Keynote Speaker

Professor Robyn Eckersley

Robyn Eckersley is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has published widely in the fields of environmental political theory and International Relations, with a particular focus on ecological democracy, the greening of states, and the ethics, politics and governance of climate change. She received a Distinguished Scholar Award (Environmental Studies Section) at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Toronto 2019 and an honorary doctorate from Utrecht University in 2024 for her work on the green state and ecological democracy.

Presentation Details

International Relations and the Planetary

In the closing decades of the 20th Century the field of International Relations (IR) was pressed to enlarge its distinctive object of inquiry – ‘the international’ – to include a more encompassing set of global relations. Since the turn of the Millennium, in the wake of major developments in Earth Systems Science and the growing risks of catastrophic and irreversible ecological tipping points, the field is now under pressure to incorporate ‘the planetary’. This lecture will explain how ‘the planetary’ is different to ‘the global’ (and to traditional geopolitics) and what this means for IR theory and practice.