POLITICS AND NATURE

What are the stakes of being uncritical about what counts as nature in theorizing the state of nature? Separating nature and culture has been a key philosophical move in modern political thought. The social contract is portrayed as somehow distinct and separate from the world and its “natural contract” (Serres Reference Serres1995, 36). The modern separation of nature as the realm of science, and politics as the realm of political science, has some profoundly problematic epistemological effects. Political science avers from the adjudication of scientific facts, whereas science avers from political facts (Latour Reference Latour2017). Latour (Reference Latour1993) sets out this paradox: “the representation of nonhuman belongs to science, but science is not allowed to appeal to politics; the representation of citizens belongs to politics, but politics is not allowed to have any relation to the nonhumans produced and mobilized by science and technology” (28). These paradoxes lead to a false separation between facts and politics: “even though we construct Nature [through science], Nature is as if we did not construct it… even though we do not construct Society [through political science], Society is as if we did construct it… Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct” (32). More specifically, the scientific observations about the possibility of sociality in anarchical systems (be they natural or anthropological) are always imbued with the analytical, disciplinary, and political prejudices of the observers, even when they are not portrayed as such. Within Hobbes’ historical context, although it was not his focus, his notion of nature and the state of nature was profoundly shaped by the context of coloniality and early American occupation (Arneil Reference Arneil1996; Jahn Reference Jahn2000; Moloney Reference Moloney2011). Among the consequences of that seventeenth-century view, Indigenous peoples and their knowledge are relegated to the realm of the anthropological and frequently counted as the objects of “scientific” data rather than political science (Latour Reference Latour1993; Shaw Reference Shaw2008; Simpson Reference Simpson2014), with some infrequent exceptions in IR theory (Bedford and Workman Reference Bedford and Workman1997; Beier Reference Beier2005; Reference Beier2009; Crawford Reference Crawford1994; Reference Crawford, Dunne and Reus-Smit2017; Epp Reference Epp, Crawford and Jarvis2001).

To be sure that we are not reproducing the conventional distinction between a natural science of anthropology and a political science of IR, I start by asserting that scientific descriptions of nature are also socially constructed (Latour and Woolgar Reference Latour and Woolgar1979). According to Latour, we must suspend the modern division between “nature” and “politics” as separate and mutually exclusive modes of knowing the world on both epistemological and ontological grounds. In Latour’s “symmetrical anthropology,” we want to avoid making an a priori distinction between the causal primacy of ideas and things, between the human and the nonhuman. To avoid the tyranny of sunk analytical costs in the false distinction between science and politics, Latour (Reference Latour1993) suggests a “symmetrical anthropology” that “uses the same terms to explain truth and errors; studies the production of humans and nonhumans simultaneously, and refrains from making any a priori declarations as to what distinguish Westerners from Others” (103). To avoid being caught up in modernist notions of facticity (and specific the boundaries of what phenomena might only be described by science and what only by politics), symmetrical anthropology focuses not on the “if” of truth claims, but the “how”: how is knowledge assembled, on what scientific and/or political authority, paying close attention to realms of knowledge that are pre-placed in one or the other binary. Rather than assuming that only humans have agency, the symmetrical anthropologist suspends judgment on what might have an effect on a particular controversy, and instead engages in a radically flat ontology and lets human and nonhuman agents demonstrate their capacity. This precisely does not mean that every agent has equal agency in every relation, but rather that we are rigorously open to possibility about what might have an effect.Footnote ⁴ And, finally, to destabilize the colonial inheritance of colonial empiricism that values Western knowledge over non-Western and Indigenous cultures, I again remain radically open to relations and connections. There is a common objection to this kind of flat methodology, closely related to the concerns of political scientists, that Latour anticipates:

Power has to be explained, it is not what does the explaining.

In this article, I operationalize this method by historicizing and contextualizing Rousseau’s stag hunt, and by making a direct comparison to a contemporaneous alternate non-Western hunting practice. Leveraging Latour’s thinking tools to foreground Indigenous practices may be a risky move. Todd (Reference Todd2016) powerfully argues that Latour and other social thinkers do little to “credit Indigenous thinkers for their millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations” (6–7). My goal in this article is, as Todd suggests, to “engage with Indigenous thought respectfully [to] give full credit to Indigenous laws, stories and epistemologies, [to] quote and cite Indigenous people rather than only citing anthropologists who studied Indigenous people 80 years ago” (Todd Reference Todd2016, 13–4).

As part of a larger goal to decolonize the discipline, this article contextualizes Rousseau’s stag hunt as a specific and historical practice that is the result of particular socio-political-economic structures and universalizes the Inuit hunt as an ontologically equally social, complex, and rational solution to the problem of cooperation under anarchy. This article is part of a larger project of decolonizing the discipline of IR (Capan Reference Capan2017; Jones Reference Jones2006; Rosenow Reference Rosenow2018; Sabaratnam Reference Sabaratnam2011; Tucker Reference Tucker2018), as a part of a scholarly project that supports Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015), and the general spirit of unsettling the “settler contract” (Pateman and Mills Reference Pateman and Mills2007). Beier (Reference Beier2005) and Crawford (Reference Crawford, Dunne and Reus-Smit2017), among others, have pointed to the systematic exclusion of Indigenous perspectives in IR theorization. We must widen the scope of academic inquiry to include subjugated knowledges and experiences for the sake of scientific accuracy and also on a politico-ethical level to unearth the connections between our knowledge production and political projects of settler colonialism and its normalization. This article enacts a double analytic move: contextualizing a “universal” example, and universalizing a “cultural” example. As Shilliam (Reference Shilliam and Shilliam2010) diagnoses, “the most signal effect has been the construction of a consensus that context-free knowledge is universally valid and thus thoroughly modern knowledge, as opposed to context-sensitive systems of thought that remain ‘traditional’… this distinction smuggles into the assessment of knowledge production a geo-political and temporal constituency, namely the modern West and the traditional non-West.” This article historicizes and contextualizes the “Western” canonical example of Rousseau’s stag hunt, and simultaneously politicizes and universalizes the Indigenous example of the Inuit walrus hunt, so that IR both acknowledges the colonial and historical roots of key concepts, but also demonstrates how that move constrains the theoretical descriptions for the possibility for cooperation in conditions of scarcity in anarchy.

By leveraging Inuit hunting practices as an alternate model for understanding the possibility of cooperation in conditions of extreme and dangerous scarcity, I reject the claim that to engage with indigenous knowledge and history is to flirt with “the (re)colonisation of indigeneity” (Chandler and Reid Reference Chandler and Reid2020). I do not aim to “become Indigenous” (Chandler and Reid Reference Chandler and Reid2019) or to render Indigenous politics simply as “spectacle” (Beier Reference Beier2005, 8). I am not seeking to replicate the worst impulses of anthropology to turn to “hunting and gathering societies for evidence to explain the development of social relations in human societies generally” (Bodenhorn Reference Bodenhorn1990, 56). I agree that: “time and again, the questions raised by anarchy point to anthropology for their resolution, particularly to the ethnographic record and the conclusions that might be drawn from its analysis. Yet the ethnographic record yields no easy resolution to these questions” (High Reference High2012, 93). Nor is this article an attempt to exoticize or to fetishize a single Indigenous culture as the necessary dialectic opposite of Western IR in order to achieve some kind of escape from the colonial-settler history of the field (Latour and Miranda Reference Latour, Miranda, Charbonnier, Salmon and Skafish2017). Rather, I am attempting to draw a precise comparison between the dominant story and a different, subaltern story. In the eighteenth century, two kinds of hunts were going on at the same time, with similar technology, in radically different environments. How does the theory of cooperation under anarchy change if we focus on the Arctic hunt rather than the European?

A REAL STAG HUNT

In the seminal Man, the State and War, Waltz relies on Rousseau’s example of the stag hunt to illustrate the structural determinants of anarchy.Footnote ⁵ The source of Rousseau’s brief story is in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality:

The general interest and the individual interest may be in harmony over the long term, but are in conflict in the short term. For individual hunters to rationally forsake their own immediate gain and to cooperate with the group, they must communicate with one another, trust in one another, and have an enforceable contract or accept an external binding arbiter. In the absence of an external arbiter, all hunters should rationally hunt rabbits. In the presumed scarcity of Rousseau’s stag hunt (limited deer) and Waltz’s international system (limited security), agents will choose short-term individual interest over an unreliable long-term general interest, or create structures that alter the risk/payoff structure. Even if realists have misunderstood the meaning of the stag hunt story in Rousseau’s own thinking, as Williams (Reference Williams1989) argues, the structural conditions of anarchy are understood and represented as being rationally derived but socially constructed in its interpretation of the natural world (the abundance of game, the behavior of stags and rabbits, the need for fencing, etc.). Sjoberg (Reference Sjoberg2017) demonstrates that Waltz’s theorization of anarchy lacks space for consideration of gender, which radically limits its analytical capacity: “an account of international anarchy that leaves out the gender hierarchies within that anarchy is to provide a less full and less useful characterization of the international arena than one that includes the role that gender plays in structuring social and political life” (337). Crawford (Reference Crawford, Dunne and Reus-Smit2017) points out that Rousseau’s stag hunt is among a pre-literate group (which matches the contemporaneous Inuit culture), and that the reproduction of Waltz’s self-help anarchy represents one political option for coping with the trust dilemma, not often supported by archeological evidence of Indigenous cooperation (108). Kropotkin (Reference Kropotkin2006) himself had also made this argument in relation to the characterization of both animals in natural systems and individuals in Inuit culture, for which he had only contemporaneous accounts (206). A zero-sum account of scarce natural resources is embedded within the mainstream account of the possibility for cooperation under anarchy (Skryms Reference Skryms2001).

Waltz (Reference Waltz2001) parses this assumption: “struggles for preference arise in competitive situations and force is introduced in the absence of an authority that can limit the means used by competitors” (35). Without rehearsing debates internal to (neo)realism, we can point to shared assumptions about the uncertainty about other’s perceptions and intentions over scarce resources and the universality of “human nature.” Waltz (Reference Waltz1979) argues again in Theory of International Politics that “international-political systems, like economic markets are individualistic in origin, spontaneously generated, and unintended. In both systems, structures are forced by the coaction of their units. Whether those units live, prosper, or die depends on their own efforts. Both systems are formed and maintained on a principle of self-help that applies to the units” (91). Unit survival in scarcity can only be secured through the mechanism of self-help, based on the assumption that scarce resources are zero-sum.

In Rousseau’s fictional forest, there is an assumption of abundance: there are stags and rabbits, the forest itself is relatively benign, and the societal bounds allow for defection. While the stag is undoubtedly a better benefit, there is an assumption in the stag hunt that the success of the group hunt is not existential, that other prey is available, and that defection from the group will not lead to starvation for the rest. Rousseau robs the actual hunt of its social and ecological context in order to situate the purportedly universal logics of anarchy and the social contract in a pre-literate group. Rousseau’s forest also has no women and no gendered division of labor, which purports to make the example more universal but in fact erases the example’s cultural and social specificity. However, when we reverse those ecological-material conditions (the forest is not benign, the prey is dangerous to the hunters, and spoiling the hunt for one causes the death of all, then defection would be understood as insane rather than rational), the payoff structure of cooperation in a condition of anarchy becomes radically different. To exaggerate this difference, I will compare it to an Inuit walrus hunt in the Arctic in a later section.

This section makes a different analytical move by providing the specific context for the eighteenth-century stag hunt, when Rousseau was writing Discourse (1754).Footnote ⁶ Hunting in the mid-eighteenth century was profoundly implicated in feudal political and legal dynamics and the socioeconomic and environmental conditions this created (Thompson Reference Thompson1975). Not everyone could hunt. Over the course of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, “the lower nobility, clergy and urban elites were left with only minor hunting rights. With few exceptions, citizens, farmers, and the rest of society were completely excluded” (Knoll Reference Knoll2004, 16). The Enlightenment fashion for high status hunting was large-scale “coursing,” large packs of mounted hunters and dogs chasing high status prey, requiring huge tracts of protected land (even the fencing itself was a resource drain), packs of trained dogs, and lots of labor (beaters). While hunting was profitable for minor nobility, for sovereigns hunting was a net economic loss, but politically crucial in terms of prestige and favor. “Hunting was a means for sovereigns of being seen everywhere in their domain and ‘displaying all their power all over by showing their splendor and magnificence’” (Knoll Reference Knoll2004, 29). Deer directly competed with domesticated animals for feed. Since male peasants were required to perform hunting service that took them away from their own farming, to host and feed hunting parties, to drive horse teams or to beat, hunting was costly for rulers and ruled alike. Deer themselves were understood to be high status prey (Knoll Reference Knoll2004, 18). The participants of the eighteenth-century European stag hunt are thus either nobility engaged in a formalized hunt and peasants doing service, or they were poachers. Disrupting the stag hunt to catch a rabbit would have had political stakes. For peasants or nobles equally, defection from the group would incur sharp penalties if it were a formal hunt. If it were poaching, it is worse. Schulte (Reference Schulte1994) describes the meaning: “whatever the motive—whether hunger or crop protection—it was classified as a political crime. Hunting was a privilege of the aristocracy and the prince, and the peasants who hunted were calling this privilege in question, especially if they went out after noble, aristocratic ‘big game’” (122). Penalties could vary from forced labor “and persistent offenders could be banished from the country” (Schulte Reference Schulte1994, 122). Either the peasants on hunting service were engaging in sly resistance to the courtly hunting privileges by catching the rabbit for themselves and disrupting the sovereign’s kill, or they were engaged in a high-stakes political crime that might lead to banishment.Footnote ⁷ When contextualized, this stag hunt is not simply about cooperation or defection with rational peers in a benign natural environment, but about the maintenance of, or resistance, to the sovereign political order done exclusively by males. The point is neither that Rousseau is a poor anthropologist and Waltz a poor historian, nor that we should develop a more developed theory of the forest (Kohn Reference Kohn2013), but rather to point out that when this metaphor is repopulated and recontextualized, it teaches the opposite lesson than Waltz and Rousseau purport.

Waltz argues that states in the international state system are like hunters in the forest, and a similar logic of anarchy obtains. The different rational strategies of cooperation with the group or defection for individual interest depend also on the perception of the rational calculation of the other actors: “If harmony is to exist in anarchy, not only must I be perfectly rational but I must be able to assume that everyone else is too” (Waltz Reference Waltz2001, 169). Anarchy is constructed through social interaction. Without doing too much violence to the rich array of realist thought on anarchy, the stag hunt remains a dominant metaphor that illustrates some core assumptions about how sociality is constructed in relation to perceptions of the natural world and the scarcity of resources within it. Of course, the connection between identity, interest, and perception has been the primary battleground between neorealists and constructivists like Wendt (Reference Wendt1992), who argues that “anarchy is what states make of it.”

THE WALRUS (AIVIQ) HUNT

Like Jahn (Reference Jahn2000), Beier (Reference Beier2005), Shaw (Reference Shaw2008), Crawford (Reference Crawford, Dunne and Reus-Smit2017), and other scholars taking the decolonization of the discipline seriously, this project attempts to take different non-sovereigntist ways of organizing political life seriously without imposing a modernist hierarchal valuation of traditional/civilized, culture/politics, Indigenous/European, anthropological/political science, and so forth. My approach differs from Snyder (Reference Snyder2002), who contributes to this debate with anthropological generalizations about material scarcity, culture, and conflict, because I am focused on a precise set of cultural practices that have developed over hundreds of years to cope with a specific set of environmental conditions of scarcity. It differs from Donnelly, although I agree with the conclusion that “foragers demonstrate, empirically, that ‘the effects of anarchy,’ where they exist, are not effects of anarchy. Standard arguments that ‘self-help is necessarily the principle of action in an anarchic order’ and that ‘no amount of cooperation can eliminate the dominating logic of security competition’ are not even close to true” (Donnelly Reference Donnelly2012, 617). Because Donnelly then wants to develop a richer sense of international structure, with little consideration of the relation between materialist and cultural conditions that determine the character of anarchy, and little actual empirical consideration of the socio-material conditions forager societies: the forager societies are the prompt for critique, but then do not figure in the actual analysis. Similarly, one could admit that Inuit society is outside of liberal, individualistic “anarchy.” Alvard and Nolin (Reference Alvard and Nolin2002), on the other hand, use anthropological data from a cooperative whale hunt in Indonesia to disrupt mainstream game-theoretical models of “prisoner’s dilemma”. However, anthropology is not a rump science, and to decolonize the discipline productively, we need to take seriously the actually existing historical examples of different ways of organizing social relations that are not philosophically indebted to eighteenth-century Europe and grant non-Western societies with equal potential for generating insights and analysis.

First, some empirical facts to distinguish the Arctic scene from the European forest. The Arctic is a harsh environment with extremely cold temperatures; permafrost prevents agriculture; there is no timber above the tree line. Food and resources are not plentiful in the same way. The cold can kill: winter temperatures easily reach −40°C, more with windchill. The ocean freezes and the ice itself can be dangerous. Indigenous traditional knowledge built up over hundreds of years of survival provides successful strategies for thriving in the Arctic, which is relayed through an oral tradition. To avoid privileging the Western-mediated knowledge about Inuit life-worlds, cultures, and practices, this section treats Western anthropological representations as equally scientific as the oral tradition of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangi (IQ: an Inuit way of reflecting traditional knowledge, translated from “that which Inuit have always known to be true”) (Karetak and Tester Reference Karetak, Tester, Karetak, Tester and Tagalik2017).Footnote ⁸ One of the methodological orientations between the production of IQ with the scarcity of Arctic life-worlds: McGrath (Reference McGrath2018) identifies as pittianrniq, an ethics of accuracy “The root pittiaq- is both to do right and to do precisely, or to do well, which comes from a survival ethic” (364–5). This survival ethic leads to the construction of cultural scaffolds that reinforce the value of honesty and the danger of dishonesty (which speaks directly to Waltz’s concern about deception).

Before the 1950s, Inuit camps were small; survival depended on social harmony, and frequently depended on hunting (walrus and other sea mammals). The prey: a walrus is more than 3.6-M long and can weigh 1,000 kg. “Prior to the modern economic era (about the early 1900s), walrus hunting supplied 60%–80% of all subsistence food consumed in many communities in the Bering Strait region” (Krupnik and Ray Reference Krupnik and Ray2007, 2947), and provided similar sustenance across Foxe Basin in the Eastern Arctic.Footnote ⁹ There is no rabbit on the floe edge—at best the parallel might be a ringed seal (55 kg). Like the stag, the walrus requires multiple hunters, coordination, and strategy. While male walruses can be hunted alone or in pairs along shoreline haul-outs in relatively predictable places across the season, Inuit hunters prefer hunting females and calves who rest on sea ice floes because of their thinner skin and less-scarred tusks (Hill Reference Hill, Braje and Rick2011, 52). The female walrus, asleep on an ice floe, can best be caught by umiat (larger boats, rather than the typical single-person kayak), which require a crew of 6–8 men (Ellanna Reference Ellanna1988; Hill Reference Hill, Braje and Rick2011, 50), with attendant women at the village (because of traditional division of labor). The gendered division of labor in Inuit culture is rigid but does not follow Western models: butchering, sewing, and preparing both home and meals are understood to be hunting activities.

The walrus itself represents an incredible bountyFootnote ¹⁰: meat for humans and sled dogs, guts for lines for harpoon and sewing, bones for harpoons, houses, and tools, hide for clothing and housing, and tusks for carving (Desjardin Reference Desjardin2020). The walrus is large, dangerous, and aggressive and might kill multiple hunters, even after it is successfully harpooned (Lasaloosie Ishulutuq in Souders Reference Souders2019, 8).

Inuit cosmology does not identify a strong division between human and animals: “treating everything with respect (as though it were a living thing) was key. People, land, rocks, water, wildlife, weather and the environment were all thought of in this way” (Kalluak Reference Kalluak, Karetak, Tester and Tagalik2017, 43). The social relationship between the Inuit and their prey should be taken into account for a better understanding of their interpretation of the radical scarcity of the Arctic. “Only by hunting and eating country food can Inuit retain their strength. Thus, they depend completely on the animals they kill. The animals are thought to be aware of this and to give themselves up willingly to be killed by the hunter… The killing of game is therefore not considered to be an act of violence by a human being towards an animal, but a meaningful act in which hunter and animal are connected as partners” (Laugrand and Oosten Reference Laugrand and Oosten2015, 38). In Inuit cosmology, the walruses (and all marine mammals) have agency, and choose to be killed, and so adherence to rituals and taboos are markers of respect for the walrus’ choice. “All animals are like that. They don’t like going to lazy, selfish people whose only concern is to survive alone. An animal will refuse to go to a person who is only concerned about his own survival” (Bennett and Rowley Reference Bennett and Rowley2014, 45). The cosmological interpretation of material conditions of the hunt lead to very different social norms about cooperation and conflict—not simply cooperation with other humans, but cooperation with the animals themselves (Gotfredson, Appelt, and Hastrup Reference Gotfredson, Appelt and Hastrup2018).

The walrus hunt inverts the environmental and contextual factors of the stag hunt, and thus inverts what is rational about cooperation in conditions of anarchy. There is no tension between the individual and the general interest: not only would it be dangerous for the individual hunter to defect from the group disrupting the larger walrus hunt and capturing the ringed seal, but there is every possibility that the whole group might die from starvation or angry walruses. I am not making a deterministic argument that “Inuit societal forms, values, and practices [are] cultural responses to the harsh arctic environment” which leads to “scholars [lauding] the communitarian values associated with food sharing practices while ignoring the less egalitarian aspects of the institution” (Stern Reference Stern, Stern and Stevenson2006, 257), but I am identifying some correlations.

SCARCITY CULTURE AND CONFLICT AVOIDANCE

Traditional Inuit knowledge promulgates norms and wisdom that focus on survival, social harmony, and the reduction of conflict. Individuals and families are not able to survive alone, and so defection from the group was considered extremely serious and dangerous. “Failure to abide by the maligarjuat [law], could have serious consequences. A person might be ostracized by the community because they become known as someone not to be trusted. Elders would use [restorative justice] in attempts to restore the person, but in extreme cases, individuals might be banished from a camp—likely the equivalent of a death sentence” (Karetak and Tester Reference Karetak, Tester, Karetak, Tester and Tagalik2017, 5). Survival is understood as a group task and responsibility. Children are raised to think of the general interest before their own: “Share your resources anytime you have the upper hand. Success does not remain in one place at all time” (Kalluak Reference Kalluak, Karetak, Tester and Tagalik2017, 42). Food from the hunt was always shared, and so to defect from the group to eat alone would also violate a fundamental Inuit aglirnaqut (taboo) (Attangalaaq Reference Attangalaaq, Karetak, Tester and Tagalik2017, 109). Hoebel (Reference Hoebel1954) describes some postulates of Inuit law: “Life is hard and the margin of safety small. Unproductive members of society cannot be supported. All natural resources are free or common goods. The self must find its realization through action. The individual must be left free to act with a minimum of formal direction from others. For the safety of the person and the local group, individual behavior must be predictable” (69–70), which again speaks to a different solution to Waltz’s concern about unpredictable behavior.

The central value associated with Inuit hunting is respect. “Walrus hunting required extensive organization to ensure that the kill was cakarpeknaki, which is to say respectful to the animals and without waste” (Miller and Miller Reference Miller and Miller2014, 58). And, a further cultural prohibition for defection from the group hunt is the strict separation of walrus meat from other foodstuffs, including caribou, seals, or salmon (Miller and Miller Reference Miller and Miller2014, 62–3). This aglirnaqut means that a defecting hunter could not bring the seal back to camp. In short, the structural cultural logic of the stag hunt is different in the walrus hunt. To defect from the general walrus hunt would be dangerous for the group, if not unthinkable, and the defector would be understood to be mad or at the very least a grave danger to the other members of the group. The culture embodies a radically different social answer to the question of scarcity. This is not to make Wendt (Reference Wendt1992) or Snyder’s (Reference Snyder2002) versions of a materialist argument that the conditions of scarcity exclusively determine the social conditions of anarchy. Rather this demonstrates that even in conditions of radical scarcity, other anarchies are available.

Group cohesion, conflict avoidance, and sharing are core Inuit values. “Unhappiness, discontent and irritation were kept to oneself or formulated as cheerful jokes, partly because unhappy people were considered dangerous. It was thought that such individuals might resort to aggression in the attempt to change their situation or overcome their dissatisfaction or unhappiness” (Briggs Reference Briggs, Schweitzer, Biesele and Hitchcock2000, 11). The effect of this desire for social cohesion also colors other kinds of calculation: “Alliances could be dangerous too, creating factions and escalating conflict by spreading it more widely, so people did not ask one another for support when they were at odds” (Briggs Reference Briggs, Schweitzer, Biesele and Hitchcock2000, 11).Footnote ¹¹ Defection from the group—rather than being understood as a rational strategy that did not endanger the whole group (as in Rousseau’s stag hunt) could result in chiding, joking, gossiping, banishment, or death. “… Inuit justice was used solely to maintain the harmony and stability of the group. Anyone who became too quarrelsome or lacked self-control, or perhaps robbed another man’s cache, became a threat to the community as a whole. When that happened, one person or more, either self-appointed or designated by the group, would dispose of the threat” (Bennett and Rowley Reference Bennett and Rowley2014, 105). Scarcity, in this context, does not lead to individualistic self-help, but rather communal conflict avoidance through social control or in extremis the killing of the selfish.

This is emphatically not to make the argument that Inuit, even the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Inuit, are “natural” or naturally peaceful in the way that Rousseau or Hobbes might have thought. Inuit have a rich philosophy and complex society that has enabled them to thrive in extreme conditions (and survive historical and on-going colonization). My argument here is that the nonhuman and social environment of the stag hunt has been taken for granted in previous analyses. The walrus hunt highlights the effect of nature, the environment, and social and material context by radically changing the context for cooperation and defection, as we can demonstrate with the Inuit cultural practices that emerged to condition a conflict-avoidant rationality. By placing a different conception of how social harmony is maintained,Footnote ¹² a different cultural rationality emerges. Within a rubric of traditional knowledge that focused on survival and social harmony, a cosmology that granted agency and respect to human and nonhuman actants equally, and a harsh environment that itself was dangerous, the rational actor is not faced with a clear choice about short-term individual interest or long-term general welfare. The sociocultural-material context of anarchy is radically different.

CONSTRUCTIVISM AND THE NONHUMAN

In the strongest constructivist critique, Wendt (Reference Wendt1992) contends that Waltz’s argument about the self-help nature of anarchy is incorrect.

Identity and interests are constructed by states through their interactions and the meaning that they attribute to selves and others (Wendt Reference Wendt1987). In this phase, Wendt remains staunchly anthropocentric,Footnote ¹³ focusing on questions of identity and identity-formation through the lens of rationality and intentionality. Constructivism, then, accounts for the internal dynamics of the formation of anarchy, but defers any materialist explanation of the contexts in which those social dynamics occur. Wendt (Reference Wendt1999) characterizes a strong version of “the materialist hypothesis,” which he argues “must be that material forces as such—what might be called ‘brute’ material forces—drive social norms” (24). Because material forces are only ever granted social meaning through ideas, it is “ideas all the way down” (Wendt Reference Wendt1999, 135). The question of scarcity, in this logic, is also socially-constructed, whatever the brute facts of the material. Latour challenges this view in his descriptions of how ideas come to become facts, which he demonstrates is an equally material and social process (Latour and Woolgar Reference Latour and Woolgar1979). Brute material forces are always represented in some scientific and political way, to be sure, but those representations are also material (papers, observations, articles, schools, and tenured professors) and come to be materialized and concretized (Callon and Latour Reference Callon, Latour, Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel1981). When those ideas have become themselves material, they come to have effects that cannot be reduced to the ideas that were the catalyst for the relation.

In Wendt’s early work, there is no substantive consideration of the agency or sovereignty of nonhumans, except for a thought experiment an alien encounter. Wendt (Reference Wendt1992) asks a rhetorical question: “Would we assume, a priori, that we were about to be attacked if we are ever contacted by members of an alien civilization? I think not. We would be highly alert, of course, but whether we placed our military forces on alert or launched an attack would depend on how we interpreted the import of their first gesture for our security—if only to avoid making an immediate enemy out of what may be a dangerous adversary” (405).Footnote ¹⁴ The encounter between human and nonhuman would definitely be anarchical, but, he argues, not inherently conflictual. Animals and the climate cannot make legal covenants, but nonetheless humans are in scientific-political relation to them. The sovereign relation has historically been exercised over the nonhuman or less-than-human—land and territory (Coulthard Reference Coulthard2014; Crawford Reference Crawford, Dunne and Reus-Smit2017, 110), animals (Wadiwel Reference Wadiwel2009), and in the colonial sense of domination over Indigenous peoples (Moreton-Robinson Reference Moreton-Robinson2015). While Wendt and Duvall (Reference Wendt and Duvall2008) conclude that the invalidation of knowledge about UFOs represents a political move to circumscribe challenges to the presumed capacity of the sovereign state, we might push them to differentiate between the agential capacity of aliens, animals, and climate change. The boundaries of knowledge production about animals and human nature are always blurry. Indeed, one might read those Inuit cultural precepts about hunting customs described above as covenants with animals, the land, and the climate. Climate change is a force that cannot be predicted, may not be susceptible to influence, and is a radically powerful, nonhuman force that might destroy human civilization if we are not able to change its current path (Connolly Reference Connolly2017), but we are in scientific-political relation to ourselves and to the climate. The data about climate change, ecological and geological disruption due to resource extraction and the carbon cycle, the impact of urbanization and industrialized agriculture, and the active genetic manipulation of living things demonstrate that nature is not passive. Climate acts on us, climate is more powerful than us individually or collectively, climate is in relation to us, but in theorizing that relationality, many theorists do not accord it rationality, calculation, subjectivity, or interests. Similarly, the ocean temperature and sea levels have radical impacts on the possibility of human life and contemporary forms of capitalism and urbanism. While we accord the climate patterns of reaction (to carbon and other greenhouse gases), we do not impute cognition, subjectivity, or sociality. If we ask science if there is evidence of agency and sociality in nonhuman spheres, there is.Footnote ¹⁵ And, in a parallel to Wendt and Duvall’s (Reference Wendt and Duvall2008) critique, Latour (Reference Latour2017; Reference Latour2018) points out that the politicization of scientific knowledge production about climate change has the effect of reinforcing the (in)capacity of sovereignty to cope with this challenge. But the character of anarchical relations is profoundly conditioned by these climatic changes: anarchy is what nature makes of it. Thus, our natural conditions of scarcity or vulnerability are conditioned by these nonhuman actors that in our current mode of theorizing are reduced to disentangled externalities. I will return to this crucial assumption below, because an important consequence of my thesis is that relations under anarchy are also constructed socially within an agential natural world.

TAKING THE NONHUMAN SERIOUSLY

Latour’s (Reference Latour1993; Reference Latour2017) diagnosis of modernism is undeniably demonstrated in the age of the Anthropocene: it is impossible and dangerous to conceptually separate nature from culture, the natural from the human. How can we take these nonhuman actors like animals, the climate, and the nature seriously in our analysis of anarchy? Wendt and Duvall have opened the analytical door to thinking about other, nonhuman forms of agency to illustrate the limits of sovereignty and the culture of anarchy. While their point is about the ontological status of the question of knowledge about UFOs and alien civilizations, the interrogation of the relationship between the limits of scientific knowledge as it relates to the project of sovereign statehood is precisely germane to this argument. What questions are askable by politics is a function of what questions are answerable by science (Latour Reference Latour1993). While all material forces are represented in discourse, the material is not reducible to the social and the social is always already also material. The instantiation of states, institutions, boundaries, and so forth, what makes a state different from a civilization or a jazz band is precisely its material accretion (Callon and Latour Reference Callon, Latour, Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel1981).

Theories of anarchy and sociality are often constructed in relation to “nature,” but do not take nature seriously (Corry Reference Corry, Eroukhmanoff and Harker2017; Goodwin Reference Goodwin2010). Hobbes justifies his grounding of the Leviathan by describing the State of Nature in philosophical terms, but also in reference to IR (Christov Reference Christov2017). First, Hobbes (Reference Hobbes1962) references how this state of war exists in the world: “It may peradventure be thought that there was never such a time nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was ever generally so, over all the world: but there are many places where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America… have no government at all, and live at this day in that brutish manner” (101; Shaw Reference Shaw2008). Mills (Reference Mills1997) points out that Indigenous people, “a nonwhite people, indeed the very nonwhite people upon whose land his fellow Europeans were then encroaching, is [Hobbes’] only real-life example of people in a state of nature” (65). He continues: “there is a tacit racial logic in the text: the literal state of nature is reserved for nonwhites; for whites the state of nature is hypothetical” (Mills Reference Mills1997, 65–6; cf. Henderson Reference Henderson2013). Indigenous peoples are understood in both Hobbes and Rousseau to be of nature, living in harmony with nature according to natural law (in sharp contradistinction to political society) (Inayatullah and Blaney Reference Inayatullah and Blaney2004). Placing the State of Nature in a state of nature has the effect of universalizing the cultural rationality of their historical context within a proto-scientific anthropology (Jahn Reference Jahn2000).

Latour (Reference Latour1993) writes “Hobbes creates the naked calculating citizen, whose rights are limited to possessing and to being represented by the artificial construction of the Sovereign. He also creates the language according to which Power equals Knowledge, an equation at that is at the root of the entire modern Realpolitik” (26). However, that set of individual rational calculations by multiple citizens is reflected by the single and singular representative voice of the Sovereign. The process of representation, of the composition of the sovereign voice, is of course social: “the Leviathan is made up only of citizens, calculations, agreements or disputes. In short, it is made up of nothing but social relations” (Latour Reference Latour1993, 28). While Hobbes’ state of war appears to have emptied out these social relations in his appeal to the State of Nature, and the misapprehended state of Indigenous peoples, Latour (Reference Latour1993) demonstrates that, in fact, the Leviathan is social all the way down. But Latour does not stop with that point. Scientific facts about nature, indeed about all nonhuman elements, are representable only through scientific discourse (29). These discourses function to separate out the natural and the social, while allowing both to be mobilized for the stabilization of the other. The social realm of the Leviathan is justified with relation to nature and the State of Nature; but the Leviathan transcends any particular natural fact or the actual state of nature. What Latour misses in his analysis of Hobbes, the State of Nature, and sovereignty is precisely the international character of sovereignty. Hobbes (Reference Hobbes1962) justifies the existence of the State of Nature by pointing to inter-state relations: “yet in all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms, and continual spies upon their neighbours, which is a posture of war” (101). It is not just sovereignty, then, that is related to nature and Indigenous peoples. Anarchy is placed in nature, among (abstracted) Indigenous peoples, before, opposed to, or elsewhere from society; and anarchical IR opposed to ordered society.

In short, Latour arrives at the same conclusion as Wendt from an entirely different direction. IR and anarchy in nature are both constructed by social relations all the way down. What Latour adds to our constructivist framing of the political theory of anarchy is the material and the colonial. Methodologically, he argues that, if we are to reject the false dichotomy between scientific and political facts, and the inherent naturalization of non-Western knowledge, then we must be utterly agnostic as to what kind of actor—human or nonhuman, Western, or non-Western—will have an impact on a particular controversy or assemblage. And, there is a relatively obvious argument about the Eurocentrism of the discipline, that relegates Indigenous and non-Western ways of knowing to the realm of culture (Hobson Reference Hobson2012; Reference Hobson2022).

To set out the more controversial part of this method: there is both a weak contextual, and a strong argument about the nature of the agency of nonhuman actors here. The nonhuman as context argument is easily demonstrable (and common ground for realists, liberals, and Marxists alike): nonhuman factors like resource distribution, ecological conditions, and environmental factors determine the systemic conditions of scarcity between states which determine payoff structures that will predispose different logics of anarchy. Climate change will affect sea levels, which will create scarcity problems that may force sovereign states to cooperate and collaborate in new ways to solve. In Facing Gaia, Latour (Reference Latour2017) argues that the contemporary sovereign state system is fundamentally unable to politically or scientifically manage climate change, which is why he proposes a new nomos of the earth: Gaia. If New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, and London all disappear because of rising sea levels, states will be unable to behave in anarchy as they do now. And, as Connolly (Reference Connolly2017) argues, from a different avenue, these anthropogenic changes will require innovative, imaginative, and novel political structures that exceed our current imagination.

The stronger argument is that nonhuman actors have agency, even though they lack consciousness, rationality, or intentionality. Latour (Reference Latour2005) defines agency as that which has an effect. He polemically claims: “one cannot call oneself a social scientist and pursue only some links- the moral, legal, and symbolic ones—and stop as soon as there is some physical relation interspersed in between the others. That would render any enquiry impossible” (78). Let us also put it polemically: the sea does not perceive the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, COP21, the Paris Agreement, or the efforts of states to reduce greenhouse gas emission, but that is not the same as saying that the sea does not react to the actions done in relation to or because of those regimes. It does react to external stimuli and may rise and destroy large swaths of human civilization. It freezes and melts in reaction to climatic conditions like global warming or the little ice age brought on by the decimation of American Indigenous peoples after contact (Davis and Todd Reference Davis and Todd2017). We only ever learn about the prospects for action (or reaction) by nonhuman entities like the sea, through the representation of the sea by scientists and other stakeholders. Politics is at the heart of this process of (re)presentation of entities, interests, and actions. At the moment, in discussion about climate change, COP21, and other international actions, there is a fundamental disagreement about the facts of the problem (Latour Reference Latour2017). My argument here is slightly different from Latour (Reference Latour2018), Grove (Reference Grove2019), and Burke et al.’s (Reference Burke, Fishel, Mitchell, Dalby and Levine2016) “Planet Politics” manifesto, because I argue the coming resource scarcity need not lead to radical pessimism. What I am arguing is that regardless of how IR scholars theorize the prospects of anarchy in the Anthropocene, anthropogenic changes radically structure the conditions of global political (and economic and social) life. It is empirically wrong and dangerously naïve to presume that nature, the environment, and our material conditions derive their space of action by our understanding or theorization of them. If it has an effect, Latour (Reference Latour2005, 73) says, it acts, so let us not prejudge what might have an effect. If we restrict our conception of agency to rational, utility-maximizing calculating humans that socially construct anarchical relations, and that it is “ideas all the way down,” then we might miss the capacity of the Anthropocene to recondition anarchy in radically new ways. However, Anthropocene anarchy will not necessarily be more cooperative or conflictual than modernist anarchy, as I can demonstrate below.