Overview
This is the concluding module of the course — a forward-looking session that asks students to turn the theoretical tools they’ve built over the preceding eleven weeks toward the future. What does IR theory enable us to imagine? What does it constrain? And whose futures get prioritized in the frameworks we’ve been studying?
The Anthropocene — the proposed geological epoch defined by humanity’s impact on Earth’s systems — provides the organizing frame. But the module isn’t only about climate. It’s about the full range of emerging challenges that IR theory must grapple with: artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, space governance, mass migration driven by ecological collapse, and the deepening tension between technological acceleration and democratic governance.
Key Questions
These are the questions that structure the session:
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Whose futures are prioritized? When IR theory imagines the future, whose perspectives are centered and whose are marginalized? How do the power asymmetries we studied in Module 3 (Non-Western IR) reproduce themselves in climate negotiations, technology governance, and development policy?
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What does IR theory miss? The frameworks we’ve studied — realism, liberalism, constructivism — were built to explain state behavior in an interstate system. How well do they handle challenges that are planetary in scale, non-state in origin, and intergenerational in consequence?
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Can we imagine differently? If the current theoretical toolkit has limits, what would a genuinely future-oriented IR look like? What would it borrow from critical theory, from indigenous knowledge systems, from the natural sciences?
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Technology as a political actor. AI, autonomous weapons, surveillance infrastructure, platform governance — these aren’t just tools that states use. They reshape the conditions under which politics happens. How should IR theory account for non-human agency?
Connecting the Threads
This module is deliberately synthetic. It draws on every preceding module:
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From Module 1 (IR Theories): Do realism, liberalism, and constructivism have anything useful to say about climate? Realists might predict a “tragedy of the commons”; liberals might point to the Paris Agreement as institutional progress; constructivists might ask how “climate security” became a policy frame.
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From Module 2 (Nuclear Proliferation): The governance challenges of nuclear weapons — deterrence logic, arms control regimes, the risk of organizational failure — have structural parallels to AI governance and geoengineering.
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From Module 3 (Non-Western IR): Whose knowledge counts in imagining planetary futures? Indigenous perspectives on ecological stewardship, non-Western development models, and the Global South’s vulnerability to climate change all challenge the Northern-centric framing of “the Anthropocene.”
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From Module 4 (Nation, Race, Gender): Climate displacement, eco-nationalism, and the racialized geography of vulnerability — who bears the costs of ecological crisis is shaped by the same dynamics of inclusion and exclusion we studied in nationalism.
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From Module 5 (Society in a Global Age): Beck’s “risk society” was written for precisely this moment. Rodrik’s trilemma acquires new dimensions when the policy challenge is planetary rather than national.
Content in Development
This module will be taught for the first time in the AY 2025–2026 cycle. Content will be added here as the session is developed. Planned elements include:
- Curated reading list on IR theory and the Anthropocene
- Case applications: the Paris Agreement, AI governance debates, climate migration, space law
- Framing experiment on intergenerational justice or climate risk perception
- Visual materials on the uneven geography of climate vulnerability