Deep Global Futures: World Politics in Posthuman Times

Abstract As discourses on future world orders conjure up increasingly catastrophic visions of climate disasters, human extinction and techno-war, dominant understandings of the future in International Relations (IR) and International Political Sociology (IPS) remain problematically human-centric. This article builds on critical insights in Environmental Studies, Black Studies, and Indigenous scholarship to develop a posthumanist understanding of time in world politics. We argue that thinking critically about the futures of world politics means envisioning deep global futures—futures where global political time is detached from fantasies of anthropocentrism, colonial violence and human survival. These futures are deep because they are not bound by human histories, but stretch time both forward and backwards to account for non-human temporalities. They are also global insofar as they de-universalise racialised, gendered, classed, and ableist understandings of the human, exposing the political nature not only of time, but also of its (human) masters. As an intellectual resource, deep global futures enable IPS to take seriously the role of time in shaping the subjects, limits, and trajectories of world politics.