Ecological Relations: Towards an Inclusive Politics of the Earth

the human, masculinised mind from the feminised and naturalised social body disputes our essential ecological relations with (other) animals. To regard the animal as the conceptual subject for politicisation troubles this epistemological basis for politicisation. Indeed, to paraphrase Haraway cited at the beginning of this chapter, the nonhuman animal represents a powerful icon of the cultural construction of politics and as such discussion of animals is inherently revolutionary. To recognise animals as our ecological relations requires an expansion of epistemological boundaries. As this genealogical reading of the subject of nonhuman animals has revealed, the modern hold on exclusive human politicisation is being loosened. Yet, as the following chapter illustrates, within humanity differential power relations persist, based upon ethnically and economically mediated epistemological differences; the case of indigenous peoples constitutes the next and final conceptual study to illustrate the emerging possibility of a broadened theorisation of IR on earth.

-170-