Cinquante ans après la Conférence de Stockholm de 1972, la littérature est appelée à offrir un compte rendu sur le passé et informer les décisions à venir. Dans ce contexte, le présent essai critique propose une revue historique de la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement, couvrant la période de 1945 à 2022. Pour ce faire, il réunit les processus et évènements marquants des dernières décennies et distingue les moments clés ayant façonné la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement. Informé par la littérature scientifique et des documents officiels, l'article expose l’émergence, la mise à l'agenda et l'institutionnalisation de plusieurs enjeux environnementaux. Il contribue ainsi à situer les développements qu'a connus la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement et contextualiser les processus en cours. La conclusion de l’étude invite à accorder une plus grande attention aux enjeux environnementaux et à repenser la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement au-delà des frontières, tant étatiques que disciplinaires.

There is increasing awareness that the ocean touches all aspects of our lives and that a healthy ocean is central to a healthy planet and sustainable future. The ocean is a highly connected system and ocean science is characterized by voluntary international collaboration supported by an enthusiastic and engaged community. Increasingly, it is being recognized that international structures and instruments need to be stronger and more holistic than the current arrangements. This article outlines some perspectives on this, drawing on experience in ocean science and scientists at national, international and intergovernmental levels.

This postscript deliberates the wider implications of decolonising the academy. It takes point of departure in the often-contentious public discourse on the topic and asks, why is the decolonisation agenda so concerning to public officials and the target of public policy? In many ways, derisive and irreverent responses to efforts to decolonise universities, schools, and the curricula is only expected seeing as it has the potential to disrupt the futures of the beneficiaries of colonial norms, practices, and institutions. But equally, the decolonisation agenda is contentious as it unsettles the assumption that scientific knowledge production is an apolitical affair. There are of course ample examples of scientific ‘progress’ being deeply indebted to histories and legacies of colonialism. However, it is in revealing this politics of science that decolonisation finds wider political relevance as not just an effort to recognise and remedy the legacies of colonisation in the academy. It also reveals the politics that is embedded in what we know and, in doing so, underlines the fallibility of a singular (scientific) frame, means of measurement, or rule of inference for understanding a social reality. In fact, decolonisation understood in this way is about opening up the possibility of acknowledging there isn’t a social reality. Every social phenomenon can be experienced in a multiplicity of ways and therefore reimagining IR in view of decolonising it requires a political response that empirically, methodologically, and theoretically forefronts the multiplicity of perspectives and experiences that have thus far been marginalised in the studying and understanding of social realities.

Seeing as colonialism is ubiquitous to where International Relations (IR) comes from, what it explains and who it represents, many have argued that the decolonisation of the discipline is impossible. However, in this agenda-setting introduction, I place decolonisation squarely in the realm of possibility and ask, ‘what would a decolonised field look like?’. In answering this question, the contributions in this forum take point of departure from varied sites within the discipline, as they seek to materialise real change that reimagines what IR is and does as a discipline that was established as a scholarly defence for colonialism. Herein they propose decolonisation as a structure that upends the discipline’s colonial epistemological roots, rethinks core concepts and underlines the need to forefront geographies, peoples, and perspectives that were underrepresented in a colonial discipline. Equally, they recognise that decolonisation is a messy affair, that takes a non-linear trajectory. However, seeing as colonialism did not just inflict material impoverishment but also sought to alienate the colonised from their sense of self, this messiness is only expected. So, rather than be discouraged by this, this forum views the non-linear trajectory to be an unavoidable facet of any attempt at decolonising the discipline.

The Anthropocene, a proposed new geological age marking the planetary impact of humanity, is no longer a newcomer to the field of International Relations (IR). Several scholars have recognised the value, as well as the danger, of the Anthropocene for theorising international relations. This article focuses on the existentialist questions and ideas derived from IR’s engagement with the Anthropocene, particularly on the anxieties surrounding the extinction of the human species, the meaning of the Anthropos, and humanity’s planetary stewardship. By drawing on scholarly discourses on these physical, spiritual, and moral anxieties, I argue that existentialist thinking helps expose IR’s anthropocentric, universalist, and hubristic tendencies, which are also prevalent in the broader Anthropocene discourse. It also serves as a reminder of the freedom to explore possibilities, albeit with a lack of certainty, for reimagining the place of humanity and IR as a discipline in this new geological age. Therefore, existentialism reveals IR’s dissonance with the paradoxes and uncertainties that the Anthropocene brings while offering a path toward theorising the “end of the world”.

Latin America has long been subjected to colonial development that has negated Indigenous territory. In the present conjuncture, the region is home to the largest volume of environmental conflicts in the world. These conflicts are intrinsically connected to the wider model of neo-extractivist development that has been embraced throughout the continent since the early 2000s. Indigenous communities have frequently been the victims of this model of extractive development, with their territories becoming the primary sites for the aggressive expansion of the resource frontier. This has generated new political conflicts, as Indigenous communities conversely assert claims to territory and resources. In this article, I link these conflicts to what I term the ‘coloniality of space’, whereby Indigenous territorial forms have been theoretically elided from traditional spatial imaginaries within International Relations and concretely negated through practices within the global political economy. Moving beyond the territorial trap of nation-state centrism, Indigenous forms of resistance raise important questions about the subject and actors of International Relations.