Beyond the Environment as Victim: A More-Than-Human Just War Theory for the Age of the Anthropocene

Ironically, it has taken the near collapse of our planetary systems due to destructive human social formations to begin to speak of the social and the geological in the same breath. The Anthropocene signals a profound shift in the modern social imaginary. Institutional and disciplinary frameworks within IR are rendered increasingly irrelevant

in light of this tremor. Just War Theory (JWT) is one such paradigm. Yet, as the instances and severity of conflicts surge in response to planetary instability, the need for a shared vocabulary for conflict mediation and harm reduction is ever-present. One approach to recognising more-than-human lives is to develop positions that stand

radically outside the dominant anthropocentric paradigms. The risk is that such approaches may not find purchase sufficient to operationalise their urgent calls. In between the poles of refusing to recognise the world beyond humans on the one hand and principally recognising non-humans on the other, there is a productive space to figure how we

might extend and expand existing theoretical positions. That is the work of this research. Its central question: can JWT address practices of ecological violence in war? If it cannot, how can it be theoretically refurbished to do so? This research works towards a conceptual expansion of the paradigm of JWT to integrate more-than-human

entanglements by testing where and how preliminary accommodations of various aspects of the more-than human agenda can be made.