ABSTRACT

This workshop is intended to begin to explore some implications for our understanding of “geopolitics” from the emerging perspective of the “planetary turn” in the social sciences. Introduced by postcolonial thinkers like Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the “planetary” perspective places human history, and in particular the dynamics of globalization in the last several centuries, within a much older history of the earth, no longer conceived as an inert backdrop to human doings, but as an active and systemic agent which includes the human species and its “technosphere.” These papers begin to address what implications this new point of view has on traditional IR conceptions of the state, security and geo-political space.

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SPEAKERS

Umut Ozguc: From geopolitics to biopolitics of pandemic borders 

Umut is a lecturer at International Relations. She is an international relations scholar with a research interest in critical border and security studies. She joined Deakin University in 2020 after working as a postdoctoral research fellow in International Ethics at the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on the construction of borders in settler colonial states, biopolitics, posthuman borders, and the changing nature of security in the context of global mobility regime.

Peter Ferguson: Geopolitics in the Anthropocene: from system stability to systemic resilience.

Peter is a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University and Politics and International Relations Discipline Convenor. Previously, he was a lecturer in environmental politics and policy at the University of Melbourne, from where he also obtained his PhD in international relations in 2014. Peter is a discourse analyst and critical theorist, whose research focusses on the political challenges to moving toward a socially just and ecologically sustainable global socioecological system, and global governance and security discourses. Peter’s first book, Post-growth Politics: A Critical Theoretical and Policy Framework for Decarbonisation (Springer Nature), was published in 2018.

Miguel Vatter: Towards a geopolitics of the elements: Carl Schmitt and the planetary turn.

Miguel is Professor of Politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. He has previously taught at UNSW and Flinders University. His main areas of research are the history of political and legal thought, biopolitics and political theology. 

Zim Nwokora

Zim is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Policy Studies at Deakin University. A comparative political scientist by training, his research examines theoretical and empirical questions about political party systems, constitutional structures and democracy. This research is informed by close attention to politics in the United States, Nigeria, United Kingdom and Australia.