2025/01/01 by Andrew Biro · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Political Theology and Sovereignty
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0034670524000433
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
At least since Aristotle defined human beings as “political animals,” politics in the Western tradition has largely been defined in anthropocentric terms. Politics was a realm of distinctively human endeavors, while nonhuman nature remained outside. Nature might impinge on or set limits to political action, but was conceived as constitutively outside of politics. However else nonhuman entities might engage with humans or each other, these relations or engagements were not understood as political. Until quite recently, Western political theory was decidedly anthropocentric. The rise of environmental problematics, and particularly the political salience of the global climate crisis, however, have made the idea of a constitutive separation between (nonhuman) nature and (human) politics less tenable. Not only the material manipulation of the nonhuman world, but also its conceptual framing, are increasingly understood as political projects. 1 At the same time, Western political thought has become increasingly open to non-Western cosmologies that do not posit a rigid divide between human and non- (or more-than-) human worlds. Environmental (or green) political theory has become an increasingly robust subdiscipline, 2 and political theory, like a number of other humanities disciplines, has undergone an “animal turn.” 3 Three of the four recent books under consideration form part of this latter animal turn while Sharon Krause’s Eco-Emancipation is firmly situated in the field of environmental political theory.