A world worth saving? Race and the war-peace binary in the Anthropocene

Abstract What happens if war and peace are no longer dichotomous? This article shows how recent scholarship on the Anthropocene reconfigures the modernist war-peace binary toward a conception of war as emergent, quotidian, and inherently entangled with the functioning of world order. This expansive conception, I argue, makes “ending” and “preventing” war conceptually impossible. In place of modernist problem-solving, critical Anthropocene scholarship instead advocates for affirmation. However, what this looks like is currently understudied. In this article, I discuss the affirmation of war within three strands of critical Anthropocene thought. First, approaches inspired by New Materialism and Posthumanism envision “becoming with” war in speculative ways beyond the modernist idea of peace. Second, approaches drawing on decolonial and Indigenous thought argue for “becoming otherwise” to war by building worlds free of martial relations. Finally, a third perspective, informed by Black Studies and Afropessimism, rejects affirmation altogether, thus returning the question of how to affirm war to whether it is worth doing at all. This comparative analysis reveals a rift in Anthropocene scholarship that mirrors a larger dilemma of critical thought: whether to seek improvement and adaptation, or to deconstruct the categories of modernity, even if this means forgoing a concrete political program.