Planetary Perspectives: A New Paradigm?

Call for contributions to a special collection of Global Perspectives

The system of international organizations established after the Second World War and the norms and regulations associated with it have come under increasing pressure in recent years. New geopolitical divisions and alliances have emerged, most recently for example as expressed by the BRICS countries which refuse US and EU-led sanctions against Russia, and in Washington's 2018 National Defense Strategy which for the first time designated Beijing and Moscow as rival "revisionist powers." Such tensions are doubtless exacerbated, if not largely determined or influenced, by turbulence in the world economy since 2008, the recent acute slowdown of GDP growth in China and elsewhere, and the onset of a severe cost-of-living crisis driven by inflation.

Underlying contradictions of the post-war order were already long evident by the turn of the century. The US's unilateral global military operations, by 2003, deflated what remained of the fanfare around a supposed perpetual peace which was to have superseded the Cold War and then inaugurate a new era of globalized prosperity. Yet the more recent period suggests a definitive break and has given rise to new critical interventions. New critiques of the concept of globalization – the narrative framework for Atlanticist post-Cold War global governance – have consequently been advanced during this period. Some argue that a truly post-globalization epoch is now on the horizon. Still, as globalization has faltered, few humane alternatives have developed to take its place.

This collection aims to reconceptualize an internationalist definition of politics as distinct from the prevailing alternatives: one model which emphasizes a global competition among national economies, and another which prizes an unbound, self-regulating global market. Contributions should examine historical developments in social-property relations, economics, politics and law. Aside from the rapid transformations of the last period, which arguably in themselves have signaled the limitations of the concept of globalization, an expansion of politics which encompasses elements of life and experience previously thought of as part of the natural world, also suggests that a new scholarly framework is needed. The title of the collection – planetary perspectives – indicates the quality of this new type of historical and theoretical research. Scholarship which analyzes novel institutional frameworks which may emerge from the new paradigm – that is, which take the form of planetary governance – will also be emphasized.

Historically, we propose the period of the long 1970s (roughly 1967-1980) as a starting point. This period was characterized by the first severe global economic crisis of the post-war period, as well as the various responses to it. At the time, both global expert networks and social movements produced competing ideas about the future organization of society and the economy. The elite Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, which warned of impending scarcity, was one such example. Representatives of what was once termed the "Third World” called for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) to redistribute wealth and natural resources. Countries which had then only recently won independence from colonialism protested a lack of economic development and the emergence of a neocolonial regime which retained local compradors and created new forms of dependence. The Third World and non-aligned opposition argued that the most urgent social problem was a lack of development. The period was also defined by a surge in labor organizing across the capitalist world, both within and outside of trade union channels.

This collection will orient itself by the historical contention that the current moment is an opportunity to revisit the formative period of the 1970s. It seeks in this period certain questions which may be posed again so as to translate them for our current world situation. This task is especially important now, given the ubiquity of environmental politics and the clear relevance to it of the ecological destructiveness of much of production for profit, to say nothing of war and economic crisis, especially inflation. Of clear relevance too are the multitude of political claims about new modes of technical management of natural resources – energy and food above all – as they relate to questions of inequality, wealth and poverty, living standards and the recent orthodoxies of globalization, which had treated the economy as a quasi-natural self-regulating dynamic. Legal debates of the period concerning the regulation of monopolies, competition and claims to global intellectual property rights should also be revisited in light of recent technological and economic developments and their attendant politics.

Before academic economics became largely an exercise in reenforcing neoliberal premises about markets, some prominent researchers in the field argued that it should be a social science capable of reflecting human needs, of analyzing social life and its contradictions – all undertaken for egalitarian ends. The NIEO for example proposed fundamental re-evaluation of international law, which it held was founded in its modern form as a colonial project. It remains an open question today whether any progressive reforms are capable of transforming economics and international law sufficiently so that they may play a role in any possible humanistic coordination of the use of natural resources and the organization of production.

This call for papers is an invitation to contribute to a new conceptualization of a future for economics, the social sciences generally and scholarship on international law as related to the successive global crises detonated at the turn of the 1970s.

We invite contributions which address the following thematic clusters of questions:

1. Political economy. Has the extended period of slowing growth punctuated by increasingly severe crises altered the quality of the global economy definitively? How might financialization relate to this dynamic, and, in turn, to finance's reliance on the state – whether in the form of successive bailouts of lenders or until recently, ultra-low interest rates? Under these new conditions, how should political-economic analysis understand the commodification of the natural world, and the significance of dramatic changes in the prices of natural resources? What effect are such changes having on social life, and do they indicate that new forms in the economy of land, labor and exchange are now developing? Separately, on what models might a counter-movement from below draw for the democratic organization of the economy and natural resources? What is the contemporary relevance, if any, of past utopian speculations from above such as Arvid Pardo's 1960s-era concept of the ocean floor as the common heritage of humankind, or older formulations of a commons found in the progressive-era American economist Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879), which advanced a notion of property rights based in labor productivity rather than legal titles to land?
2. Internationalism. How might an internationalist politics relate production and the use of natural resources to the social aims of democratic self-determination and improved welfare? How does mounting inequality within countries impose itself on international politics? What environmental considerations are relevant to the equitable distribution of wealth? How does internationalist politics distinguish itself from an apolitical reliance on the market and technological change? Currently, policies addressing ecological destruction are based on the trading of carbon emissions through markets;  such practices have been widespread in OECD countries since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Other proposals which depend on technical change and technocratic management risk widespread depoliticization and undermine popular self-determination. What role is there for alternative approaches which are more democratic and more sharply political?
3. The politics of environmental law. How will the politics of new environmental-legal campaigns be defined – as technocratic and elitist, or democratic and popular? Policy recommendations and expert opinions proliferate across global networks linked by NGOs and states, but new legal concepts are equally relevant to political economy and the prospective regime of planetary governance now taking shape. Bangladesh for example recently became the first country to grant rivers the same legal rights as human beings, and Canada’s Magpie river in Quebec is now a legal person with the inherent “right to flow” and “not to be polluted.” The question of how land might be included in this new legal theory remains unaddressed. Emerging "Earth Law" movements and arguments address uninhabited areas. Will inhabited and industrialized zones also be included in these initiatives? How do such laws allow for democratic and other popular forms of oversight, or do they rely mainly on the judgment of specialists?
4. Intellectual property. What is the status of legal claims to intellectual property today, and what are the relevant institutions and interests defining it? Which agents enforce the rights to the use of intellectual property legally and practically? The global regulation of intangible assets, specifically intellectual property, was shaped by the incorporation of the World Intellectual Property Organization into the UN in 1974. Industrial interests at the time often expressed preferences about such property which contradicted liberal orthodoxy; intellectual property rights secured rents, but often at the expense of innovation, it was then argued. This dynamic persist today. Histories of the fundamental political and legal questions raised by the enforcement of intellectual property rights – that is, the question of executive power at a global or planetary register – and especially within institutions such as the WIPO and later the WTO, will be most welcome. Papers which relate these debates to the present historic levels of concentration in high-tech (digital, biotech, pharmaceutical) and financial sectors are encouraged.
5. Technology and technical change. The rapid digitization of private and public life alike raises new political and economic questions. Decentralized blockchain-based currencies promise users anonymity, but they are likely prohibitively energy intensive in the long run, and as commodities have experienced massive speculative fluctuation in price which undermines their status as money. Central banks around the world are now proposing their own digital currencies, which give every indication of establishing immense powers of surveillance and influence. Other digital technologies promise fundamental changes not only for modes of production and transport, but also for politics, social life, the arts and even biology. The use of digital technology, especially when combined with patents held on agriculture, natural processes, or even entire genomes, portends a more thoroughgoing privatization of natural resources, if not their outright financialization. The related prospect of technological unemployment has also returned as a topic to be debated with renewed force. Does the concern have merit, or does it reflect other perhaps underappreciated contradictions producing underemployment and flagging growth? What might the parameters of a humane digital future be – and what are the prospects for an improvement in work conditions, where the many deleterious social consequences of digitization can be mitigated?
6. The state. Is geopolitics today still mostly a question of the balance of power within the inter-state system, or have supranational institutions supplanted the state, even partially? What are some of the consequences for international relations of new transnational problems, whether economic, military or ecological? How does the concept of global governance relate to this field? What does the recent history of institutions such as the UN, the ICC, and the breakdown of peace treaties such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty indicate about what drives geopolitical events? What new modes of internationalism might better be able to meet human needs, and what type of politics would have to be developed to usher in such a transformation of international institutions?
7. Social movements. What are the historical touchstones for a new internationalist, planetary politics? In which historical contexts did exemplary groups of people diagnose key global problems, and why? How did they envision possibilities in a changing world for progress toward peace, welfare, self-determination, and what meaning do such experiments carry today? In this context, we encourage contributors to focus on non-academic political groups and social movements broadly defined.
8. Military affairs. What type of politics is adequate for addressing the rise in militarism and the use of force since the turn of this century? Have new military technologies now initiated a transformation of warfare – toward hybrid and covert forms of war unfolding in civil society and targeting civilian infrastructure? How does the current balance of power among states bear on these developments, and how is the UN's performance to be evaluated in this context? Is the UN’s liberal internationalism in fact an expression of Atlantic interests, or is it the germ of a genuinely multilateral representative institution? What is the specific condition of imperialism today: does it reflect the jostling of rivals within a Westphalian inter-state system, or has it developed qualitatively into something else at a global scale?
9. Humanism and social theory. Is a renewal of humanistic inquiry in store? How might certain universalistic theories be revived and developed within the humanities and social sciences? What is the state of the critique of humanism as advanced by those who argue it is compromised by its Western provenance? Does social theory relate itself adequately to new historical developments, and how might historians incorporate new theoretical concepts into their practices?
10. Further ideas not mentioned in the above points are just as welcome if they address related questions.  

We invite authors to submit abstracts by the end of October 2023, and articles between 8,000 and 10,000 words in accordance with the journal’s guidelines by the end of January 2024.