Abstract Three images may help to understand planetary politics. The first refers to a Nomos of the Earth defined as a conquest of lands between States. With the Gaia Hypothesis, the second image associates the Earth to a composite entity in the Anthropocene, where conflicts and even a new kind of “war” appear between humans and natural elements. The third, the Spirit of the Earth, defines the planetary as a cosmic star embedded in evolution, where a gradual awareness of the links between humans and the living world is growing. The aim of this paper is to clarify them and to identify their consequences for defining politics. The first tends to confuse war and politics. The second conceives politics in latent state of war even though it suggests a climatic regime that relies on composition between a plurality of actors and also the living. As for the third, it entails a revolution that aimed at a broad decentering of International relations. These three images not only help to refine what we mean by planetary, but also to show that planetary politics is not uniform, and that it can give rise to a plurality of forms of war and conceptions of politics.
Frédéric Ramel (Tue,) studied this question.