Beyond International Relations and toward International Relationality?

Abstract

This article provides a review and commentary on the articles in this special issue, which offer alter-IRs as approaches to bringing climate change into international relations theory and practice as a force or phenomenon that can transform theory and practice. I summarize the articles, as I read them, and suggest that this is a largely futile task. Is description of new ontologies and epistemologies sufficient to bring climate change into IR in a meaningful way? If the discipline is so constrained by its deeply rooted ontology and epistemology, why make the effort to attempt this transformation? And given that our task as philosophers is to ‘change the world’, what are the theories and practices that will make this happen?