Is Posthumanist International Relations a New Hope for Global Ecological Politics? A Critical Realist Response

This paper addresses the question, “Is posthumanism a new hope for global ecological politics?” by examining the structure–agent problem from a critical realist perspective. Despite its theoretical contributions in rejecting dualism and advancing a non-anthropocentric ontology of the nature–human relationship, I argue that posthumanism, grounded in an ontology that excludes the historical and social structures underlying ecological destruction, offers only a limited imagination for global ecological politics and weakens the transformative capacity of social and ecological emancipation. Within this critical realist starting point, I return to historical materialism (HM), which conceptualizes social and ecological processes on the basis of historically constituted relations of production and material conditions. Against reductionist interpretations of HM, I position critical realism (CR) as a meta-theoretical framework. A CR-informed HM posits ontologically distinct causal mechanisms in the structure–agency relation: agents act within the possibilities and constraints of these structures but, through praxis, contribute to their reproduction or transformation. Posthumanism, by contrast, orients global ecological politics not toward transformative praxis but toward a framework centred on adaptation and ethics.