Justice Through a Multispecies Lens

The bushfires in Australia during the Summer of 2019–2020, in the midst of which we were writing this exchange, violently heightened the urgency of the task of rethinking justice through a multispecies lens for all of the authors in this exchange, and no doubt many of its readers. As I finish this introduction, still in the middle of the Australian summer, more than 10 million hectares (100,000 km2 or 24.7 million acres) of bushland have been burned and over a billion individual animals killed. This says nothing of the others who will die because their habitat and the relationships on which they depend no longer exist. People all around the world are mourning these deaths and the destruction of unique ecosystems. As humans on this planet, and specifically as political theorists facing the prospect that such devastating events will only become more frequent, the question before us is whether we can rethink what it means to be in ethical relationships with beings other than humans and what justice requires, in ways that mark these deaths as absolute wrongs that obligate us to act, and not simply as unfortunate tragedies that leave us bereft

Fermenters of the World Unite

This article explores the power of food and fermentation as a situated and material way for women and feminist communities to come together for change and sustenance. Fermentation processes, when understood as a microbial process, can aid in imagining a feminist political project of transformation that begins in the kitchen, and it can be a powerful metaphor for rethinking politics and equality.L’article de Fishel explore le pouvoir de la nourriture et de la fermentation au moyen duquel les femmes et les communautés féministes peuvent unir leurs voix pour réclamer un changement des politiques en matière d’alimentation. Les processus liés à la fermentation, lorsqu’on les considère comme des processus microbiens, peuvent nous aider à visualiser un projet féministe politique de transformation qui commence dans nos cuisines, pour devenir un puissant catalyseur de refonte des politiques et de l’égalité sociale

Horror, Apocalypse and World Politics

World politics generates a long list of anxiety inspiring scenarios that threaten to unravel everyday life with sudden and violent destruction. From total war and the concentration camps, through nuclear firestorms, global pandemics, and climate disaster, the diabolical violence of the recent past and conceivable future is the stuff of nightmares. The challenge for both policy practitioners and researchers is to engage world politics in a way that foregrounds human consequences. In this article, we explore these difficult experiences through popular culture representations of the apocalypse, a subject of intense interest for researchers in a discipline where global destruction is a distinct possibility. However, we take a different route by exploring the apocalypse through the horror genre, the one place that human suffering is explicitly accentuated. We argue that the horror genre is at once an access point for ethical engagement with the human consequences of extreme violence and a complex terrain where dark imaginings can be politically loaded, culturally specific and ethically ambiguous

Between Ecology and Indigeneity

We live at a time of unprecedented ecological and socio-political crisis—climate change, pandemic, extinction, inequality, and repression—yet everywhere it is underpinned by the dispossession of Indigeneous peoples and the persistent refusal of Indigneous authority and sovereignty. Bringing together concerns about bio- and necropolitics, habitat destruction and animal cruelty, corporate-colonial modes of conservation, whitened food systems, and settler-colonial systems of land, business and environmental law, this special issue highlights enduring structures of injustice and creative lines of Indigenous resistance, authority, and cultural-political transformation