From the planetary dashboards of the EU’s Digital Twin Earth (Rothe 2024), through Tuvalu’s vision of becoming the world’s first digital nation (Rothe et al. 2024), to Elon Musk’s techno-feudalist ventures, SpaceX and Neuralink, imaginaries of apocalyptic endings multiply and modes of speculative governance surge, each following acts of political mobilisation through existential securitisation “in which life emerges from the point of view of its ending” (Huysmans, 2023: 263), while at the same time striving for a radical severance from the dependencies that define what it means to be "Earthbound" (Latour 2018).
While SpaceX promises a physical escape from planetary collapse in the form of a spaceship carrying human life to an extraterrestrial terra nullius, Neuralink replaces survival with disembodied transcendence by envisioning a transformation of cognition in which consciousness is no longer tethered to organic materiality but dispersed through machinic assemblages.
As the case of the persona Elon Musk or that of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s zero-carbon, cognitive, mega-city project, Neom, demonstrates, these speculative lifeboats are frequently stirred by illustrious techno-paternalists who converge futurist thinking with revisionist conservatism, reactionary geopolitics, and authoritarian rule. The roundtable brings together Delf Rothe, Jef Huysmans, and Stephanie Wakefield to reflect on the ways in which twin-logics of ‘planetary experimentation’ and ‘end-thinking’ shape the present-future of global governance: What kind of onto-epistemological authority do they wield? How are technoscientific infrastructures and their aesthetic and epistemic regimes shaping the conditions of political legibility and exclusion in the present? Crucially, what space—if any— do they leave open for transgressive politics (Huysmans and Nogueira 2025) that move beyond a negative dialectic that oscillates between ‘dystopian catastrophe’ and utopian ‘promise’ (Rothe et al. 2024)? And lastly, which analytical registers allow us to critically make sense of them?
This is a hybrid event, and the number of available seats is limited.
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Speakers
Delf Rothe is a senior researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg and a member of the German research cluster of excellence Climate, Climatic Change, and Society (CLICCS). Previously, in 2018–2021 he was the Principal Investigator of the project ‘The knowledge politics of security in the Anthropocene’ funded by the German Research Foundation. He has published widely on issues including the securitization of climate change, climate-induced migration, security technologies, risk and resilience. He is the author of Securitizing global warming: a climate of complexity (2016).
Stephanie Wakefield is an urban geographer whose work analyzes the philosophical, technological, and environmental transformations of urban life in the 21st century. She is currently Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Design in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University.
Jef Huysmans is Professor of International Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He co- convenes the research cluster Doing International Political Sociology (http://www.doingips.org). He is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity, the securitization of migration, critical methods, and international political sociology. Currently he is working on an international political sociology of fracturing worlds and motioning the politics of (in)security.
MODERATOR
Franca Kappes, Geneva Graduate Institute.
The event is hosted by DoingIPS Switzerland with the generous support of the Global Governance Centre, the International Relations / Political Science Department, and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).