Toward an Interspecies Politics

I was in the midst of reading Interspecies Politics when the Trump administration, in one of its closing moves, finalized a rule that removed most gray wolves from the federal endangered species list. Shortly after this rule took effect, hunters killed 216 wolves in Wisconsin. The hunt, which occurred over a span of three days and coincided with mating season, killed roughly 20 percent of the state’s estimated wolf population. In this context, Rafi Youatt’s question, “do we have the political imagination to see sovereign communities—wolf packs—existing on a different temporal scale from ours?” arrived with poignant insistence (p. 93). Interrogating an International Relations literature that “does not involve wolf packs…as political collectives worthy of the name” felt especially pressing (p. 4). Interspecies Politics is about much more than wolves. But these wolves remind us, more broadly, that interspecies relations are not abstract or opaque ethical matters; rather, they involve concrete political experiences of borders, sovereignty, power, and control.

As the title suggests, Interspecies Politics presents a wider definition of politics and a more expansive approach to the boundaries of the political. It seeks to reveal how nonhuman actors and agents participate in and generate forms of global political life. It is a cutting-edge work of international political theory that skillfully weaves together meaningful theoretical insights with careful empirical observations. Offering a compelling political view of international relations as “already interspecies relations,” it delivers on its central ambition of showing how sovereignty, borders, power, and security—the very core of global politics—can be understood in terms of multispecies practices (p. 11). An astute challenge to the assumption that “species should be a central barrier to who can be part of global politics,” Interspecies Politics considers—in distinctly political terms—the interspecies complexity of global relations (p. 4). Appearing within a context of increasing scholarly attention to nonhuman aspects of political life, Youatt’s book provides timely and urgent theoretical innovations rooted in concrete forms of interspecies interaction.

Far from presenting an overly abstract view of interspecies political life, Youatt attentively looks to “particular instances and contexts where species encounter one another and generate shared meanings, and gaps in meaning, that are the ‘ether’ of interspecies politics” (p. 17). It is in specific contexts—wolves, moose, viruses, and scientists on Isle Royale or relations between human and hutias (“banana rats”) in the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, for example—where empirics and theoretical claims intertwine and take shape, yielding both subtle and generalizable observations about global political life. The complexities of Youatt’s contention that politics involve multispecies interactions are nicely fleshed out through a sophisticated blend of theoretical and empirical chapters structured in three parts.

Part I focuses on “ecologically entangled states” and explores two issues of critical importance to IR scholars: security and borders. Regarding the former, Youatt theorizes national security in terms of interspecies security, demonstrating how biopolitical security logics at Guantánamo play out in concrete material and symbolic practices involving the Desmarest’s hutia—a large rodent endemic to Cuba. Focusing on material and discursive practices involving human-hutia relations, Youatt traces the material management of, and metaphorical ideas about, hutias—often called “banana rats”—in relation to detainees in Guantánamo. These traces serve to expose the operation of security in terms of interspecies practices, which create (rearrangeable) hierarchies of life within a space of torture, detention, and national security. From within (and structured by) these material and discursive hierarchies, are shifting meanings of humanity, animality, and precarious life. The production of security, in this sense, involves politically mixing and rearranging the value and meaning of certain human and nonhuman lives, shaping possibilities of killable, grievable, and securable life in the process. An implication of this process, Youatt argues, is that “we face not dehumanization but the very ecological embeddedness of biopolitical security. This is interspecies security in the politics of life” (p. 69). Youatt’s arguments constitute a nuanced, textured account of security that entangles human and nonhuman actors in its production. Forms of national and international security—so central to how we understand the makeup of global politics—are creatively reimagined in Youatt’s account, with interspecies security practices woven into its generative fabric.

In a similar vein, Youatt approaches borders in terms of bordering practices, which involve both interspecies and intraspecies forms of cooperation, conflict, and violence. The U.S.-Mexico border, for example, is much more than a physical barrier between two states. It is a set of practices and ideas. It can be understood in terms of mobility regimes consisting of material and discursive practices structuring the movement of human and nonhuman life. And the border is far from static. It moves through forms of surveillance, identity cards, and other material practices. In the borderlands, human and nonhuman movements are mapped far from the mapped line dividing the two countries. The border is therefore a network of multispecies activity involving various checkpoints and border patrol agents, often far away from the border line yet controlling multispecies movements within the borderlands. And the border, as Youatt puts it, is “constitutively interspecific” (p. 47). It is generated through interspecies practices involving multiple lifeforms. Such a claim opens up intriguing political questions about who or what can border. Reaching beyond the border and bordering practices as fundamentally human, Youatt considers how nonhuman species “make their own borders and engage with the US-Mexico border in their own ways” (p. 48). Ocelots, an endangered species in Texas, establish themselves on particular territories and engage in bordering practices involving thorn brush habitats. Efforts in the borderlands to create tunnels and corridors for ocelots are one layer of interspecies entanglement. By attending to these kinds of species interactions within the borderlands, Youatt cultivates both a clearer and more expansive view of the border, its multispecies emergence, and its mobility effects. With this analytical precision and shift in perception comes a difficult hope for a concrete and “positively articulated socioecology of migration and movement” in which “claims about ecosystem functionality” are also “claims about justice” (p. 49).

This focus on interspecies practices produces interesting insights into other core IR concepts such as sovereignty and collective personhood, which make up Part II of the book. Attention to the politics of wolves and human-wolf relations on Isle Royale in Michigan, for example, reveals how “state sovereignty has always been an interspecies formation presumed to be under its authority and material appropriation and symbolic elements of wolf life used in constituting sovereignty itself” (p. 94). Engaging philosopher Jacques Derrida’s work to assess American sovereignty over Isle Royale and its predator-prey relations, Youatt considers the shifting meanings of sovereignty and animality, and how these “are related in concrete historical practices” (p. 75). By thinking carefully about the political formation of human and wild animal sovereignty—such as wolf sovereignty—we might more fully consider who participates in the making of sovereignty. Questions about sovereignty not only involve humans as the central moral agents and arbiters; reflection on the interspecies emergence and effects of sovereignty demands rethinking what collective existence means (or could mean) in non-anthropocentric terms. This chapter therefore nicely demonstrates different modes and forms of animal, interspecies, and intraspecies sovereignty on Isle Royale. It also grounds abstract ideas of sovereignty in concrete experiences and communities, productively complicating tendencies to theorize sovereignty in frameworks revolving around questions of human intervention/non-intervention. Rather than settling on a simple and cohesive vision of interspecies sovereignty, Youatt cracks opens the messy underpinnings of sovereign practices in order to reveal paths for imagining other formations of sovereignty—on different time scales, with increased rates of interspecies mobility, in nonhuman terms, and perhaps with less interventionist impulses.

Relatedly, Youatt grapples with another central idea of IR—personhood. IR scholars are likely familiar with debates about state personhood and arguments over the psychological, legal, and normative aspects of personhood that began to steadily emerge in the mid-2000s. They are less likely to have engaged this literature on personhood in interspecies terms. Youatt has much to offer on this front. In an analysis of the political rights of nature in Ecuador and the legal personhood of the Whanganui River in New Zealand, Youatt provides a lively and nuanced discussion of forms of collective personhood involving nonhuman actors. After a long struggle by Māori communities, the Whanganui River gained legal personhood in 2017. In 2008, indigenous movements in Ecuador helped realize the constitutional codification of legal rights for Pachamama. While these are intra-state, domestic events, they unfolded in internationalized settings with international actors or in the context of “the emerging global movement around rights of nature” (p. 104). Variations in nonhuman rights and personhood in these cases point to important questions about the representation of nonhuman interests and the production of persons through complex human-nonhuman relations in global politics. Moving beyond the collective personhood of states, Youatt’s analysis details how discursive, ontological, symbolic, and political personification practices involving “nature” produce historically variable forms of collective nonhuman personhood. By shifting the focus beyond the personhood of states, Youatt is able to demonstrate how “the Westphalian state—if it ever existed as such—has never had the kind of monopoly on collective personhood that theorists have claimed” (p. 113). In showing how forms of collective persons shift across space and time, emerge in different kinds of ontologies, and are contingent on relations and forms of relationality with other kinds of persons—human and nonhuman—Interspecies Politics also offers a potent reminder for the discipline of IR to engage more deeply with indigenous cosmologies.

While Parts I and II are structured around empirical case studies, Part III shifts into more conceptual terrain to offer arguments about “interspecies internationality.” The central objectives here are to engage objections to “nonhuman animal participation in political life” and to offer “a perspective that helps us understand a major historical shift that is under way in the relationship between the political and nonhuman life in the simultaneous intensification of ecological connections and the decimation of nonhuman diversity, which have together been termed Anthropocene” (p. 117). Youatt centers his response in terms of constitutively inclusive forms of politics that extend beyond ecobiopolitical interventions to make the planet livable for humans. By rethinking the boundary conditions of political life, agency, and nonhuman forms of political participation, Youatt begins to envision how, in the context of climate change and planetary transformation, “living well with nonhuman others” should be “a kind of political end in itself” (p. 136). The presence of nonhuman others is a political presence, marked by multiple and shifting forms of exclusion and inclusion. On these matters, Youatt’s work is a marker of an important, posthumanist shift in international political theory.

Interspecies Politics provides a novel description and analysis of global politics that should be of interest to a broad range of readers interested in post-anthropocentric thinking about the world. Its pages contain a certain hope for what lies outside of them—a post-textual transformation of living well with others on a multispecies and deeply damaged planet. As Youatt puts it, Interspecies Politics is “a commitment to further opening the questions of life and death, collective forms of flourishing, and justice” (p. 142). Underlying this commitment is an inquisitive planetary hope, a pressing call to problematize our political existence in collective terms that are inescapably bound up with human and nonhuman others. A key contribution of Interspecies Politics is that it articulates a more precise view of what international politics is (and always has been). But much more than that, it opens space for new thinking about international relations in political terms for a more just (multispecies) present and future. Its urgency, clarity, and vision prompt new conversations about not only what the world is but also what it might be.