Workshop: ‘Reimagining Order in a Planetary Era: Science, Knowledge and Power’

Andrew Hurrell (Oxford), Benedict Kingsbury (NYU), Alejandro Rodiles (ITAM)

Oxford Martin School Programme on Changing Global Orders, NYU Law School Guarini Program on Planetary Futures,, and  ITAM (Mexico)  

Andrew Hurrell welcomes delegates on day two of the workshop at Nuffield College

The rippling awareness of planetary-scale phenomena has layered onto existing socio-political challenges a raft of new concerns about knowledge-making, institutions and governance, and the durability of arrangements capable to sustaining and improving common life. Planetary referents are moving from science (and specific group cosmologies) into much wider societal awareness, political discourse, and policy programmes.

These moves involve changing temporalities – compression so that deep geological time figures within the short timeframes of human agency and practical reason – and reconfigurations of spatiality and of scalar relations. This is very influential in some branches of research and knowledge-making. It has not (yet) resulted in new arrangements for human ordering, but is manifesting in significant interrogation of existing models of order and in the values and priorities they embed.

This workshop – which builds out from previous work on the significance and challenges of planetary law and governance – addressed the implications of ‘planetary’ concerns in current rethinking of ‘global’ scripts, and in contestation over the sustenance, remaking, or viability of ‘international ordering’. It sought to illuminate systemic change, the critical dynamics of planetary-related knowledge and framings, and the implications of, and for, power.  The goal was to bring together a small and eclectic group of scholars with varied interests and ways of engaging with this theme. 

The full workshop programme can be seen here.