2025 Theses Doctoral

Planetary Peoples: Historical Continuity and Contemporary Spaces

Stethem, Isaac

This dissertation offers a series of proposals for considering and contesting questions of planetary politics. Over the past four decades, scientific research (particularly in the field of Earth Systems Science) has shown that planetary systems are now deeply interconnected with, and often subject to, the outcomes of human systems, leading to the controversial classification of our present age as the Anthropocene. In more recent years, scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences have sought to show how such fields might contribute to the debate and decision-making this state of affairs necessarily entails, in particular to preclude decisions in human systems with planetary implications from being taken solely on the basis of scientific knowledge.

Political theory, this dissertation shows, is particularly well-positioned to contribute to this discourse because of the manner in which it can offer analyses and proposals which synthesize the history of political ideas, the structure of political processes and institutions, and the normatively-guided analysis of legal texts and practices. Such an approach is particularly well-suited to the politics of human impacts on planetary systems, in particular because such systems are dynamic: a sustained and evolving set of institutions and practices, rather than correct decisions at a particular moment in time, are necessary to sustainably bring about planetary habitability.

Central to such an undertaking, I argue, is a reconceptualization of political peoplehood in a planetary age. Addressing planetary questions and crises requires a somewhat paradoxical spatial politics: on the one hand, the diminishment of the bounds of state sovereignty, while on the other, a greater claim over planetary systems by humanity as a whole. Though this may call for the further development of something like a global demos, I argue that this need not, and indeed should not, entail the effacement of particular and localized collective identity, nor should we aim to imagine or create an over-arching “planetary people” ex nihilo. Instead, I propose that existing political peoples ought to turn themselves towards the planetary—in essence, maintaining their autonomy while simultaneously widening its spatial scope and therefore the necessity to act in concert with other peoples.

The first two chapters offer historical reference points for both theorizing and bringing about this kind of peoplehood through examination of three European Jewish political thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Hannah Arendt, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Simon Dubnow. I draw two key conceptual insights from this reconstruction. First, aterritorial utopianism, a view that the non-territorial condition in which turn-of-the century Jews found themselves neither precluded their status as a political people, nor was to be seen as necessarily inferior to association with a sovereign nation-state; rather it was in part a source of insight into alternative possibilities for international governance more broadly. Second, I argue that Arendt and Zhitlowsky offer an account of the both the nature of, and conditions of change for, peoplehood, which I term transformative continuity. Importantly, this understanding of peoplehood not only casts the capacity of peoples to radically change their central features and principles as an expression of their autonomy, but also highlights the extent which such transformative processes can encompass changes in how land and territory is understood. These insights in turn allow me to critically engage with the planetary shortcomings of a series of contemporary theoretical accounts of nationalism, peoplehood, and territory.

Chapters 3 and 4 consider the ends and means by which peoplehood might turn itself towards the planetary, and by which planetary resources might be collectively governed. Central to this account is the role which extra-sovereign spaces such as the oceans, Antarctica, and outer space, might play in planetary governance. These places matter, I argue, not only because of their own particular connections with planetary systems, but also because their extra-sovereign status renders them critical sites of experimentation in new modes of collective governance of the planet. In so doing, I offer a re-valuation of the international legal concept of common heritage, proposing that part of its value can be seen in the “political heritage” such extra-spaces contain, particularly in cases such as the deep seabed in which New International Economic Order proposals offered an alternative to both existing Grotian and alternative Seldenian conceptions the global commons.

I further extend this argument to both the long-standing and highly peculiar governance structure in place in Antarctica (which I term non-con-dominium), and the more recent creation of a strategic treaty conflict surrounding the very meaning of heritage in outer space by signatories of the American-led Artemis Accords. Both cases, I argue, offer a possibilities for the articulation of new forms of planetary politics and peoplehood. In concluding, I briefly sketch a tentative outlook and evaluative criteria for the conduct of planetary politics which I term anti-elementalism.