Peace Needs to Embrace the Anthropocene

Abstract

The current climate crisis and related extreme weather phenomena massively influence everyday human life and thus also armed conflict and peace. Acknowledging the human origin of these biospheric instabilities introduces the geological era of the Anthropocene. While it is built around the acknowledgment of the human ability to indelibly alter Earth’s physis, it does not celebrate humanity’s sovereignty, but rather indicates the dissolution of agency within the complex interrelationships between the human and the nonhuman world. The Anthropocene and the issue of peace obviously interrelate. This essay describes the Anthropocene not only as a useful conception in approaching peace, but as its conditio sine qua non. Its ontological implications highlight the substantial share of nonhuman agency and complexity through extreme weather phenomena in armed conflict and peace, while its epistemological innovations reveal the indispensability of the dissolution of the modernist transcendental ego for reasoning about and practicing peace. Peace in the Anthropocene means to let the world and its myriads of human and nonhuman inhabitants speak and to take them seriously.