Conceptualizing Planetary International Relations: From Foreign Policy to Planetary Politics of Reparation

What the paper says

This article continues scholarly efforts to articulate an ontological turn of international relations (IR) away from frameworks organized around states’ exceptional sovereignty and foreign/domestic policy binary, which fail to account for the planetary entanglements that characterize shared crises of biophysical and social reproduction under global capitalism. As a counter-hegemonic intervention, ‘planet politics’ help to address the historical processes that have denied and severed planetary entanglements via foreign policy projects of colonial domination. Through a case study of Canada, as an inherently international terrain characterized by multiple and overlapping sovereignties, I trace the continuities of struggle for mutually assured survival across foreign and domestic policy agendas. By recovering the already existing heritage of Indigenous anti-colonial resistance and diaspora consciousness, planet politics emerges as centuries-old praxis grounded in relational ethics of reciprocal care for each other and the rest of nature. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies and place-based ontologies, decolonial IR critiques, and eco-socialist feminism, I highlight the analytical categories of shared, consensual, and overlapping sovereignty. Conceptualized in this way, planet politics reveals the mutuality of reparatory projects that advance Indigenous self-governance, migrant and labour justice, and transnational solidarity in defence of human life and ecologies.