Beyond Sovereign Territory

How should we think about politics in a world where ecological problems - from the deforestation of the Amazon to the acid rain - transcend national boundaries? This is the timely question addressed by Kuehls. Contending that the sovereign territorial state is not adequate to contain or describe the boundaries of ecopolitics, the author reorients our thinking about government, nature, and politics. Kuehls argues that changes in technology and the scope of governmental aims have rendered conventional ecological and internationalist aims anachronistic - and ultimately ineffective - in the face of impending environmental collapse. He questions the process by which land transformed into an object of sovereignty - into "territory" - demonstrating how representations of political space that focus on territorial sovereignty fail to come to terms with much of what is involved in ecopolitics.
Engaging social and political theory texts from such diverse thinkers as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, Kuehls moves through the fields of ecopolitical thought and international relations on his way to articulating an ecological politics that exceeds the space of the sovereign territorial state.