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Realpolitik in the Anthropocene: Resilience, Neoclassical Realism, and the Paris Agreement

journal contribution
posted on 2024-07-08, 04:09 authored by Peter FergusonPeter Ferguson
Abstract It has been observed that the Paris Agreement has become an “analogy” of diplomatic success and institutional design because it allows emissions reduction commitments to be determined at the national level. While this is widely attributed to the United States’ insistence on excluding any provisions that would have required US Senate ratification, the success of Paris stems more from the way the agreement partly circumvents the divergent interests of developed and developing countries by allowing states to pursue their own mitigation strategies based on domestic distributional and ideological politics rather than interstate cooperation and/or competition. It is this accommodation of both an institutionalist logic of absolute gains and a more realist logic of relative gains that ultimately underpins the diplomatic and institutional design success of Paris. However, the resonance of realism, at least in its neoclassical form, also stems from its greater capacity to accommodate the heightened socioecological complexity, interconnectedness, and unknowability occasioned by the Anthropocene than other branches of Anthropocentric international relations theory. This potential is outlined in this Forum article by sketching the epistemological and ontological connections between neoclassical realism and the concept of resilience.

History

Journal

Global Environmental Politics

Volume

24

Pagination

1-8

Location

Boston, Mass.

Open access

  • No

ISSN

1526-3800

eISSN

1536-0091

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Issue

2

Publisher

MIT Press

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