¹ WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) dashboard, available at: {https://covid19.who.int} accessed 27 January 2022. This is a conservative estimate; The Economist, taking into account unreported deaths and unrecorded COVID-19 infections, along with non-Covid deaths related to an inability to access treatment, estimates that the true total of pandemic-associated mortality is closer to 17 million. ‘The pandemic's true death toll’, The Economist (31 October 2021), available at: {https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates}.

² Arundhati Roy, ‘“We are witnessing a crime against humanity”: Arundhati Roy on India's Covid catastrophe’, The Guardian (28 April 2021); Kurki, Milja, ‘Coronavirus, democracy, and the challenges of engaging a planetary order’, Democratic Theory, 7:2 (2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manuela Andreoni, Ernesto Londoño, and Letícia Casado, ‘Brazil's covid crisis is a warning to the whole world, scientists say’, The New York Times (3 March 2021).

³ Quote from Harman, Sophie, ‘COVID-19, the UN, and dispersed global health security’, Ethics & International Affairs, 34:3 (2020), pp. 373–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ozguc, Umut, ‘Three lines of pandemic borders: From necropolitics to hope as a method of living’, Critical Studies on Security, 9:1 (2021), pp. 63–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at: {DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.1904361}; Achille Mbembe, ‘The Universal Right to Breathe’, In the Moment: Critical Inquiry (13 April 2020).

⁴ Jakob Hanke Vela and Ryan Heath, ‘Brussels blocks vaccine exports in all but name’, Politico (7 April 2021).

⁵ Michael Safi, ‘Vaccine tensions loom in Asia as China and India trade free shots for influence’, The Guardian (21 March 2021); Oliver Holmes, ‘Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Morocco “told of delay in Covid jabs from India”’, The Guardian (21 March 2021).

⁶ Pan, Chengxin, ‘Racialised politics of (in)security and the COVID-19 Westfailure’, Critical Studies on Security, 9:1 (2021), pp. 40–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at: {DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.1904195}.

⁷ The term non-human is used in this article to refer to Earthly life, organisms, and physical processes that are not of the species Homo sapiens in form or cause. It is not used to imply, as Joseph Pugliese fears in his Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), p. 3, ‘a series of tacit or explicit deficits’. While here I use the term ‘non-human’ to contrast the human with such other-than-human or more-than-human life, matter, and process, it should always be understood as interchangeable with them. While the latter terminology is normatively preferable, there is a long tradition in ecocentric thought (such as in the works of Val Plumwood, Robyn Eckersley, Timothy Morton, and Donna Haraway) that uses the ‘non-human’ as an affirmative term for animal, plant, and ecosystemic life.

⁸ Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2006).

⁹ This term comes from Plumwood, who describes hyper-separation as a system in which ‘our own species appears as “outside nature”, as essentially intellectual beings, “rational choosers” calculating maximum satisfaction and not essentially reliant on the earth, beings whose basic ecological demands have no more legitimacy than any other desire, however trivial. Other species appear, when they appear at all, through a reductive and human-centred framework.’ Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), p. 27.

¹⁰ Key thinkers here from the analytical tradition include Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); J. Baird Callicott, Thinking Like a Planet (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014); Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Alisdair Cochrane, Animal Rights Without Liberation (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012). From the critical theoretical wing, Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992/London, UK: Routledge, 2003) and Dryzek, John S., ‘Political and ecological communication’, Environmental Politics, 4:4 (1995), pp. 13–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ This ethics is developed at length in Burke, Anthony, ‘Blue screen biosphere: The absent presence of biodiversity in international law’, International Political Sociology, 13:3 (2019), pp. 333–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel, ‘Across species and borders: Political representation, ecological democracy and the nonhuman’, in Joana Castro Pereira and André Saramago (eds), Nonhuman Nature in World Politics: Theory and Practice (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2020), pp. 33–50.

¹² The term ‘actant' comes from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Bruno Latour explains its value via its ability to ‘not limit itself to human individual actors, but [to] extend the word actor – or actant – to nonhuman, non-individual entities’. Such actants (which could be a bacterium or a virus, an electricity grid, an ocean wave, a uranium atom, an animal, a person, or a social institution) are defined as ‘any entity that modifies another entity’. Such understandings extend the world of actors and agents beyond human beings and institutions to non-human organisms, ecosystems, and processes as they are manifest in networks and assemblages of other matter, beings, and relations. Importantly, an actant does not require a mind, a complex intelligence, or an ability to reason or strategise. Latour, Bruno, ‘On Actor-Network Theory: A few clarifications’, Soziale Welt, 47:4 (1996), p. 369Google Scholar; Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 237.

¹³ Stefanie Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis, MN and London, UK: The University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

¹⁴ Ewen Callaway, ‘Could new COVID variants undermine vaccines? Labs scramble to find out’, Nature (7 January 2021).

¹⁵ Luciana V. Gatti et al., ‘Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change’, Nature, 595 (2021), pp. 388–93; Joana Castro Pereira and Eduardo Viola, Climate Change and Biodiversity Governance in the Amazon: At the Edge of Ecological Collapse? (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021).

¹⁶ Early efforts to make these connections include, inter alia, Stefanie Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); the two volumes of Mark Salter (ed.), Making Things International (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Gitte du Plessis, ‘When pathogens determine the territory: Toward a concept of non-human borders’, European Journal of International Relations, 24:2 (2018), pp. 391–413; Olaf Corry, ‘Nature and the international: Towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity’, Globalizations, 17:3 (2020), pp. 419–35; Leander, Anna, ‘Locating (new) materialist characters and processes in global governance’, International Theory, 13:1 (2021), 157–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kandida Purnell, Rethinking the Body in Global Politics (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021); and the June 2013 issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41:3.

¹⁷ Harrington, Cameron, ‘The ends of the world: International relations and the Anthropocene’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 44:3 (2016), pp. 478–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Joana Castro Pereira, ‘The limitations of IR theory regarding the environment: Lessons from the Anthropocene’, Revista Brasileira de Politíca Internacional, 60:1 (2017); Joana Castro Pereira and Eduardo Viola, ‘Catastrophic climate change and forest tipping points: Blind spots in international politics and policy’, Global Policy, 9:4 (2018), pp. 313–524.

¹⁸ Stevenson, Hayley, ‘Reforming global climate governance in an age of bullshit’, Globalizations, 18:1 (2021), pp. 86–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Anthony Burke, Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby, and Daniel Levine, ‘Planet politics: A manifesto from the end of IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 44:3 (2016), pp. 499–523.

²⁰ Rafi Youatt, Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020); John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, Politics in the Anthropocene (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019); Frank Biermann, Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press, 2014); Rothe, Delf, ‘Governing the end times? Planet politics and the secular eschatology of the Anthropocene’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 48:2 (2020), pp. 143–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simon Nicholson and Sikkina Jinnah (eds), New Earth Politics (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: The MIT Press, 2016); Cameron Harrington, ‘A quantum Anthropocene: International relations between rupture and entanglement’, in Pereira and Saramago (eds), Nonhuman Nature in World Politics, pp. 53–72; Milja Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).

²¹ Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, 2:1 (2015), pp. 81–98.

²² For more detail on my interpretation of the Anthropocene, see Burke, ‘Blue Screen biosphere’, p. 334, fn. 1. Two fine windows into the justice debates emerging from the (proposed) new epoch are Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: Kairos/PMPress, 2016).

²³ Fishel, The Microbial State, p. 113.

²⁴ Janice Bially Mattern, ‘The concept of power and the (un)discipline of International Relations’, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).

²⁵ The full argument for rethinking political power in this way is contained in Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel, ‘Power, world politics and thing-systems in the Anthropocene’, in Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand (eds), Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking (Cambridge, UK and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 87–107.

²⁶ Simon Dalby, Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (Ottawa, Can.: University of Ottawa Press, 2020); Dalby, Simon, ‘Firepower: Geopolitical cultures in the Anthropocene’, Geopolitics, 23:3 (2018), pp. 718–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin (eds), COVID-19 and World Order: The Future of Conflict, Competition, and Cooperation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

²⁸ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism; on cosmopolitanism and difference, see Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006), ch. 2.

²⁹ See Richard Beardsworth, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011); Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power Values in the Constitution of International Society (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007); Toni Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism: Duties to Strangers and Enemies and a World of ‘Dislocated Communities (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (London, UK and New York, UK: Palgrave 2010); Richard Shapcott, International Ethics: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity 2013).

³⁰ Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. P. A. Brault and M. Naas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 78; Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 1.

³¹ Robert Cooper, ‘The new liberal imperialism’, The Observer/Guardian (7 April 2002). Nuanced treatment of this dilemma can be found in the work of Vivienne Jabri, inter alia, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (London, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave, 2010); The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity (Abingdon, UK: Routledge 2012); and ‘Cosmopolitan politics, security, political subjectivity’, European Journal of International Relations, 18:4 (2012), pp. 625–44.

³² See Chengxin Pan, ‘Enfolding wholes in parts: Quantum holography and International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 26:S1 (2020), pp. 14–38 (pp. 30–1); Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Siba Grovogui, ‘Practices and metaphysics of knowledge: Notes on nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37:2 (2017); Stephen F. Schneck (ed.), Letting Be: Fred Dallmayr's Cosmopolitical Vision (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); Luis Cabrera, The Humble Cosmopolitan: Rights, Diversity, and Trans-state Democracy (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020).

³³ Compare the treatment of cosmopolitanism's relationship to war in Cécile Fabre, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Anthony Burke, Katrina Lee-Koo, and Matt McDonald, Ethics and Global Security: A Cosmopolitan Approach (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014).

³⁴ Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2001), p. 20.

³⁵ Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 66.

³⁶ Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997); Patricia Owens, ‘Racism in the theory canon: Hannah Arendt and “the one great crime in which America was never involved”’, Millennium, 45:3 (2017), pp. 403–24.

³⁷ Veronique Pin-Fat, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the end of humanity: A grammatical reading of posthumanism’, International Political Sociology, 7 (2013), pp. 241–57, and ‘Seeing humanity anew: A grammatical reading of liberal cosmopolitanism’, in Tamara Craus and Elena Paris (eds), Re-Grounding Cosmopolitanism: Towards a Post-Foundational Cosmopolitanism (London, UK: Routledge, 2016).

³⁸ See Judith Butler, ‘Universality in culture’, in Martha C. Nussbaum et al., For Love of Country? (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), p. 46; Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Pluriverse: Proposals for a world of many worlds’, in Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (eds), A World of Many Worlds (Kindle end, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), loc. 76; Breckenridge et al. (eds), Cosmopolitanism, pp. 7–9.

³⁹ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 139.

⁴⁰ It should be clear here that I am referring to ‘family’ in a normative, affective sense (as kin) and am not referring to the Linnaean biological classification, in which humans are Hominidae.

⁴¹ Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011); John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, Politics in the Anthropocene (Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019); Robert Boardman, Governance of Earth Systems: Science and Its Uses (London, UK: Palgrave, 2010).

⁴² Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, p. 34.

⁴³ Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 2, 17.

⁴⁴ Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, pp. 34–44.

⁴⁵ Cara Daggett, ‘Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and authoritarian desire’, Millennium, 47:1 (2018), pp. 25–44; Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

⁴⁶ Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, p. 23.

⁴⁷ Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, p. 7.

⁴⁸ Fabre, Cosmopolitan War, p. 16.

⁴⁹ Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, p. xi.

⁵⁰ Breckenridge et al. (eds), Cosmopolitanism p. 13.

⁵¹ Kant excludes non-human animals from the ‘Kingdom’ (or Commonwealth) of Ends and thus from political community, arguing that while they should never be treated cruelly, they can, unlike human beings, be treated as means. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 2; Heather M. Kendrick, ‘Animals in the Kingdom of Ends’, Between the Species, 13:10 (2011), article 2.

⁵² Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 1.

⁵³ Brown and Held (eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, pp. 1–2, emphasis added.

⁵⁴ Richard Beardsworth, Garrett Wallace Brown, and Richard Shapcott (eds), The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).

⁵⁵ Helga Haflidadottir and Anthony F. Lang Jr, ‘Climate change and cosmopolitan responsibilities’, in Beardsworth, Wallace Brown, and Shapcott (eds), The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities, ch. 9.

⁵⁶ Richard Beardsworth, Garrett Wallace Brown, and Richard Shapcott, ‘Introduction’, in Beardsworth, Wallace Brown, and Richard Shapcott (eds), The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities, p. 2.

⁵⁷ Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998).

⁵⁸ Matthew Leep, ‘Stray dogs, post-humanism and cosmopolitan belongingness: Interspecies hospitality in times of war’, Millennium, 47:1 (2018), pp. 45–66.

⁵⁹ Andrew Linklater, ‘Towards a sociology of global morals with an “emancipatory intent”’, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 135–50.

⁶⁰ Andrew Linklater, The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 2, 65.

⁶¹ Lorraine Elliott, ‘Cosmopolitan environmental harm conventions’, Global Society, 20:3 (2006), pp. 345–63.

⁶² N. A. J. Taylor, ‘The problem of nuclear harm for Andrew Linklater, Lorraine Elliott and other contemporary cosmopolitans’, Global Society, 32:1 (2018), pp. 111–26 (p. 121).

⁶³ Ibid., p. 123.

⁶⁴ Rosi Braidotti, ‘Becoming world’, in Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafin, and Bolette Blaagard (eds), After Cosmopolitanism (Kindle edn, Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), loc. 298.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Kurki, International Relations in a Relational Universe, p. 121.

⁶⁷ Pan, ‘Enfolding wholes in parts’, p. 31.

⁶⁸ Taylor, ‘The problem of nuclear harm’, p. 124.

⁶⁹ Matthew Leep, ‘Stray dogs, post-humanism and cosmopolitan belongingness: Interspecies hospitality in times of war’, Millennium, 47:1 (2018), pp. 45–66 (p. 51). See also Matthew Leep, Cosmopolitan Belongingness and War: Animals, Loss, and Spectral-Poetic Moments (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2021).

⁷⁰ Claire Colebrook, ‘Destroying cosmopolitanism, for the sake of the cosmos’, in Braidotti, Hanafin, and Blaagard (eds), After Cosmopolitanism, loc. 4731.

⁷¹ Ibid., loc. 4837.

⁷² Braidotti, ‘Becoming world’, loc. 482.

⁷³ Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, Principle 25; Fabian Schuppert, ‘Beyond the national resource privilege: Towards an International Court of the Environment’, International Theory, 6:1 (2014), pp. 68–97.

⁷⁴ CBD Secretariat, Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (Montreal: Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020).

⁷⁵ Leep, ‘Stray dogs, post-humanism and cosmopolitan belongingness’, pp. 45–66. See also Matthew Leep, ‘Cosmopolitanism in a carnivorous world’, Politics and Animals, 3 (2017), pp. 16–30.

⁷⁶ This is a core premise of Alasdair Cochrane, Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Interspecies Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).

⁷⁷ Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 10–11; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Kindle edn, Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2010), loc. 466–73.

⁷⁸ Karen Barad, ‘Toward an ethics of mattering’, in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Kindle edn, Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2007), loc. 7772.

⁷⁹ Christine J. Winter, ‘A seat at the table’, Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Law and Earth, 20:1 (2021), pp. 116–39; Rafi Youatt, ‘Personhood and the rights of nature: The new subjects of contemporary Earth politics’, International Political Sociology, 11:1 (2017), pp. 39–54; Rosemary-Claire Collard, Jessica Dempsey, and Juanita Sundberg, ‘A manifesto for abundant futures’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105:2 (2015), pp. 322–30.

⁸⁰ Danielle Celermajer, David Schlosberg, Lauren Rickards, Makere Stewart-Harawira, Mathias Thaler, Petra Tschakert, Blanche Verlie, and Christine Winter, ‘Multispecies justice: Theories, challenges, and a research agenda for environmental politics’, Environmental Politics, 30 (2012), pp. 119–40 (pp. 1–2).

⁸¹ United Nations ‘Harmony with Nature’ programme, available at: {http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org}.

⁸² Brown and Held, ‘Editor's introduction’, in Brown and Held (eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, p. 1.

⁸³ David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideal and Realities (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), p. 68, emphasis added.

⁸⁴ Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community, p. 7.

⁸⁵ Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, p. 76.

⁸⁶ Burke and Fishel, ‘Across species and borders’.

⁸⁷ Cochrane, Sentientist Politics, p. 4; Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, pp. 76, 351; Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Kindle edn, Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2003), loc. 677. See also David Schlosberg, ‘Climate justice and capabilities: A framework for adaptation policy’, Ethics & International Affairs, 26:4 (2012), pp. 445–61.

⁸⁸ Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), ch. 4.

⁸⁹ See Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness (London, UK: William Collins, 2020); Ferris Jabr, ‘The social life of forests’, New York Times Magazine (6 December 2020); Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest (London, UK: Allen Lane, 2021); David George Haskell, ‘Listening to the thoughts of the forest’, Undark (5 July 2017), available at: {https://undark.org/article/listening-to-the-thoughts-of-the-forest/}.

⁹⁰ Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, p. 357.

⁹¹ Danielle Celermajer, Sria Chatterjee, Alasdair Cochrane, Stefanie Fishel, Astrida Neimanis, Anne O'Brien, Susan Reid, Krithika Srinivasan, David Schlosberg, and Anik Waldow, ‘Critical exchange: Justice through a multispecies lens’, Contemporary Political Theory, 19:3 (2020), pp. 475–512 (p. 479); Mitchell, Audra, ‘Only human? A worldly approach to security’, Security Dialogue, 45:1 (2014), pp. 5–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹² Brown and Held (eds), The Cosmopolitanism Reader, p. 1.

⁹³ Burke, Anthony, ‘Humanity after biopolitics: On the global politics of human being’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 16:4 (2011), pp. 101–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁴ James L. Richardson, ‘Critical Liberalism in International Relations’, Working Paper (2002/7) (Canberra: Department of International Relations, ANU), p. 11.

⁹⁵ Anthony Burke and Rita Parker (eds), Global Insecurity: Futures of Global Chaos and Governance (London, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

⁹⁶ Hayley Stevenson, Institutionalizing Unsustainability: The Paradox of Global Climate Governance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012); Allan, Jen Iris, ‘Dangerous incrementalism of the Paris agreement’, Global Environmental Politics, 19:1 (2019), pp. 4–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁷ Ehsan Masood and Jeff Tollefson, ‘“COP26 hasn't solved the problem”: Scientists react to UN climate deal’, Nature, 599 (14 November 2021), pp. 355–6.

⁹⁸ Burke, ‘Blue screen biosphere’, p. 342; Michelle Lim, ‘Repeating mistakes: Why the plan to protect the world's wildlife falls short’, The Conversation (16 July 2021).

⁹⁹ United Nations, Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992, Preamble and Article 3.

¹⁰⁰ Lakshman D. Guruswamy, ‘The Convention on Biological Diversity: Exposing the flawed foundations’, Environmental Conservation, 26:2 (1999), pp. 79–82.

¹⁰¹ Tara Smith, ‘Creating a framework for the prosecution of environmental crimes in international humanitarian law’, in William A. Schabas, Yvonne McDermott, and Niamh Hayes (eds), The Ashgate Companion to International Criminal Law (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), pp. 52–7.

¹⁰² See the Special Issue of the Journal of Genocide Research, 23:1 (2021), edited by Martin Crook and Damien Short.

¹⁰³ Held, Cosmopolitanism, pp. 97–116.

¹⁰⁴ Burke, ‘Blue screen biosphere’.

¹⁰⁵ Cochrane, Sentientist Politics, p. 75.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., ch. 4 cites the work of Lea Ypi, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), and another notable work is Beardsworth, Wallace Brown, and Richard Shapcott (eds), The State and Cosmopolitan Responsibilities.

¹⁰⁷ Robyn Eckersley, The Green State (Kindle edn, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), loc. 1465–84.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., loc. 2912.

¹⁰⁹ Cochrane, Sentientist Politics, ch. 4.

¹¹⁰ Dryzek and Pickering, Politics in the Anthropocene, p. 48; Dryzek, ‘Political and ecological communication’, pp. 24–6.

¹¹¹ See Youatt, Interspecies Politics, ch. 6.

¹¹² Our full argument is laid out in Burke and Fishel, ‘Across species and borders’.

¹¹³ James R. May and Erin Daly, Global Environmental Constitutionalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The two science plans of the network are: Earth System Governance Project, Earth System Governance: Science and Implementation Plan of the Earth System Governance Project (Utrecht, 2018); Frank Biermann et al., Earth System Governance: People, Places and the Planet: Science and Implementation Plan of the Earth System Governance Project, Earth System Governance Report 1, IHDP Report 20 (Bonn, IHDP: The Earth System Governance Project, 2009).

¹¹⁴ Oran R. Young, Governing Complex Systems: Social Capital for the Anthropocene (Kindle edn, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), loc. 163.

¹¹⁵ Joyeeta Gupta, ‘Toward sharing our ecospace’, in Nicholson and Jinnah (eds), New Earth Politics, loc. 5187, 6094.

¹¹⁶ Frank Biermann, Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (Kindle end, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), loc. 426.

¹¹⁷ Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (Devon, UK: Green Books, 2011); Christina Voigt (ed.), Rule of Law for Nature: New Dimensions and Ideas in Environmental Law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Peter Burdon (ed.), Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2011); Joshua C. Gellers, ‘Earth system law and the legal status of nonhumans in the Anthropocene’, Earth System Governance, 7 (2021), p. 100083; Kotzé, Louis J., ‘Earth system law for the Anthropocene’, Sustainability, 11:23 (2019), p. 6796CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁸ Louis J. Kotzé, Global Environmental Constitutionalism in the Anthropocene (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), p. 34.

¹¹⁹ See Burke and Fishel, ‘Power, world politics and thing-systems in the Anthropocene’; Eva Lövbrand, Malin Mobjörk, Rickard Söder, ‘The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space’, Earth System Governance, 4 (2020), p. 100051; Joshua C. Gellers, ‘Earth system law and the legal status of nonhumans in the Anthropocene’, Earth System Governance, 7 (2021), p. 100083; Marie-Catherine Petersmann, ‘Sympoietic thinking and earth system law: The Earth, its subjects and the law’, Earth System Governance, 9 (2021), p. 100114.

¹²⁰ Burki, T., ‘The origin of SARS-CoV-2’, The Lancet, 20:9 (1 September 2020), pp. 1018–19CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹²¹ Mbembe, The Universal Right to Breathe’, part 3.

¹²² Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, p. 110; Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1996).

¹²³ Burke, ‘Blue screen biosphere’, p. 342.

¹²⁴ Gupta, ‘Toward sharing our ecospace’; Ryan Katz-Rosene and Matthew Paterson, Thinking Ecologically About the Global Political Economy (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018).

¹²⁵ A persuasive engagement with critics can be found in Richard Beardsworth, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011); an English School approach is developed in Robert Falkner, Environmentalism and Global International Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021).