Empires of Waste. Seeing and Confronting the Global Politics of Throwing Things Away

Discarded matter is increasingly challenging global politics, and waste has become an existential threat. Discarded chemicals and plastics are undermining both health and biodiversity; the creation of wastescapes and sacrifice zones sees land and populations defined by their proximity to waste; while the emission of waste gases is threatening to destabilize the climate on which human societies rely. Much of the realities of waste and discarding takes place in the third dimension (oceans, atmosphere, subterranean), and so are rendered invisible by predominantly two-dimensional International Relations theories. This article sets out to make sense of waste in a global politics ‘post-IR’ through an engagement with Discard Studies, where the acts of discarding waste are seen as techniques of power that involve questions of justice and equity. Here, I argue that waste in the global political economy forms a world that mirrors the world of production. In fact, the ‘Empire of Plenty’ that is associated with global production cannot be separated from what its industries discard, and it would be more correct to call the global political economy an Empire of Waste. Understanding this Empire of Waste is one of the many ways of getting to grips with the new ecological realities facing global politics.