Differentiated complexity and international systems

The most sophisticated account of international systems to date is found in the work of Barry Buzan and Richard Little, and we would largely agree with their prescription for International Relations as a ‘failed intellectual project’, that the discipline needs to embrace systems theorising and to adopt an ‘holistic historical framework’.Footnote ¹¹ However whilst we find much of value in their systems approach, our analysis of systems is somewhat different and leads us to ultimately different conclusions. Buzan and Little remain wedded to a Newtonian and human-centred account of the social world, whereas we advocate a post-Newtonian, complex, and non-human centred account.

Such an account is principally enabled by the adoption of a complexity framework which informs different elements of our model of posthuman international relations. However introducing complexity theory to an International Relations audience is complicated not only by the associated terminology but also, and perhaps more significantly, by the variety of ways in which complexity has been understood and theorised.Footnote ¹² In short there is no ‘one’ complexity theory. Crucially, analyses in the social sciences inspired by complexity thinking have interpreted complexity in radically different ways with significant ontological and epistemological implications.Footnote ¹³ A particular distinction can be drawn between those approaches that view complexity as a feature of models or metaphors (a majority view), and those that see complexity as ontologically real. While most authors argue that a complexity approach provides us with a means of interpreting the social world, they differ on what constitutes the relationship between theory and the social world. In short, is the complexity in the metaphor or model, or is there an underlying physics at work which impinges on the social world. Metaphoric approaches use ideas derived from the physical sciences and apply these to the social world ‘as if’ complexity was at work.Footnote ¹⁴ Modelling approaches attempt to use computers to play out scenarios replicating complex phenomena.Footnote ¹⁵ We consider that to regard complexity theory as a metaphor for understanding social phenomena is a weak position and one that reflects a human-centred approach, ignoring the embodied character of human systems and existence. Likewise, modelling has understated the embedded character of human systems and represents, in Morin's words, a ‘restricted complexity’ which ‘still attaches complexity as a kind of wagon behind the truth locomotive, that which produces laws’ and ‘avoids the fundamental problem of complexity which is epistemological, cognitive, paradigmatic’.Footnote ¹⁶ An alternative approach is to consider complexity in the social world as under-pinned by physics, with social systems overlapping and intersected by biological and physical systems. Some have advocated a consilient approach seeing physics ‘all the way down’.Footnote ¹⁷ We would see complexity as ontologically real – by which we mean a property of, and observable across, a range of inanimate, animate, human, and non-human systems – and hence more than a feature of metaphor and models. This said, we also acknowledge that, because of human cognitive capacities to represent, analyse and adapt, human social systems, while exhibiting complex characteristics, need specific forms of analysis. We advocate an approach to the study of complexity that we describe as ‘differentiated complexity’.

A core idea from complexity thinking is the complex adaptive system. Systems from a complexity perspective refer to the boundaries which can be drawn around actors or units which have sufficient interactions to generate patterns, or emergent features. Boundaries in a complex system are open and porous in the sense that interactions between systems can impact on the character of internal inter-relationships – in other words complex systems do not have ‘hard shells’. Stating the boundaries of complex adaptive systems are no less problematic than in any other attempt to define systems, though with regard to international relations states, the international political system, and the international economic system can be considered as complex adaptive systems.Footnote ¹⁸

Complex adaptive systems have a number of significant features. First, a central feature of complex adaptive systems is their propensity to develop in a non-linear fashion. To understand such systems therefore requires a break from a Newtonian conception of systems – one that has dominated systems thinking in the social sciences. Complex systems can behave in both linear and non-linear ways. In a linear system we would expect there to be a constant and predictable relationship between cause and effect. In International Relations theory, most models of the international system expect such a constant relationship between variables. In the work of Kenneth Waltz, for example, there was the expectation that there would be a regular relationship between the number of great powers and the characteristics of international relations.Footnote ¹⁹ The democratic peace theory, seen as coming ‘as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations’,Footnote ²⁰ likewise points to a supposed regular linear relationship in international relations – democracies don't fight each other. In non-linear systems there may be regularities but they are less likely to be durable. There is no predictable pattern in terms of the relationship between events, and there is no expectation that the same events will result in the same pattern of results.

Secondly, complex systems are in a constant state of flux, and are ‘active and creative’.Footnote ²¹ In other words complex systems do not remain in a ‘constant state’ where the interactions between the parts can be modelled, as if their features were fixed. They are constantly changing, and in particular, over time have a propensity to become more complex. Complex systems develop in an organic fashion in that the interactions between the parts, and the character of their interactions, become increasingly multifaceted. In this process systems and agents change in ways that are not reversible. Complicating matters further, in complex systems feedback mechanisms are seen as central to the understanding of systems development. These characteristics of complex systems have considerable implications for the study of the social world. We have already argued that complex systems exhibit unpredictability. We would also argue that because of their actively creative features, it is the development of social systems that should be studied. There are links here with thinking about international relations from the perspective of Historical Sociology. Rather than seeing the international system, and international relations within it as essentially unchanging because of the determinant features of anarchy, which conditions states to act in certain ways, complexity theorists would argue that while international systems may be stable for a certain period of time, self-organisation or ‘autopoiesis’ would be likely to result in changes in their character.Footnote ²²

In terms of the analysis of complex systems of social relations, we are particularly drawn to the work of Sylvia Walby whose approach is perhaps the closest to our ‘differentiated complexity’. We draw considerable inspiration from Walby's analysis of systems, and in particular of intersectionality. Central to Walby's discussion is the question of how to analyse multiple forms of social inequality. Rather than focus on one form of social inequality,Footnote ²³ Walby seeks to understand how different forms of social inequality interact, or intersect with each other. These intersections occur within the broader context of globalisation. As she notes, ‘there is a need both to capture the distinctions, differentiations and nuances of complex inequalities … and to keep the global horizon in sight’.Footnote ²⁴ In complexity theory she finds the toolbox to analyse these multiple systems. Hence, a key point of her work is to point out how developments in complexity theory permit a rethinking of the concept of system. In particular, she argues that systems, when reconceptualised from a complexity perspective, do not have an inherent tendency to move towards equilibrium. While feedback can be negative, drawing a system towards equilibrium, it can also be positive, reinforcing, and amplifying forces for change. Various examples from international relations of positive feedback could be cited: the actions of states in attempting to stem the flow of illegal drugs pushing the price and profits of drug trading up and encouraging increased participation in the trade; financial flows out of economically weaker members of the Eurozone making it harder for their continued membership; melting of ice caps as a result of climate change decreasing the amount of heat reflected back into space and thus contributed to global temperature rises.

Systems, while having boundaries, also intersect with other systems, allowing the possibility of thinking about their mutual influence. However these intersections are always far from straightforward (or linear), and forms of inequality interact in ways that can only be understood from a complexity based analysis. Walby's model permits the analysis of unequal power relations between different systems, and her concern with intersecting forms of power reflects the concerns of feminist writers.Footnote ²⁵ Central to this is the concept of fitness landscape, which provides a way of understanding power differentials. Additionally it allows the analysis of the context in which actors operate, including the ability to manipulate the fitness landscape to the more powerful actors' advantage.Footnote ²⁶ Walby's approach is entirely humanocentric however and despite this detailed and effective account of relational and institutional complex systems, we need to examine the ways in which social systems attempt to exercise domination over the non-human world, and, at the same time, are co-constituted with and by them.Footnote ²⁷

There are elements of International Relations theory, such as the work of Buzan and Little, or of historical sociologists that in focusing on historical patterns and systemic relations, are already open in some respects, to the use of a complexity approach. In thinking about complex systems, we have found it very useful to distinguish between different types. Here, we have drawn on the distinction between institutional, relational, and embodied social structure.Footnote ²⁸ We apply the same kinds of distinctions to complex systems. Drawing on a distinction between relational and institutional structures, for example, we can consider order in international systems as an emergent feature of relative distributions of power, and through the operation of institutions. One of the most significant features of international relations since 1945 has been the enormous proliferation of institutional order, in terms of organisation, and restrictions on practice – we would argue that this is a manifestation of the increasing complexity of international institutional systems.

A further insight from complexity theory which serves as an important bridge to the second, posthuman strand of our argument is the way in which systems are perceived as interactive and co-constituted. Useful here is the notion of ‘panarchy’, taken from the work of Gunderson and Holling and their collaborators working in resilience studies.Footnote ²⁹ This draws in ecosystems, political, economic and social systems, alongside a notion of local, specific human cultural systems. Panarchies are living systems, conceived of as internally dynamic and historically non-static structures which develop mutually reinforcing relationships which are co-constitutive and adaptive.Footnote ³⁰ There are multiple connections established by feedback mechanisms between both different kinds of system, and different levels of a system. It is not only panarchies involving human systems which demonstrate decision-making properties, rather a huge variety of non-human animals make collective decisions and engage in individual decision-making behaviour with a cumulate system effect.Footnote ³¹ Living systems of humans, non-human animals, and plants develop self-organised interactions with physical processes thus ‘physics sets the constraints around which life structures opportunity’.Footnote ³² These self-organised interactions do not result in stability. Rather, systems may be vulnerable – ecosystems may collapse or be undermined by human endeavours, political systems may be vulnerable due to the collapse of natural systems on which populations depend for resources, or social shifts.Footnote ³³ Importantly also, these configurations of systems in interaction are themselves complex systems with their own emergent properties.Footnote ³⁴

Ecosystems and human social systems are all complex systems in their own right.Footnote ³⁵ Whilst social and natural systems may be shaped and structured by similar processes, ‘signification allows human systems to divorce themselves to some degree from space and time, the critical organizing dimensions of ecosystems’.Footnote ³⁶ In addition, there is potentially increased dynamism as the reproduction of social systems means that they are more mutable. This does not mean that change operates towards self-regulation in terms of the maintenance of equilibrium. Whilst the notion of ‘panarchy’ in the work on resilience has origins in the study of ecology, it has moved more firmly into an examination of the detail of social system dynamics than most of the work in the study of ‘global ecology’. The latter, whilst paying some attention to quality of human life questions, is overwhelming focused on human impacts on ‘natural’ ecological systems. As such, it tends to separate the ecological conditions of existence from the organisation of human social life.Footnote ³⁷

Rather, as the resilience perspectives of Holling and others suggest, human systems may become more easily locked into paths of development that may have serious consequences for certain human and non-human populations. In addition, it is important to acknowledge the ways that human systems reproduce and develop formations of social power, of social relationships, which, like capitalism, patriarchy and so on, are usefully understood as complex adaptive systems. Holling et al. do not adequately account for the systemic patterns of human inequalities and it is this which gives us an added challenge in using complexity in social relations. There are systems of social power relations, ecosystems, and various levels of systems and structure in the social world that give rise to a multiplicity of forms of local, regional, and global configurations. The central contribution that students of international relations can make is to study the development of that system, its self-organising characteristics, and its relations to other human (such as capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy) and non-human (other species, the biosphere) systems. The embeddedness of systems is a key feature of differentiated complexity. International relations has always been about more than the mainstream script of the discipline of International Relations focused on relations between states. International politics has always been involved with the non-human and with global systemic relations of human and intra-human power. A posthuman approach is appropriate for the study of international relations because it enables us to think about politics in its embedded context with the non-human, and in terms of patterned relations of power. Before we outline the challenges of thinking about international politics through a posthumanist lens, it is necessary to specify exactly what we mean by ‘posthumanism’.

Posthumanism(s)

The term ‘posthumanism’ has entered academic and popular discourse as a descriptor for critical perspectives on our human centrism.Footnote ³⁸ It suggests a perspective that seeks to understand more about the diversity of species and non-human beings with which our world is constituted.Footnote ³⁹ Thus the term ‘animal’ has been seen as ridiculously broad and impossible to deploy with any accuracy, whilst the way species are categorised has been critiqued as more reflective of religious belief and political opinion, than physical or cognitive differences.Footnote ⁴⁰ In turn, the category human has always been differentiated – some humans are ‘more human’ than others in the sense that the ‘animalising’ of certain groups of humans has been consitutive of forms of social exclusion and oppression such as those of gender and ‘race’.Footnote ⁴¹ The social constitution of the ‘human’ has certainly impacted on non-human species and lifeworlds, usually regarded and utilised as means for the satisfaction of human ends. The term ‘posthuman’, however, is flexible, ambiguous, and contested. In order to clarify our perspective and in this section we locate our position within a range of more and less critical perspectives.

Posthumanism has been associated with transhumanism, that is, the ideology that emphasises the possible good of a future in which humans are able to acquire ‘posthuman capacities’ and extend their life and health spans, their capacities for happiness, and their intellectual capabilities.Footnote ⁴² Despite the appropriation of the term posthumanism by transhumanist advocates, these disembodied and transcendent fantasies are best seen as ‘an intensification of humanism’ and hence completely distant from the project of problematising human centrism.Footnote ⁴³

In sharp contrast, biophysical, philosophical, and political posthumanisms centre on the relationships between human beings, other species, and the whole other worlds of non-human ‘nature’. A well-known example of what we might think of as biophysical posthumanism is the work of earth systems scientist, James Lovelock. In Lovelock's model, humans are utterly embedded in, and with, the multitude of systemic processes that make up the ‘mega system’ of the planet. Lovelock's fame is based on his development of the concept of Gaia: the idea that earth's multifarious living forms act as regulators that control conditions on the planet by a series of chemical feedbacks.Footnote ⁴⁴ Lovelock literally sees our future as posthuman in the sense that he thinks that the severity of the stresses humans have caused in the earth's system(s) mean that we have critically endangered the survival of humans and a vast number of other species.Footnote ⁴⁵ Fritjof Capra has linked this notion of the Earth as a complex system to the politics of ecologism.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, humans are part of a multitude of various levels of natural and social systems, in which humans exploit other species and scapes as resources. Human activity has had such an impact that some have argued that we are now in a new geological era. Simon Dalby employs the term ‘anthropocene’ (originally used by Crutzen and Stoermer) to describe a new geological age, in which humans have remade the ‘circumstances of life’ of both our own existence and that of all other species, with serious consequences for the survival of many life forms.Footnote ⁴⁷ These human induced changes mean that the environment is increasingly artificial – we have remade the environmental context of our own existence. Dalby's account is also influenced by certain kinds of political ecologism, and he considers our current predicament to be constituted through collective human activity that has been structured by carboniferous consumer capitalism, and relations between rich and poor regions and peoples. In such understandings, humanity is understood as locked into systemically exploitative relations to non-human lifeworlds, and also as socially intersectionalised. This kind of posthumanism is close to our notion of complex ecologism.

For those writing from within animal studies, such as Ralph Acampora and Cary Wolfe, we need to pay attention to human animality as well, and understand not only that we are one (animal) life form amongst a multitude, but also that, crucially, our biology and evolution are co-constituted with and by this multitude.Footnote ⁴⁸ Writers such as Wolfe emphasise that it is not so much ‘the human’ that is a difficulty, but the human-centric understanding of the human as the unique individual striving in the world, and not embodied and embedded in complex biotic lifeworlds. We would very much endorse Wolfe's understanding.

Less politically committed than these perspectives, but perhaps more engaged with established notions of ‘politics’, are a range of positions within science and technology studies and cultural studies, which want to move beyond an outdated understanding of the human in our current social, cultural, and material context of technoscience. Most of these are very much influenced by the work of Bruno Latour who is keen to point out that we have never been purely human or ‘animal’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the real natural/cultural world all kinds of hybrids are emergent. In this sense, we have never been modern, but rather we are ‘a-modern’; the separation of nature and culture never was.

Widening the debate out further to include matter more generally, the political theorist Jane Bennett argues for a ‘vital materialism’. This animating force is a character of matter itself, and Bennett's intention is to recognise the role of apparently inanimate matter affecting and configuring situations and events.Footnote ⁵⁰ Drawing on thinkers such as Spinoza, Thoreau and Adorno, Bennett's argument about the animism of all things, resonates in different ways, with the complexity understandings of Capra and of neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.Footnote ⁵¹ The Spinozist notion of animate matter has also been foundational for systems inflected political ecologism, in particular, deep ecology.Footnote ⁵² That complex adaptive interactions occur between animate and inanimate matter is indicated by research on early human tool and brain development.Footnote ⁵³ However, in vital materialism (and indeed, in deep ecologsim), there is a tendency to minimise the differences between subjects and objects with this notion of a vitality which runs through both human and non-human matter. The end in view is the development of a more environmentally aware and cautious politics, but the elevation of the ‘shared materiality of all things’ is a rather blunt instrument in securing this end.Footnote ⁵⁴

Following Deleuze and Guattari,Footnote ⁵⁵ Bennett develops the notion of assemblage in order, for example, to describe the multiple animate bodies of which an individual human body is constituted. We consider that the complexity notion of nested, overlapping, or intersected coevolved system(s) is more helpful. The latter allows us to differentiate and distinguish as well as examine the specific sites and forms of relation between the multiple organisms of a human body. It also presumes a contextualising array of systemic contexts in which a body might emerge. A sufficiently critical posthumanism must draw in the insights about human centrism, human power, and social justice provided by elements within political ecologism and critical animal studies. We may never have been human, but our analyses of social relations have been human exclusive. Any attempt to transform international politics in a posthumanist direction must have questions of political power and relations with non-humans at its core.

Posthuman politics

Nation states and international organisations respond to the way we have harmed non-human matter, by incorporating the environment, the non-human lifeworld, into existing modes of the political – securitisation and governance. This has been reflected in the discipline of International Relations by the development of environmental security and environmental governance as specific subfields. We have suggested elsewhere, that these approaches retain a traditional state-centred perspective in which ‘the environment’ is seen as threatened by, or a threat to, human beings.Footnote ⁵⁶ A posthumanist perspective however, does not understand the environment as ‘out there’ but rather as ‘with’ and ‘in here’. A key difficulty is that the spatial boundaries of the nation state deal poorly with non-human relations and our entanglements with other beings and things. Thom Kuehls has argued that such entanglements with biological life and non-human lifeworlds produce a topology that cannot be contained or understood within the current frameworks of nation states and international system.Footnote ⁵⁷ For Isabelle Stengers such political institutions are deeply problematic – we cannot reduce the inclusion of non-human worlds in politics to an account of the role they would play in political association and public life as currently constituted.Footnote ⁵⁸ This is because the very framing of those institutions was developed by mobilising the category ‘human’ – our idea of what constitutes politics is human exceptionalist and exclusionist.

Allowing space in political life and political analysis for non-human beings and things however, would be radically trangressive for the tightly circumscribed discipline of politics and its smaller sibling, International Relations. There is a profusion of complex materials, systems and processes through and with which we humans live. We consider that a posthuman approach to politics involves the recasting of key debates around the subjects, actors and objects of politics, political representation, and possibilities for policy change.

The history of political theory has ascribed political will and agency to humans alone (or often, to very limited groups of humans). Even those contemporary thinkers with challenging and radical notions of the nature of decision-making in democratic political institutions, consider that (human) speech is the medium of politics.Footnote ⁵⁹ Those political theorists with environmental credentials have also cast both technologies and ‘natures’ as outside of political life – as the objects of political attention rather than political agents with affect and causality.Footnote ⁶⁰ Those experimenting with radical notions of ‘environmental democracy’ have only experimented so far, and tend to conceive of politics as a human-exclusive sphere of activity and democratic decision-making that is separate from the objects over which democratic deliberation takes place.Footnote ⁶¹

Bennett contests this humanocentrism with her notion of ‘thing power’.Footnote ⁶² This enables us to see agentic capacity as distributed, and as distributed differently ‘across a range of ontological types’.Footnote ⁶³ In describing an electric grid as an assemblage of vital material and in her use of the term emergent properties, Bennett is actually close to the notion of a complex system.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such systems, or for Bennett, non-human assemblages, can act. However, what she actually means is something else – assemblages can have an impact or effect on humans and non-humans. Following on from this, she argues that human agency has never been separate from the non-human world, but always intermingled and co-constituted. Herein lays a recurrent problem in Bennett's work – a conflation between the idea of the properties and powers of beings and things, the notion of action and the idea of agency.

Margaret Archer argues that a defining characteristic of agency, as opposed to action, is that it is plural – agents are collectivities and actors are singular.Footnote ⁶⁵ Individual actors might reflect on their embodied situation and they might also recognise commonality. Individual actors may also possess will and intent. In animal studies, there have been suggestions that many non-human animals have agency because they have ‘the capacity for self-willed action’.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, following Archer, Bob Carter, and Nickie Charles consider that many non-human animals can be seen as agents to the degree that they share life chances and are affected by their social location.Footnote ⁶⁷ Considering this social location is of prime importance, for non-human animals are ‘highly disadvantaged’ in an anthropocentric distribution of resources.Footnote ⁶⁸ For Archer, to engage in anything beyond this primary agency, another emergent property is needed – political influence, associated with, for example, social movements. Carter and Charles further argue that language enables humans to change the world and their own place in it to such a degree that there is a fundamental asymmetry in the agency of human and non-human animals.Footnote ⁶⁹ We are not convinced that there is sufficient understanding of forms of communication in other species to preclude animal agency, but concur with Carter and Charles that whilst many non-human animals might be agentic beings, they cannot usually exercise agency.Footnote ⁷⁰ Rather, where they exert political influence, this is via human representation in the form of social movement organisations or NGOs. This is fundamentally shaped by context – that of human domination over non-human animals.

The retort of those such as Bennett, Latour and Haraway, might be that unless we allow for the agency of things, and unless we decentre human language as an enabler of agency, we cannot decentre the human in political analysis. Bennett has rightly argued that the human/non-human dichotomy in political thought has not helped many of the political demands of humanism – the successful articulation of human rights claims, for example.Footnote ⁷¹ Conversely however, there are serious questions to be raised about Bennett's assumption that a distributing concept of agency will be effective in unsettling humanocentric politics.Footnote ⁷² Latour has argued that the powers and properties of non-human ‘objects’ call for a public space that is profoundly different from what is usually recognised as ‘the political’.Footnote ⁷³ In his view, a more fully democratic space recognises that our collective public is not a body of human representatives of human interests, but a cosmos.

Latour wants to redefine the notion of the public and the idea of a political assembly. Whilst humans are held to be able to articulate views about the world, interests, and ‘wants’, non-humans cannot and are thus held not to have interests, opinions, and ‘wants’. For Latour, the natural, technical world of non-human beings and things is represented, not by politicians but by professional experts, by ‘science’. Science represents not the ‘wants’ of beings and things however, but ‘facts’ about them. Politicians, on the other hand, also represent, but are seen to represent views; claims and desires.Footnote ⁷⁴ For Isabelle Stengers this raises the problem of authority – there is power in both these kinds of representation, the representation of human wills and the representation of ‘facts’ about non-human worlds.Footnote ⁷⁵ Undergirding these ideas is the notion that political representation is an artifice. As Latour claims, it is a misrepresentation to say that ‘the people’ speak for themselves – they elect others who claim to speak in their name.Footnote ⁷⁶ What both Stengers and Latour propose is the idea of being the representatives of ‘things’ in the same assembly as the parliaments which claim to represent the wills of the ‘people’ – they want closer integration between scientific expertise and politics. We endorse the critique of the artifice of representation, although we consider that Latour's conception of representing non-humans is horizontal – there are incredible differences in properties, powers, affects, interests, and even standpoints that fundamentally affect the politics of representing the ‘non-human’ in all its enormity. In addition, the representation of non-humans by scientists is not free from humanism, nor is it necessarily an extension of democracy as Latour suggests it would be.

James Brassett and William Smith have argued that the difficulties of deliberation are further exacerbated at the level of international politics.Footnote ⁷⁷ Whilst there have been many arguments for the democratisation of global governance and the increase of deliberation involving ‘global civil society’, opening up international organisations to such deliberation is contested and difficult.Footnote ⁷⁸ This is particularly so because of the way in which international political institutions and processes reflect systemic imperatives of relational power, such as that of capital.Footnote ⁷⁹ In opening up the international political arena to deliberation, it is interesting to see those similar problems of engagements through representation by elites (comparable to the professional scientists of Latour and Stengers) surfacing. For example, Brassett and Smith emphasise cultural interventions by NGOs.Footnote ⁸⁰

Environmental questions are subsumed under a bureaucratic rationality of resource managerialism by various nodes in the institutional system of international politics, be they local, national, regional, or ‘global’ levels of governance.Footnote ⁸¹ As Eva Lövbrand and Johannes Stripple note for example, the climate itself has become understood as an international political space, which is fundamentally shaped by local, national, and international politics.Footnote ⁸² The contemporary features of the ‘carbon-cycle’ are tied in to a logic of nation states operating territorially. The climate is also a space shaped by relational power – of capitalism, coloniality, and other regimes of power and domination which are minimally disrupted by the elite political or scientific ‘representation’ of the interests of non-human beings and systems.

At present, it is difficult to see how we can get around the question of the problematic representation of non-human interests in politics, or whether in fact, ‘representation’ is a concept that can be utilised to this end. This said, we are not sure that the embedding of representation of the non-human by scientific elites, into political institutions will result in significant change. Such elite representation is already part of the national and international processes of making policies ‘about’ the ‘environment’. However we would argue that an understanding of the world in terms of complex systems may enable less problematic policies to be made. We are seeing some changes, albeit limited ones, with patterns of decision-making becoming more participatory, involving a greater range of actors in particular NGOs, and a larger range of concerns (such as the ‘environment’, human rights, and animal rights). These inclusions are not without their difficulties. For example, a range of NGO representatives were highly critical of the weaknesses of proposals at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June 2012 and the political director of Greenpeace, Daniel Mittler, referred to the event as ‘an epic failure’.Footnote ⁸³ Yet despite such trenchant criticisms of the weaknesses of proposals at Rio, there was applause from NGOs on certain matters (such as the strengthening of the UNEP and measures to protect ocean ecosystems) and the level of participation of NGOs was unprecedented in the Earth Summit process. Policymakers at all levels in the institutional system are confronted with the complexity of socio-ecological issues, and a larger range of potential issues and side effects. Sandra Mitchell suggests a two-pronged approach to dealing with decision-making in a complex world. She suggests that prediction should be replaced with models ‘of multiple alternative futures’ which evaluate different variables and possible policy effects.Footnote ⁸⁴ Others suggest that it is possible to go further, and to use the dynamics of complex systems in productive ways.Footnote ⁸⁵

From this brief discussion perhaps two general ideas could be derived. First, a precautionary principle is implied. The study of complexity suggests that the possibilities for predicting the outcomes of certain policies are limited. This does not mean that all policies are doomed to failure, or that policy should not be made or implemented. However, ‘we are not only failing to solve the persistent problems we face, but are in fact causing them’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Policies, may have expected outcomes, however in complex systems, the unexpected should be anticipated, and hence the possible wider implications of policy options should be considered carefully before implementation. Morin argues that policymakers need a strategy, which he defines as ‘the art of working with uncertainty’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Second, a humility principle is suggested. Complexity approaches stress the character of over-lapping and intersectionalised systems. Human systems are embedded and coexist with uncountable animate and inanimate systems. Developments and processes within one system can ripple through systems sparking different development trajectories. As Morin points out ‘action escapes the will of the actor’, entering not only wider human society, but also potentially into non-human systems.Footnote ⁸⁸

Policymakers need to avoid the ‘arrogant dogmatism which rules non-complex forms of thinking’, and accept the human situation of being embedded within a potentially enormous range of other systems.Footnote ⁸⁹ The latter, we would suggest, is difficult to envisage within the normative frameworks of politics where ‘environmental’ questions become matters of governance and securitisation, and are conceptualised as threats to human populations. Here, we humans are often cast as at the mercy of non-human forces that must be regulated and controlled. This understanding of the human as separate from all other species and natural systems is fundamentally problematic for in complexity, ecosystems are complex systems and fundamentally affected by and co-constituted with, natural systems. In addition, however, re-envisioning the political to incorporate the representation of the ‘facts’, let alone the ‘wants’ of non-human beings and things is almost impossible to envisage in political institutions, at all levels, as currently constituted. Whilst we are co-constituted by and with the non-human, the implications of this for political organisation are uncertain, but likely to necessitate radical change.Footnote ⁹⁰ There is not space in this article for suggesting what changes to current practices might be useful and possible. We do however want to suggest that changes must be significant. Whilst the posthuman politics of Latour and others provides a normative compunction to consider the non-human as bound up with the human condition of life, this critical ontology is more firmly established when integrated with insights from political ecologism, because this undertakes a thorough critique of the impact and power of human social organisation on the non-human lifeworld.

Complex ecologism

In the first two sections of this article, we made the argument that complex systems are ecologically embedded – we are caught up with multiplicities of species and things. We also considered that complex systems could be of different kinds – institutional, embodied, and relational. Inter-human relations have been shaped by histories of distinction and domination, and at the same time have coevolved with non-human systems. A complex and posthuman orientation to politics also requires an analysis of human centrism and human domination. The different schools of political ecologism have much to offer here, but they need reworking through the lens of complexity. Whilst complexity theory provides us with an overarching framework (of multiple, interrelated, co-constituted complex systems) it does not imply a normative position. Niklas Lumann is right to suggest that it is a ‘meta-theory’.Footnote ⁹¹ Different political ecologisms have used the notion of ‘system’ to think about human relations with non-human systems, and have usefully deployed ideas of domination and exploitation in so doing. In complexity models, all systems are bound up with others, and we suggest here that systems of social relations between both humans and other species and between different groups of humans are also usefully seen as complex systems.

Deep ecologism already adopts a systemic approach to understanding the organisation and patterning of both social and natural life – it uses complexity as a framework for understanding relations between human and non-human systems. All processes are connected and human intervention in natural ecosystems cannot be without impact. Arne Naess suggests that living beings of all kinds are ‘knots’ in a biospherical field of relations.Footnote ⁹² Such webs of relationships are incredibly complex and need to be understood as vast systems that interlock us with a variety of species and scapes. The net of relations is of paramount importance, and no ‘system’ is discrete, as Robyn Eckersley puts it:

It is unsurprising then, that deep ecologism and complexity theory have already been drawn together.Footnote ⁹⁴ In addition, a strength of deep ecologism is that it understands human society as structured in particular relations with the ‘natural world’, a system of relationships termed ‘anthropocentrism’. Western society is human-centred in its organisation and has a dominant worldview in which non-human natures are conceptualised in terms of means to human ends. However, anthropocentrism has been used in ways that marginalise human diversity and are blind to social inequalities.Footnote ⁹⁵ It has not been understood as a complex social system. Whilst we want to retain this notion of social relations with ‘the environment’ as systemic and exploitative, we also understand human relations with the environment as socially intersectionalised, that is, existent in a context of overlapping relations with other systems of social relations, such as those based on class, gender, and ethnic hierarchy.

A key insight of complexity approaches is the notion of self-organisation – that order can arise without a specific orderer. Here there is a considerable overlap with anarchist contributions to the study of political ecology. In the work of Bookchin in particular, the analysis of various kinds of social hierarchies and forms of institutionalised social domination is key, and Bookchin's understanding of these as co-constitutive is highly compatible with a complexity understanding of social systems. Bookchin's contribution in turn, was highly influenced by the work of Peter Kropotkin. Both Bookchin and Kropotkin are significant for contemporary debates. This is, at least in part, because they consider the relationship between natural systems and social forms, and, in our view, they develop understandings of the world that are compatible with complexity approaches. In Bookchin's case, complexity is specifically referenced and critiqued;Footnote ⁹⁶ interestingly however, it is Kropotkin who might be read as more clearly a proto-complexity theorist.

Mutual Aid stressed the process of evolution as one where successful adaptation and exploitation of evolutionary niches is secured by species' propensity for cooperation and solidarity.Footnote ⁹⁷ This is very similar to ‘symbiogenesis’, a notion used extensively in complexity biology.Footnote ⁹⁸ Many of Kropotkin's ideas are elaborated in the work of Bookchin, who has been instrumental in linking anarchism to green social and political thought. The notion of overlapping and intersected forms of social domination which are systemic and co-constituting is clearly compatible with a complex systems analysis of social domination. In addition, Bookchin's understanding of the hybridised and amorphous nature of contemporary political systems embedded firmly in the social fabric and constantly in the processes of arranging and rearranging social life – maintaining themselves – can be given a complexity reading.Footnote ⁹⁹

Patterns of hierarchy and domination usurp, distort, and reconfigure human relations, but also, particularly for Bookchin, structure our coexistence with non-human natures. Complexity theory, with its notions of coexisting, interrelated, multi-levelled, and co-constituted systems enables the capture of the ontological depth of relational systems of social domination (of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and so on) and their interaction or intersection. Here, socialist and feminist ecologisms have made important contributions. Peter Dickens suggests for example, that the nexus of environmental exploitation is the social organisation of labour power in capitalist societies around the production of goods for the market.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Indigenous and postcolonial ecologisms have stressed the ways in which ethnic hierarchy and exclusions and notions of race impact on the geography of environmental ‘problems’ and the vulnerabilities of certain populations.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Further, a complexity reading of Marx has been developed by David Harvey in suggesting that local actions (for example, the exploitation of workers) reproduce the capitalist system and its emergent properties (for example, class relations, resource depletion) and give rise to various system contradictions (from social movements to environmental collapse).Footnote ¹⁰² For various theorists, contemporary developments in capitalist relations means ‘nature’ becomes increasingly internal to the dynamics of capital accumulation as biotechnology is harnessed to overcome ‘natural’ barriers.Footnote ¹⁰³ Thus Harvey suggests that we now have what he calls ‘constructed ecosystems’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Unfortunately, some writers in these fields are strongly antagonistic to feminist political ecologisms which are considered forms of reverse sexism, or positions which essentialise gender differences.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Ecofeminism provides an analysis of the domination of nature as interrelated particularly with gender, but in many cases, also with a range of other forms of systemic inequalities.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Ariel Salleh has emphasised that a rounded, ‘triangulated’ political ecologism would integrate the analysis of gender relations, north-south relations, and those of capital, into an understanding of human relations with ‘nature’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ We see some of these feminist approaches as fully intersectionalised forms of social ecologism and compatible with a complexity analysis of multiple, coevolved and dynamic systems of social relations. Ecofeminist analysis has tended to emphasise the systemic properties and effects of patriarchy, but would be enhanced by understanding systems of social relations of power, or social domination (such as patriarchy, capitalism, and the domination of the natural world) as analytically distinct but overlapping. It would also be strengthened by deploying complexity concepts in articulating how these relational systems are co-constituted with other systems of non-human beings and things.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

We take from deep ecologism that there is a social system of human domination, but consider that this takes historically and geographically specific formations. Such domination is linked to multiplicitious intra-human formations of domination, outlined in various ways by the different kinds of social ecologism. We conceive these systems as both analytically distinct, whilst being also, mutually constitutive. The domination of non-human nature is a system of exploitative relations that overlaps and interlinks with other systems of power and domination based on gender, capital, ethnic hierarchy, and so on. This is what we call ‘complex ecologism’. The politics of complex ecologism requires the interrogation and undermining of contemporary forms of social relations, both within and across species. It also requires that we understand international politics very differently.