Bringing the climate into existence

Abstract

This special issue takes up the problem of how, where and through what methodological means the study of international relations, and ourselves as scholars, may be brought into closer connection to climate change and contribute to the social and political change critical to responding to global environmental degradation. In the introduction, I begin from where I became aware of the absence of climate change in how I studied and analysed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I came to look back on and understand this absence through a journey that I was taken on by collaboration and with writers of and from other worlds. This provides a starting point to explore where the articles and commentaries take us as they chart their own journeys through the discipline of IR in the study of climate change. Each article articulates particular dimensions of the challenge that the special issue grapples with as it sets out to examine how, where and through what means the study of international relations may be re-rooted in closer relation to the Earth.