Maximilian Lakitsch

Dr. Maximilian Lakitsch is a postdoctoral lecturer (senior researcher) in the Department of Global Governance at the Institute of the Foundations of Law at the University of Graz and coordinates the Austrian Conflict – Peace – Democracy Cluster. He wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Graz and the American University of Beirut. His research focuses on issues of political power, legitimacy, posthuman politics, and religion in International Relations and Peace and Conflict Studies, often within the regional context of the Middle East and North Africa, especially Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. E-mail: [email protected]