Overview
Does international relations have an adequate toolkit for planetary-scale problems? The final lecture tests the discipline’s concepts against the Anthropocene. Audra Mitchell argues that a field organized around survival often treats extinction as large-scale death or managerial risk. This view misses the loss of life’s open-ended capacity for being and becoming. Her posthumanist response decenters humanity and takes nonhuman and inhuman forces seriously.
The lecture next examines how images of global futures shape current politics. It considers artificial intelligence and outer space before turning to planetary boundaries and migration. Who writes the rules? Who gains from technological acceleration? Who bears the costs of adaptation? These questions reconnect the course’s major themes after the break. Constructivism and Global IR return first, followed by nationalism and populism. The globalization trilemma completes the synthesis. The methodological lesson is that IR theories are tools with histories and limits. Students should keep asking what each framework explains and which experiences it excludes.
Questions guiding the lecture
- Why does extinction pose an ontological challenge that exceeds an empirical security risk?
- How do AI, space, ecological change, and migration distribute agency and vulnerability across human and nonhuman life?
- Whose futures are prioritized, secured, delayed, or sacrificed in present political decisions?
- How do the theories studied across the course enable or constrain the imagination of alternatives?
Lecture map
Mitchell's question, “Is IR going extinct?”, introduces the distinction between ontic and ontological extinction. That distinction identifies the limits of survival-centered international thought.
Posthumanism goes beyond the human by taking nonhuman and inhuman forces seriously. Mitchell develops a cosmopolitics of gratitude and welcome from this position.
Four fields organize the discussion of the future. Technology and AI sit alongside outer space, ecology and planetary boundaries, and migration.
The course synthesis returns to constructed interests and plural histories. National membership and globalization's trade-offs then inform the distribution of possible futures.
Readings
Mitchell, Audra. 2017. “Is IR Going Extinct?” European Journal of International Relations 23(1): 3–25.
The lecture's central challenge to anthropocentric, state-centered, and managerial accounts of extinction.
Whitham, Ben, and Andrew Heywood. 2023. Global Politics, 3rd ed., discussion of contending global futures.
The 2026 syllabus and guide identify this reading as “Chapter 21: Images of Global Futures.” That number and title do not match the table of contents in the local third edition. This page retains the course's futures framework while leaving the chapter citation unverified.
Recommended extensions
The syllabus recommends Coward et al. (2024) on the futures of IR and Mitchell and Chaudhury (2020) on white apocalyptic visions and BIPOC futurisms. It also includes Lacy (2024) on the politics of control in 2074 and Grove (2018) on the Anthropocene and Eurocene.
Classroom study
Descriptive survey and course review
Concepts, future priorities, and course reflection
The survey asks whether participants recognize the Anthropocene and how they assess the adequacy of IR and sovereignty. It also measures views on technology and ecological conflict, a future priority and the usefulness of course components.
The fielded instrument was descriptive and had no randomized condition. It combined a concept check with five agreement items. One future-priority choice, five course-usefulness ratings and optional open-text feedback completed the survey.
Student response data and open-text comments remain private. Draft materials describe a ranking item, while the final instrument used a single-choice future-priority question.
The activity combined formative assessment with course review. An earlier version of the site described a proposed framing experiment as though it had been conducted. The experiment was never run.
Takeaways
- Planetary processes cross sovereign boundaries and levels of analysis. They also challenge the human-centered ontology on which much IR depends.
- Extinction exceeds a large death toll because it ends unique forms of life and forecloses future possibilities.
- Future scenarios intervene in present politics. They can authorize investment and control as well as delay, sacrifice or resistance.
- Technology and ecology connect with migration as sites where power distributes risk and agency.
- A critical user of theory asks whether a model explains the case. The next question is whose experience and future its categories include.
Course record checked against the 2025–2026 syllabus and the completed lecture slides, speaker notes and reading guide. The Mitchell article, final survey instrument and course-review workflow were used to verify the remaining content.