The Anthropocene poses a challenge to international relations theories. However, International Relations’s (IR’s) engagement with the Anthropocene condition is still pervaded by modernist/Holocene limitations, visible for instance, when upholding traditional analytical categories such as ‘the state’, ‘the system’ or ‘agency’. Indeed, much of the debate in IR seems to be stuck in Holocene thinking and tends to feed the assumption that harmful ecological effects were in principle governable and manageable.
In response, this chapter first explores how these limitations prevent IR from theorizing the Anthropocene condition. It then zooms in on dissident debates that seek to decentre the human perspective, the Western perspective or cis/masculine perspectives. Queerfeminist and decolonial approaches as well as more-than-human approaches reframe human agency and relationality in the Anthropocene and provide suggestions for overcoming IR’s holocene limitations.