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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2022
Rats tend to thrive wherever humans do. In recent centuries, the growth of human populations around the planet has meant the growth of a nearly equivalent global population of rats, particularly in cities, where they thrive on trash, food scraps, and infrastructure, and widely stymie human efforts to get rid of them. This forced coexistence has inspired a wide range of human responses, ranging from revulsion and extermination efforts as vermin, to religious veneration and use as experimental lab animals. At the same time, the political figure of the rat has played a constitutive role in violence and experimentation against human populations who are deemed as rat-like. To understand these linked dynamics, the article frames the idea of interspecies internationality, against both Anthropocene and geopolitical readings of the planetary condition. It then elaborates three axes around which rat assemblages have been formed – exterminative, experimental, and ecological. The article concludes by arguing that the rat, as interspecies figure of politics and as living creature, allows us to understand important dynamics around the generation of disposable life, political difference, and conditions of coexistence, in ways that are critical to the entwined politics of life on the planet.
1 The rat king represents an exploitative sovereign who sits on the tails of their own subjects, apocryphally, appearing in 1500s Germany during the Protestant Reformation; Martin Luther is quoted as calling the Pope as a rat king. Adrian Daub, ‘All Hail the Rat King’, Longreads (12 November 2019), available at: {https://longreads.com/2019/12/11/rat-king-germany-nutcracker/}.
2 Jacques Derrida's final lectures on animals and politics begins one such political bestiary, via the figure of the wolf, both through tracing the relationship of domestic sovereigns to animality (the fox, the lion, the sheep), and by considering the sovereign a wolf in international relations among other sovereigns. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
3 Franklin Ginn, Uli Beisel, and Mann Barua, ‘Flourishing with awkward creatures: Togetherness, vulnerability, and killing’, Environmental Humanities, 4 (2014), pp. 113–23.
4 For examples illustrating this dynamic in the context of American interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, see Joseph Pugliese, State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), p. 93; Rafi Youatt, Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020), pp. 64–5.
5 Ticktin, Miriam, ‘Invasive others: Toward a contaminated world’, Social Research, 84:1 (2017), pp. xxi–xxxivCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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7 John Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, The Politics of the Anthropocene (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).
8 Frank Biermann, ‘The future of “environmental” policy in the Anthropocene: Time for a paradigm shift’, Environmental Politics, online (November 2020), pp. 61–80.
9 Luke, Timothy, ‘The Anthropocene and freedom: Terrestrial time as political mystification’, Platypus Review, 60 (2013), p. 2Google Scholar.
10 Jairus Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
11 Anthony Burke, ‘Blue screen biosphere: The absent presence of biodiversity in international law’, International Political Sociology, 13:3 (2019), pp. 333–51; Audra Mitchell, ‘Beyond biodiversity and species: Problematizing extinction’, Theory and Event, 33:5 (2016), pp. 23–42; Leonardo Figueroa-Helland, Cassidy Thomas, and Abigail Perez-Aguilara, ‘Decolonizing food systems: Food sovereignty, Indigenous revitalization, and agro-ecology as counter-hegemonic movements’, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 17:1–2 (2018), pp. 173, fn. 201. On anthropocentrism in IR, see Audra Mitchell, ‘Only human? A worldly approach to security’, Security Dialogue, 45:1 (2014), pp. 5–21; Youatt, Rafi, ‘Interspecies relations, international relations: Rethinking Anthropocentric politics’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43:1 (2014), pp. 207–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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14 The first nuclear blasts in 1945 have been debated by geologists as possibly marking the beginning of the Anthropocene, making it not just an ecological event but also a thermo-nuclear-geological one. See also Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, ‘Reclaiming nuclear politics? Nuclear realism, the H-Bomb, and globality’, Security Dialogue, 45:6 (2014), pp. 530–47; Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2000).
15 William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Chakrabarty, Dipesh, ‘The climate of history: Four theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35:2 (2009), pp. 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ticktin, Miriam Iris, ‘From human to planetary: Speculative futures of care’, Medicine, Anthropology, Theory, 6:3 (2019), pp. 133–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conway, Phillip, ‘On the way to planet politics: From disciplinary demise to cosmopolitical coordination’, International Relations, 34:2 (2020), pp. 157–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021).
16 Mark Salter (ed.), Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Milja Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020); David Blaney and Arlene Tickner, ‘Worlding, ontological politics, and the possibility of a decolonial IR’, Millennium, 45:3 (2017), pp. 293–311; Anna Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009).
17 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 296.
18 Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 6.
19 For a full development of interspecies internationality as I use it here, see Rafi Youatt, Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020); Youatt, ‘Interspecies relations, international relations’.
20 DuPlessis, Gitte, ‘When pathogens determine the territory: Toward a conception of nonhuman borders’, European Journal of International Relations, 24:2 (2018), pp. 391–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stefanie Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Matthew Leep, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War: Animals, Loss, and Spectral-Poetic Moments (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021); Rothe, Delf, ‘Jellyfish encounters: Science, technology, and security in the Anthropocene ocean’, Critical Studies on Security, 8:2 (2020), pp. 145–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Rosenberg, Justin, ‘International Relations in the prison of political science’, International Relations, 30:2 (2016), pp. 127–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kurki, Milja, ‘Multiplicity expanded: IR theories, multiplicity, and the potential of trans-disciplinary dialogue’, Globalizations, 17:3 (2020), pp. 560–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 I borrow this idea of sites and global forms from anthropologists Aiwha Ong and Stephen Collier, ‘Global assemblages, anthropological problems’, in Aiwha Ong and Stephen Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 3–21. Similar analysis is found in Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
23 René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1998), Part V, pp. 23–32. On the animal, see Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 47. Derrida's move from The Animal to ‘animot’ is a guiding idea here, blending the linguistic term with the biological being.
24 Mavhunga Clapperton Chakanetsa, ‘Vermin beings: On pestiferous animals and human game’, Social Text, 106 (2011), pp. 151–76.
25 Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel, ‘Le Pratique Sauvage: Race, place, and the human-animal divide’, in Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (eds), Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands (New York, NY: Verso), p. 72.
26 On contextuality in animal ethics, see Clare Palmer, Animal Ethics in Context (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden, ‘Civilization and the domination of the animal’, Millennium, 42:3 (2014), pp. 746–66; Matthew Leep, ‘Stray dogs and posthumanism, and cosmopolitan belongingness: Interspecies hospitality in times of war’, Millennium, 47:1 (2018), pp. 45–66; Mine Yildirim, ‘Between Care and Violence: Stray Dogs of Istanbul’ (PhD dissertation, New School for Social Research, New York, April 2021).
27 Jacob von Uexkull, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O'Neill (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
28 For this argument as applied to lab rats, see Taylor, Alex, ‘What lines, rats, and sheep can tell us’, Design Issues, 33:3 (2017), pp. 25–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 30).
29 Jake Kosek, ‘The natures of the beast: On the new uses of honeybees’, in Richard Peet, Paul Robbins, and Michael Watts (eds), Global Political Ecology (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), pp. 227–55.
30 Evans, Nicholas H. A., ‘Blaming the rat?: Accounting for plague in colonial India’, Medical Anthropology Theory, 5:3 (2018), pp. 15–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human, p. 54.
32 One issue, raised thoughtfully by a reviewer, is whether focusing on contexts of violence ultimately reproduces a problematic understanding of what IR is about. This point has some merit, especially as IR re-evaluates who and what it is for, to paraphrase Robert Cox, in a world seemingly beset by problems that ought to take a front seat compared to traditional geopolitics, whether climate change or pandemics. While scholarship obviously plays a role in reproducing and in changing the world, I do not think that focusing on understanding contexts of violence should therefore be set aside. If anything, it might be the opposite – contexts of violence require facing directly and critically, so that we better understand how they work, which is part of the aim of this article's analysis. A fuller rendering of human-rat relations would, however, explore additional contexts, as noted in later in the text.
33 Jonathan Burt, Rat (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 150.
34 Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2004), p. 138.
35 Evans, ‘Blaming the rat?’.
36 Ibid., p. 19.
37 Dawn Day Biehler, Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, Rats (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2013), p. 150.
38 Ibid.
39 Biehler, Pests in the City, p. 155.
40 Ibid., p. 162.
41 Ibid., p. 170.
42 Non-urban areas have been more successful in their eradication efforts than cities – Alberta, Canada notably claims to have no breeding rats whatsoever, with a patrolled rat control zone along its eastern border and newspaper headlines generated at the mere appearance of a rat.
43 Tyler Foggatt, ‘Rat Academy is in session’, New Yorker (20 August 2018), available at: {https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/20/rat-academy-is-in-session} accessed 13 May 2021.
44 Abinales, Patricio N., ‘Let them eat rats! The politics of rodent infestation in the postwar Philippines’, Philippine Studies, 60:1 (2012), pp. 67–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ed Yong, ‘New Zealand's war on rats could change the world’, The Atlantic (16 November 2017); on the ‘epistemic emergence of zoonosis’, see the Global War Against the Rat project, led by Christos Lynteris, available at: {https://wwrat.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/}.
45 Davis, Jeffrey Sasha, ‘Representing place: “Deserted isles” and the reproduction of Bikini Atoll’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95:3 (2005), pp. 607–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 616).
46 Mark Duffield, Development, Security, and Unending War (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007); Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: The Martial Face of Global Biopolitics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009).
47 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2012 [orig. pub. 1975]), p 195.
48 Branywyn Polykett, ‘Building out the rat: Animal intimacies and prophylactic settlement in 1920s S. Africa’, Engagement blog (2017), available at: {https://aesengagement.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/building-out-the-rat-animal-intimacies-and-prophylactic-ssettlement-in-1920s-south-africa/}.
49 Sullivan, Rats, p. 98.
50 Burt, Rat, p. 48.
51 Karen Varnham, ‘Invasive Rats on Tropical Islands: Their History, Ecology, Impacts, and Eradication’, RSPB Research Report No. 41 (Bedfordshire: RSPB Conservation Science Department).
52 Thanks to Mihnea Tanasescu for discussion on these points.
53 Quoted in: {https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48702762}.
54 David Towns and Keith Broome, ‘From small Maria to massive Campbell: Forty years of rat eradications from New Zealand islands’, New Zealand Journal of Zoology, 30:4 (2016), pp. 377–98 (pp. 377–8).
55 Simberloff, Daniel, ‘Confronting introduced species: A form of xenophobia’, Biological Invasions, 5 (2003), pp. 179–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subramaniam, Banu, ‘The aliens have landed! Reflections on the rhetoric of biological invasions’, Meridians, 2:1 (2001), pp. 26–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Youatt, Interspecies Politics, pp. 27–50.
56 IUCN Global Invasive Species Database, available at: {http://www.iucngisd.org/gisd/100_worst.php} accessed 13 April 2021.
57 Burt, Rat, p. 99; see also Birke, Lynda, ‘Who – or what – are the rats and mice in the laboratory?’, Society and Animals, 11:3 (2003)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
58 Evans, ‘Blaming the rat?’, p. 33.
59 Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_Oncomouse(tm) (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997).
60 Burt, Rat, p. 89.
61 Vinciane Despret, ‘Thinking like a rat’, Angelaki, 20:2 (2015), pp. 121–34.
62 Taylor, ‘What lines, rats, and sheep can tell us’, p. 31.
63 By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the rat gaze became more specifically aimed at genes. Here, though, the laboratory space and the ecological space are increasingly fused. The New Zealand Rat Eradication Programme is one of the many contexts pondering the use of gene-editing technologies (especially through CRISPR) either to create self-deleting organisms or to modify them in ways more suitable to contemporary planetary conditions. As COVID-19 vaccine testing has vividly shown, the lab and the world have overlapped in practice, with vaccines quickly tested in labs, but ultimately tested in real-world populations in real time. The emergence of ‘kill switches’ – self-destroying DNA – have been proposed for GMO crops and species that escapes their assigned confines, with the aim of both killing the organism and deleting its proprietary genetic code. Fusing with environmental arguments against pesticides, gene editing is increasingly pitched as a way to achieve ecologically desirable ends. Rats in the lab have been a standby for early trials of this, but human trials of CRISPR gene editing have recently begun to treat inherited blindness, and have potential applications to treating COVID-19. The rats on the remote islands are both lab animals, as test cases, and ecological reality, creating the conditions for a more biological politics in which biology, far from being the mechanical counterpoint to mutable human culture, itself is becoming the more mutable element.
64 Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams, ‘Escaping the laboratory: The rodent experiments of John B. Calhoun and their cultural influence’, Journal of Social History, 42:3 (2009), pp. 761–92.
65 These are themes I have taken up in more detail elsewhere. On the problematic anti-politics of sacredness and multinatural alternatives, see Rafi Youatt, ‘Ecologies of globalization: Mountain governance and multinatural planetary politics’, in Pereira and Saramago (eds), Nonhuman Nature and World Politics: Theory and Practice, pp. 73–90; on the dewilding politics and rewilding people and nature, see Rafi Youatt, Counting Species: Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 117–26, 133–7.
