Cosmopolitics in action: bridging the human-non-human divide in everyday environmental conflicts

In environmental conflicts, the political involvement of non-human actors sits uneasily with classical procedures of human politics. The engagement of non-human actors is often conceived in de-sensitized, emotionless, juridical forms, as an ‘external factor’ imposing its rules as boundaries on the political process. In this paper, we conceive of more-than-human participation differently, as embodied, affective and stimulated by conflict. This opens up environmental politics to be a co-creative process of intersubjectivation in which non-human actors are actively involved with and through the learning bodies of human participants. We build this argument based on ethnographic vignettes centered on water conflicts in Brussels, Belgium and Valencia, Spain.