Bruno Latour and Ecology Politics: Poetics of Failure and Denial in IR

Abstract

Failure and denial are seductive concepts, and they were explicitly theorised at the Millennium conference in October, 2015. Though used to evoke an array of images to understand the condition of International Relations (IR) as a discipline and in relation to other social sciences, the concepts were not previously deemed pivotal for theorising world events. This article critically assesses how failure and denial are used by IR’s scholarly community as signifiers, and what it is that they signify. To this end, it considers Bruno Latour’s keynote address at the 2015 Millennium conference, along with some of Latour’s shorter works. Drawing on STS (science and technology studies), postcolonial and queer sensibilities, it concludes with a discussion of the significance of theatre in IR scholarship, and examines the broader social and political implications of how we think and understand failure and denial in the era of the Anthropocene.