The Ends of the World: International Relations and the Anthropocene

The concept of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch defined by human action – has so far remained largely absent from International Relations (IR) analyses. This is perplexing given the monumental stakes involved in dealing with planetary change and the discipline’s overriding focus on crisis. This silence may exist, however, because contemporary studies of international relations are troubled by the Anthropocene, which shifts basic assumptions about how humans live in the midst of perpetual danger, harm, and risk. It also presents us with the prospect of failure in existential terms, if indeed we are living in (and causing) ‘the sixth mass extinction’. The focus of this article, therefore, is threefold. First, to consider the challenges to environmental IR that the Anthropocene concept presents; second, to probe what it means for IR to respond to the end of nature; and third, what is required of IR to deal with the prospect of mass extinction. It is argued that Earth system changes wrought by human action require the discipline to demystify its own ontological, epistemological, and ethical approaches that are culpable in ushering in the Anthropocene. Doing so may allow IR to provide necessary insight into the contemporary and historical effects of the state system as an enabler of planetary change, and the future possibilities for global politics within the Anthropocene

The eternal return: Imagining security futures at the Doomsday Vault

This article examines how imaginaries of security in the Anthropocene function at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), otherwise known as the ‘Doomsday Vault’. Recent explorations by scholars of security have suggested that different ways of seeing, understanding, acting in, and imagining the world are necessary to adequately respond to complex crises in the Anthropocene. The dissolution of the nature/culture divide and the existential risk from planetary threats are said to require new and creative formations of security. Buried in the Norwegian high Arctic, the heavily fortified SGSV was built in 2008 as a planetary-scale, ‘deep-time organisation’ that would forever secure a wide variety of plant seeds and their genetic makeup against regional or global upheavals. The article argues that his seed ‘ark’ materialises three Anthropocene security imaginaries: apocalypse, hope and escape. The prevalence and use of these imaginaries reveal the stability of long-held security logics and challenge the widely-held belief in the innately transformative properties of the Anthropocene concept for security. Instead, the SGSV demonstrates the difficulty in overcoming a collective mindfulness that fixes security to eternal forms even in the midst of unprecedented threats, interventions and technology

Fluid Identities: Toward a Critical Security of Water

Water wars are coming! Water is the defining security threat of the 21st century! The future belongs to the water-rich! These types of warnings are frequently proclaimed, urging attention to looming water conflict, which will occur as stores of freshwater diminish in both quality and quantity. Yet the issue of water security is far more complex than as an inevitable source of future violent conflict. Water is a central component to all aspects of life and planetary health and thus it contains within it a multiplicity of social and political meanings, pivotal to our understandings of security. This dissertation begins with an acknowledgment that conceptions of security are conditioned by larger understandings of being and reality, and that water security in particular is emblematic of traditional allegiances within the subject of international relations that are resistant to change. At its core, it is designed to answer the question: What are the relationships between water and security? It adopts a critical security approach to excavate traditional security narratives and then construct and identify emancipatory visions immanent within relationships over water. It argues that an emancipatory vision of water security that is inclusive, communicative, and cosmopolitan is desirable and possible in human water relations. It concludes by identifying various contemporary water relationships that offer potential emancipatory appellations of water security

Toward a critical water security: hydrosolidarity and emancipation

Traditional approaches to water security presume that water will be a primary vehicle that will drive conflict in the future, and may in fact lead to war between states or armed intra-state groups. This article begins by pointing out the limitations of the connections between water scarcity and traditional security and examines the role of emancipation as an aim for the study and practice of water security. It aims to uncover the complex relationships individuals and political communities have with scarce water sources; relationships that defy simple classification as competitive and protectionist, as traditional security views might have us believe. An individual's connection with water is characterized by a wide and shifting confluence of personal and social needs and identities. Thus, this article seeks to reveal the wide range of approaches used by individuals and political communities to manage their relationships with water, and more broadly, with each other. In particular, the concept of “hydrosolidarity” is studied as a potential emancipatory alternative to hostility, strategy, and conflict in water relations

Law and governance in the Anthropocene

This special issue on ‘Law and Governance in the Anthropocene’ brings together scholars from the disciplines of law and international relations to examine the ramifications of the Anthropocene for global governance and international law. The predominant focus of the literature to date has been understandably on defining the Anthropocene and on assessing what it means for the validity of longstanding viewpoints. However, more attention must be given to the specific changes needed in international relations and law in practice and as disciplines to adjust to the reality of human-driven planetary change. Thus, it aims to build upon existing scholarship by developing specific governance responses to the challenges of the Anthropocene. This introductory article provides a brief outline of the larger workshop project which led to this special issue and offers a synopsis of the included articles. It concludes with some comments on the possible future directions for both scholarship and for legal and political practice

The environment and emancipation in critical security studies: the case of the Canadian Arctic

The traditionally dominant discourse of The Great White North views Canada as a land of vast wilderness and abundant resources. However, this discourse excludes growing environmental risk and prevalent insecurity felt by vulnerable populations in Canadian society, namely indigenous groups whose livelihoods are deeply dependent upon their relationship with their environments. The effect of the relationship between the physical environment and conceptions of security can contribute to a deeper understanding of traditional and critical accounts of security. This article investigates traditional Canadian environmental security discourses and alternative environmental security discourses promoted by Arctic Inuit groups. It examines how these discourses impact the analytic and normative goals of critical security studies and interprets the way in which they affect the concept of emancipation. It argues that Canadian security is co-constituted with its understanding of the environment, and that the Canadian case compels an expansion of the notion of the referent object of security to include the environment – a change which throws it into contrast with other schools of critical security, whose visions of emancipation might not, as currently theorized, be equipped to overcome these phenomena

Entangling carbon lock-in: India’s coal constituency

This article investigates how energy security in the Anthropocene is entangled in diffuse ways with materiality. In particular we examine the social-material entanglement of humans and coal in India and how coal manifests itself differently across social life in the country. Focusing on a single material allows us to study how the Anthropocene creates, and is created by, particular appropriations of the material world. It offers a corrective to some Anthropocene literature that avoids discussing the complex, “everyday,” social impacts that fossil fuels have, particularly in the developing world. These intertwined impacts add to the complexity and difficulty in the process of decarbonizing societies, or in transitioning to a sustainable energy future

Short chain fatty acids produced by CHO cells enhance their specific productivity in fed- batch cultures

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Metabolic engineering of CHO cells towards reduced novel growth inhibitor production and amino acid prototropy

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are currently the workhorses for recombinant therapeutic protein production. In fed-batch processes, these cells consume large amounts of nutrients and convert a significant fraction of them to inhibitory byproducts that accumulate in the culture. Various methods have been devised to control the accumulation of classical mammalian cell culture byproducts, namely lactate and ammonia. We employed one such method, called HiPDOG1 (High-end pH-controlled Delivery of Glucose), which controlled lactate levels effectively in fed-batch cultures allowing cells to grow to higher cell densities. However, even under this control scheme, cells eventually stopped dividing suggesting that another level of growth-inhibitory metabolic byproducts were accumulating. Omics approaches were employed to identify and quantify these novel byproducts accumulating in the cultures. A significant fraction of these compounds were identified to be intermediates or byproducts of amino acid catabolism pathways. Optimizing the supply of specific amino acids in lactate-controlled HiPDOG cultures led to reduced production of corresponding toxic byproducts resulting in significantly higher peak viable cell densities and titers2. In addition to the nutrient optimization strategies, genetic engineering methods were also explored to modulate intrinsic metabolic pathways in order to reduce the channeling of the amino acid carbon flux towards inhibitory byproduct formation. Two pathways were considered as part of this effort, the phenylalanine-tyrosine catabolic pathway and the branched chain amino acid (BCAA) catabolic pathway. Generation of growth inhibitory byproducts, including 4-hydroxyphenyllactate and 3-(4-hydroxyphenyl)pyruvate, from the phenylalanine-tyrosine catabolic pathway was determined to be mainly due to low to negligible transcript expression of four endogenous enzymes including phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH), 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvic acid dioxygenase (HPD), homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase (HGD) and pterin-4 alpha-carbinolamine dehydratase 1 (PCBD1). Mouse orthologs of these four enzymes were heterologously overexpressed in CHO cells. PAH and PCDB1 enzymes together catalyze the conversion of phenylalanine to tyrosine. Cells overexpressing the above mentioned four enzymes were conferred with tyrosine prototrophy, viz. growth in tyrosine-free culture conditions, and in addition, produced lower levels of the pathway related growth inhibitors in fed-batch cultures. In case of the BCAA catabolic pathway, production and accumulation of the pathway related inhibitors, isovalerate, 2-methylbutyrate and isobutyrate, was ascertained to be an outcome of high catabolic rates of leucine, isoleucine and valine amino acids, respectively. Branched chain aminotransferase 1 (BCAT1) enzyme catalyzes the first enzymatic step in the catabolic pathway of all three BCAAs. A siRNA knockdown strategy was employed to reduce levels of BCAT1 enzyme in CHO cells. In fed-batch cultures, the BCAT1 knockdown cells had reduced consumption rates for all the three BCAAs and reduced production rates of the above mentioned inhibitory byproducts, which resulted in enhanced culture performance. The presentation will showcase the results from the above mentioned metabolic engineering efforts and discuss how such an enhanced understanding of CHO cell amino acid metabolism can be employed in development of novel host cell lines with optimized nutrient metabolism. 1. Gagnon, M., Hiller, G., Luan, Y.-T., Kittredge, A., DeFelice, J. and Drapeau, D. (2011), High-End pH-controlled delivery of glucose effectively suppresses lactate accumulation in CHO Fed-batch cultures. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 108: 1328–1337. doi:10.1002/bit.23072 2. Mulukutla, B. C., Kale, J., Kalomeris, T., Jacobs, M. and Hiller, G. W. (2017), Identification and control of novel growth inhibitors in fed-batch cultures of Chinese hamster ovary cells. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 114: 1779–1790. doi:10.1002/bit.2631