Fissured thought for fractured times: Reflections on geography, ecology and the state

Abstract

There has been an ecologisation of social and political thought in recent decades. The planetary crisis has prompted scholars in the humanities and social sciences to become more acutely sensitive to the conditioning effect of the physical environment on their varied disciplinary interests. The growing influence of post-structuralism has also been a critical factor, giving rise to the ecologically inflected tradition of new materialism, of which Bruno Latour has been a prominent advocate. Latour's later ‘ecological’ writings seek nothing less than a Copernican-scale revolution in modern cosmology, more applicable to living in the Anthropocene. As this important intervention from Gonin et al. elucidates, this presents a challenge to the longstanding Westphalian conception of territory, which remains a dominant framework in political theory. In this commentary, however, I question their intention to transcend the state, suggesting that Gonin et al. risk downplaying Latour's own mounting concern with sovereignty while overlooking the lineage of his thought in post-structural political theory. This post-structural tradition remains more relevant than ever in an era marked by ecological crisis and the resurgence of the nation-state.