Stephen Hobden
Biographic Data
| ID | 1667560 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Hobden |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Hobden |
| SIGNATURE | HOBDEN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of East London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6058-8964 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 221 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Are we Posthuman yet? Things, Animals and Relations in Global Politics
In this article, we survey the field of posthuman international relations and argue that contributions have focused on three main areas. Firstly, the influence of Bruno Latour is impossible to ignore. Many works have drawn on Actor Network Theory, highlighting the significance of non-human “actants” for outcomes in human affairs. The second area is the role of more-than-human animals in international affairs. Multiple contributions have highlight…
Introduction. Posthumanism meets Political Philosophy. For a Critical Posthumanist Reading of Political Philosophy
The contemporary landscape – marked by climate change, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, species extinction, and the shifting boundaries of the political community as we used to intend it – demands an urgent rethinking of inherited categories, to reassess the foundational concepts and frameworks of political philosophy. This monographic issue aims at responding to that demand by collecting and enhancing contributions that explore how the ph…
Critical theory and international relations: Knowledge, power and practice
Critical theory remains one of the most important and exciting areas within the study of international relations. Its purpose is not only to describe the way in which the world operates but to help us imagine how the world might be different and how we might achieve a more equitable and sustainable way of life. As well as presenting key concepts and thinkers the book also provides an evaluation of the field and suggests how critical thinking can …
Animalising International Relations
This article explores what it means to 'animalise' International Relations (IR). The posthuman move in the social sciences has involved the process of de-centring the human, replacing an anthropocentric focus with a view of the human as embedded within a complex network of inter-species relations. In a previous work we drew attention to the lack of analysis within International Relations of the key role played by more-than human animals in situat…
Marxist theories of international relations
This chapter examines the contribution of Marxism to the study of international relations. It first considers whether globalization is a new phenomenon or a long-standing feature of capitalist development, and whether ‘crisis’ is an inevitable feature of capitalism, and if so, whether capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. The chapter proceeds by discussing a number of core features common to Marxist approaches as well as the inter…
Zoonotic Politics: The Impossible Bordering of the Leaky Boundaries of Species
Zoonotic pandemics shine an uncomfortable light on how human lifeways facilitate the sharing of pathogens across species. The predominant political response to zoonotic pandemic has been bordering practices of surveillance, securitisation and bodily separation. These practices reflect intra-human and species hierarchies. They also fail to acknowledge the extent to which the boundaries of species are leaky, and are continually breached. A posthuma…
A politics of attachment
This chapter discusses actor-network theory, specifically focusing on the work of Bruno Latour. A central feature that distinguishes ANT from more conventional sociology is the role given to non-human actors, sometimes referred to as actants. The sources of confusion relate to the technical use of the term network – such as power networks, rail networks or the internet – or traditional sociological notions of networks relating to inter-human conn…
Creaturely politics
In living better, the authors consider that there may also be possibilities for a posthumanist emancipatory politics of attachment, and they consider what engagements with non-Western cultures have to teach them about creatureliness. They investigate the ways in which the distinctions of civilisation are linked to discourses around the transcendence of their embodied condition as animals. Rather, certain kinds of humans have &s;uplifted&s; themse…
How to change a complex world?
This chapter lays out the problem – the need for urgent radical action to confront a range of global challenges such as inequality and environmental damage, while at the same time we inhabit a complex world where people actions may not have the outcomes that they anticipate. To understand why complexity thinking could have something to contribute to policy making, one need to provide an explanation of why &s;orderly thinking&s; can lead to proble…
Towards posthumanist emancipation
This chapter contests Latour&s;s presumption that attachment and emancipation are irreconcilable. Ultimately, Burke et al. seem to have a suprising faith in the mechanisms of global governance that borders on an endorsement for authoritarianism, and a continued belief in universalism. The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses isn&s;t that the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, whether one should put up sea walls to protect M…
Emancipation and its critics
Booth has noted, emancipation is a controversial term: &s;ideological critics challenge its implications; friendly critics question its application in specific historical situations; orthodoxies and establishments resist its threat to their interests; and many others do not know what the term means&s;. This chapter attempts to unravel some of these issues. Christian Welzel explicitly considers enlightenment and emancipation as synonymous. Haberma…
Critical posthumanism and the lives of others
This chapter develops earlier ideas on posthuman political theory specifically within the framing of a politics of emancipation or of &s;liberation&s;. It engages with the considerable literature in animal studies and work which, since Peter Singer&s;s call for &s;animal liberation&s; in the 1970s, has made a concerted attempt to extend the project of emancipation beyond the human. Drawing inspiration from the work of Benedictus de Spinoza, Hasan…
A politics of enchantment
This chapter assesses some of the influential work within the field of posthumanist thinking. It explores the potential for political projects of emancipation within a posthumanist frame through the interventions made by Jane Bennett and William Connolly. While Connolly suggests that there are ten distinguishing features which unite the various very different new materialist approaches, we consider that these can be grouped under three main headi…
Posthuman Dialogues in International Relations
Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Liberal Cosmopolitan IR: A Response to Burke et al.’s ‘Planet Politics’
This article is a collective response to ‘Planet Politics’ by Anthony Burke et al., which was published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a ‘Manifesto from the End of IR’. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al. reprod…
The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism
This is the first book to make the argument for an emancipatory project from within a posthuman framework. Responding to critics, Cudworth and Hobden argue that while some posthumanisms may be less critical, it is possible to develop a political programme from a posthuman perspective. Cudworth and Hobden develop such issues by addressing the following questions: How have ideas about emancipation been developed, and does the notion of emancipation…
Marxist theories of international relations
This chapter examines the contribution of Marxism to the study of international relations. It first considers whether globalization is a new phenomenon or a long-standing feature of capitalist development, and whether ‘crisis’ is an inevitable feature of capitalism, and if so, whether capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. The chapter proceeds by discussing a number of core features common to Marxist approaches as well as the inter…
Being “a Good Animal”: Adorno, Posthumanism, and International Relations
This article examines the potential contribution of the work of Theodor Adorno to the development of a posthuman analysis of international relations. Despite a recent blossoming of “Adorno studies,” his writings on nature, particularly his concerns regarding human relations with other species, have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that many of the central concerns driving the recent development of posthuman analyses of…
Analysing Change: Complex Rather than Dialectical
This article offers a discussion of dialectics from a complexity perspective. Dialectics is a term much utilized but infrequently defined. This article suggests that a spectrum of ideas exist concerning understandings of dialectics. We are particularly critical of Hegelian dialectics, which we see as anthropocentric and teleological. While Marxist approaches to dialectics, in the form of historical materialism, marked a break from the idealist el…
Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism
The term ‘new materialism’ has recently gained saliency as a descriptor for an eclectic range of positions that question the human-centred and human-exclusive focus of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In turn these emerging perspectives have been subject to critique by those writing in the established materialist tradition, who argue that new materialism ignores the unique specificity of human agency and the transformatory c…
Civilisation and the Domination of the Animal
Underlying claims about a ‘standard of civilisation’ are questions about what it means to be human. Those that assert membership of a higher civilisation do so on the basis of the extent to which a particular grouping has been able to separate itself and become independent of nature. Such contentions reproduce the duality between the human and non-human nature in that the civilised are considered as separate/superior to the non-civilised, and on …
Of Parts and Wholes: International Relations beyond the Human
While some theorists in International Relations have engaged with thinking about complexity, we would argue that few have thought it through to its logical conclusion – the interconnectedness of systems, and the implications for agency and structure. This article examines the structure–agency question using the framework of ‘posthuman international relations’, which draws on recent thinking in complexity and argues for an approach to the study of…
The Foundations of Complexity, the Complexity of Foundations
A debate over the possibilities for foundations of knowledge has been a key feature of theoretical discussions in the discipline of International Relations. A number of recent contributions suggest that this debate is still active. This article offers a contribution to this debate by suggesting that the study of complexity may provide a contingent foundation for the study of international relations. We examine the grounds on which such a claim mi…
Complexity, ecologism, and posthuman politics
Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and 'things'. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of in…
Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global Politics
About the authors Erika Cudworth is senior lecturer in international politics and sociology at the University of East London. Her research interests are in political theory, broadly conceived, particularly feminisms, ecologisms and complexity theory, food consumption and production, human relations with non-human animals and educational inclusions/exclusions. She is author of Environment and Society (Routledge, 2003), Developing Ecofeminist Theor…
International Relations and Historical Sociology: Breaking Down Boundaries
This book provides an original analysis of recent work by key historical sociologists through the prism of International Relations. Stephen Hobden investigates the number of issues which overlap between the two disciplines by focusing on three main themes: * the ways in which historical sociologists approach international relations in general and the concept of an international system in particular * recent advances on the concept of the state as…
Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global Politics
About the authors Erika Cudworth is senior lecturer in international politics and sociology at the University of East London. Her research interests are in political theory, broadly conceived, particularly feminisms, ecologisms and complexity theory, food consumption and production, human relations with non-human animals and educational inclusions/exclusions. She is author of Environment and Society (Routledge, 2003), Developing Ecofeminist Theor…
Complexity, ecologism, and posthuman politics
Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and 'things'. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of in…
Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Liberal Cosmopolitan IR: A Response to Burke et al.’s ‘Planet Politics’
This article is a collective response to ‘Planet Politics’ by Anthony Burke et al., which was published in this journal in 2016, and billed as a ‘Manifesto from the End of IR’. We dispute this claim on the basis that rather than breaking from the discipline, the Manifesto provides a problematic global governance agenda which is dangerously authoritarian and deeply depoliticising. We substantiate this analysis in the claim that Burke et al. reprod…
The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism
This is the first book to make the argument for an emancipatory project from within a posthuman framework. Responding to critics, Cudworth and Hobden argue that while some posthumanisms may be less critical, it is possible to develop a political programme from a posthuman perspective. Cudworth and Hobden develop such issues by addressing the following questions: How have ideas about emancipation been developed, and does the notion of emancipation…
Of Parts and Wholes: International Relations beyond the Human
While some theorists in International Relations have engaged with thinking about complexity, we would argue that few have thought it through to its logical conclusion – the interconnectedness of systems, and the implications for agency and structure. This article examines the structure–agency question using the framework of ‘posthuman international relations’, which draws on recent thinking in complexity and argues for an approach to the study of…
Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism
The term ‘new materialism’ has recently gained saliency as a descriptor for an eclectic range of positions that question the human-centred and human-exclusive focus of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In turn these emerging perspectives have been subject to critique by those writing in the established materialist tradition, who argue that new materialism ignores the unique specificity of human agency and the transformatory c…
Civilisation and the Domination of the Animal
Underlying claims about a ‘standard of civilisation’ are questions about what it means to be human. Those that assert membership of a higher civilisation do so on the basis of the extent to which a particular grouping has been able to separate itself and become independent of nature. Such contentions reproduce the duality between the human and non-human nature in that the civilised are considered as separate/superior to the non-civilised, and on …
Anarchy and Anarchism: Towards a Theory of Complex International Systems
The use of ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory appears very different from its incarnations in political philosophy. Whilst realist scholars have used anarchy to describe an absence of centralised political authority in which states wield differential power, political philosophers in the anarchist tradition have mounted a critique of the coercive and compulsory powers of states themselves. This article argues for reconceptualising ‘anarch…
Beyond environmental security: Complex Systems, Multiple Inequalities and Environmental Risks
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link
Theorising the international system: Perspectives from Historical Sociology
Recent interest in the work of Historical Sociologists has concentrated on their renewed interest in the state. There is considerable regard for the historical account of state formation and development produced by writers such as Mann, Skocpol and Tilly. Surprisingly there has been less attention paid to another feature of their writings—the locating of states in an inter-state context. This article examines the international context envisioned …
Zoonotic Politics: The Impossible Bordering of the Leaky Boundaries of Species
Zoonotic pandemics shine an uncomfortable light on how human lifeways facilitate the sharing of pathogens across species. The predominant political response to zoonotic pandemic has been bordering practices of surveillance, securitisation and bodily separation. These practices reflect intra-human and species hierarchies. They also fail to acknowledge the extent to which the boundaries of species are leaky, and are continually breached. A posthuma…
Can Historical Sociology Be Critical
Animalising International Relations
This article explores what it means to 'animalise' International Relations (IR). The posthuman move in the social sciences has involved the process of de-centring the human, replacing an anthropocentric focus with a view of the human as embedded within a complex network of inter-species relations. In a previous work we drew attention to the lack of analysis within International Relations of the key role played by more-than human animals in situat…
Analysing Change: Complex Rather than Dialectical
This article offers a discussion of dialectics from a complexity perspective. Dialectics is a term much utilized but infrequently defined. This article suggests that a spectrum of ideas exist concerning understandings of dialectics. We are particularly critical of Hegelian dialectics, which we see as anthropocentric and teleological. While Marxist approaches to dialectics, in the form of historical materialism, marked a break from the idealist el…
Historical Sociology of International Relations
Part I. Introduction: 1. What's at stake in 'bringing historical sociology back into international relations?' John M. Hobson 2. Historical sociology: back to the future of international relations? Stephen Hobden Part II. Historical Sociologies of International Relations: 3. The two waves of Weberian historical sociology in international relations John M. Hobson 4. Neo-Weberian historical sociology and the question of epochal transformations Rand…
Geopolitical Space or Civilization: The International System in the Work of Michael Mann
International relations and historical sociology: Breaking Down Boundaries
Can Historical Sociology Be Critical
Theorising the international system: Perspectives from Historical Sociology
Recent interest in the work of Historical Sociologists has concentrated on their renewed interest in the state. There is considerable regard for the historical account of state formation and development produced by writers such as Mann, Skocpol and Tilly. Surprisingly there has been less attention paid to another feature of their writings—the locating of states in an inter-state context. This article examines the international context envisioned …
You can choose your sociology but you can't choose your relations: Tilly, Mann and relational sociology
I would like to thank Daniel Nexon for taking the time to read, reflect, and comment on the article ‘Theorising the International System: Perspectives from Historical Sociology’. His comments are astute, pertinent and challenging. I would also like to thank the editors of the Review of International Studies for offering me space to reply to Nexon's comments. Nexon clearly wishes that I had written a different article. However, although I think th…
Historical Sociology of International Relations
Part I. Introduction: 1. What's at stake in 'bringing historical sociology back into international relations?' John M. Hobson 2. Historical sociology: back to the future of international relations? Stephen Hobden Part II. Historical Sociologies of International Relations: 3. The two waves of Weberian historical sociology in international relations John M. Hobson 4. Neo-Weberian historical sociology and the question of epochal transformations Rand…
International Relations and Historical Sociology: Breaking Down Boundaries
This book provides an original analysis of recent work by key historical sociologists through the prism of International Relations. Stephen Hobden investigates the number of issues which overlap between the two disciplines by focusing on three main themes: * the ways in which historical sociologists approach international relations in general and the concept of an international system in particular * recent advances on the concept of the state as…
Anarchy and Anarchism: Towards a Theory of Complex International Systems
The use of ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory appears very different from its incarnations in political philosophy. Whilst realist scholars have used anarchy to describe an absence of centralised political authority in which states wield differential power, political philosophers in the anarchist tradition have mounted a critique of the coercive and compulsory powers of states themselves. This article argues for reconceptualising ‘anarch…
Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global Politics
About the authors Erika Cudworth is senior lecturer in international politics and sociology at the University of East London. Her research interests are in political theory, broadly conceived, particularly feminisms, ecologisms and complexity theory, food consumption and production, human relations with non-human animals and educational inclusions/exclusions. She is author of Environment and Society (Routledge, 2003), Developing Ecofeminist Theor…
Beyond environmental security: Complex Systems, Multiple Inequalities and Environmental Risks
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link
The Foundations of Complexity, the Complexity of Foundations
A debate over the possibilities for foundations of knowledge has been a key feature of theoretical discussions in the discipline of International Relations. A number of recent contributions suggest that this debate is still active. This article offers a contribution to this debate by suggesting that the study of complexity may provide a contingent foundation for the study of international relations. We examine the grounds on which such a claim mi…
Complexity, ecologism, and posthuman politics
Theorisations of the political in general, and international politics in particular, have been little concerned with the vast variety of other, non-human populations of species and 'things'. This anthropocentrism limits the possibilities for the discipline to contribute on core issues and prescribes a very limited scope for study. As a response to this narrow focus, this article calls for the development of a posthuman approach to the study of in…
Of Parts and Wholes: International Relations beyond the Human
While some theorists in International Relations have engaged with thinking about complexity, we would argue that few have thought it through to its logical conclusion – the interconnectedness of systems, and the implications for agency and structure. This article examines the structure–agency question using the framework of ‘posthuman international relations’, which draws on recent thinking in complexity and argues for an approach to the study of…
Analysing Change: Complex Rather than Dialectical
This article offers a discussion of dialectics from a complexity perspective. Dialectics is a term much utilized but infrequently defined. This article suggests that a spectrum of ideas exist concerning understandings of dialectics. We are particularly critical of Hegelian dialectics, which we see as anthropocentric and teleological. While Marxist approaches to dialectics, in the form of historical materialism, marked a break from the idealist el…
Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism
The term ‘new materialism’ has recently gained saliency as a descriptor for an eclectic range of positions that question the human-centred and human-exclusive focus of scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. In turn these emerging perspectives have been subject to critique by those writing in the established materialist tradition, who argue that new materialism ignores the unique specificity of human agency and the transformatory c…
Civilisation and the Domination of the Animal
Underlying claims about a ‘standard of civilisation’ are questions about what it means to be human. Those that assert membership of a higher civilisation do so on the basis of the extent to which a particular grouping has been able to separate itself and become independent of nature. Such contentions reproduce the duality between the human and non-human nature in that the civilised are considered as separate/superior to the non-civilised, and on …
Being “a Good Animal”: Adorno, Posthumanism, and International Relations
This article examines the potential contribution of the work of Theodor Adorno to the development of a posthuman analysis of international relations. Despite a recent blossoming of “Adorno studies,” his writings on nature, particularly his concerns regarding human relations with other species, have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that many of the central concerns driving the recent development of posthuman analyses of…
Marxist theories of international relations
This chapter examines the contribution of Marxism to the study of international relations. It first considers whether globalization is a new phenomenon or a long-standing feature of capitalist development, and whether ‘crisis’ is an inevitable feature of capitalism, and if so, whether capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. The chapter proceeds by discussing a number of core features common to Marxist approaches as well as the inter…
A politics of attachment
This chapter discusses actor-network theory, specifically focusing on the work of Bruno Latour. A central feature that distinguishes ANT from more conventional sociology is the role given to non-human actors, sometimes referred to as actants. The sources of confusion relate to the technical use of the term network – such as power networks, rail networks or the internet – or traditional sociological notions of networks relating to inter-human conn…
Creaturely politics
In living better, the authors consider that there may also be possibilities for a posthumanist emancipatory politics of attachment, and they consider what engagements with non-Western cultures have to teach them about creatureliness. They investigate the ways in which the distinctions of civilisation are linked to discourses around the transcendence of their embodied condition as animals. Rather, certain kinds of humans have &s;uplifted&s; themse…
How to change a complex world?
This chapter lays out the problem – the need for urgent radical action to confront a range of global challenges such as inequality and environmental damage, while at the same time we inhabit a complex world where people actions may not have the outcomes that they anticipate. To understand why complexity thinking could have something to contribute to policy making, one need to provide an explanation of why &s;orderly thinking&s; can lead to proble…
Towards posthumanist emancipation
This chapter contests Latour&s;s presumption that attachment and emancipation are irreconcilable. Ultimately, Burke et al. seem to have a suprising faith in the mechanisms of global governance that borders on an endorsement for authoritarianism, and a continued belief in universalism. The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses isn&s;t that the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, whether one should put up sea walls to protect M…
Emancipation and its critics
Booth has noted, emancipation is a controversial term: &s;ideological critics challenge its implications; friendly critics question its application in specific historical situations; orthodoxies and establishments resist its threat to their interests; and many others do not know what the term means&s;. This chapter attempts to unravel some of these issues. Christian Welzel explicitly considers enlightenment and emancipation as synonymous. Haberma…
Critical posthumanism and the lives of others
This chapter develops earlier ideas on posthuman political theory specifically within the framing of a politics of emancipation or of &s;liberation&s;. It engages with the considerable literature in animal studies and work which, since Peter Singer&s;s call for &s;animal liberation&s; in the 1970s, has made a concerted attempt to extend the project of emancipation beyond the human. Drawing inspiration from the work of Benedictus de Spinoza, Hasan…
A politics of enchantment
This chapter assesses some of the influential work within the field of posthumanist thinking. It explores the potential for political projects of emancipation within a posthumanist frame through the interventions made by Jane Bennett and William Connolly. While Connolly suggests that there are ten distinguishing features which unite the various very different new materialist approaches, we consider that these can be grouped under three main headi…
Politics (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · International relations (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Social science (9 works)