Research

‘Some of you may Die, but it’s a Sacrifice I am willing to make’: Existential Narcissism and the Problem(s) of The International

In recent years, a range of International Relations thinkers has begun to grapple with the implications of existentialist theory for analysing world politics. Spurred by a global pandemic, exacerbating climate change, the (increased) threat of nuclear war, and technological developments in artificial intelligence, such scholarship has placed human(ity’s) death and survival at the forefront of IR theorising. This project premises that such work can be enriched by critically engaging with narcissism as a psychoanalytical concept and condition. A few notable exceptions notwithstanding, engagements with narcissism in its own right have featured surprisingly little in IR theorising in general and/or international ontological security studies in particular. Borrowing especially from Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, this project strives to address this lacuna by proposing existential narcissism as a promising concept for understanding various global political dynamics in the Anthropocene. Specifically, it centres three overlapping components of existential narcissism – reckless overconfidence, universalising individuality, and indifference towards others – as key characteristics of the international’s ontology and epistemology. The project indeed concludes that (the problem of) ‘the international’ itself inculcates an existential narcissism, captured neatly in Shrek’s Lord Farquaad’s meme that ‘some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make’.

The Zoo and International Politics: Ecological (Post-)Imperialism and International Status-Seeking

Zoos remain among the most common visiting sites in many places around the globe, yet their significance as an international political space remains somewhat underexplored in IR scholarship. This is especially striking, given the growing body of IR research critiquing some of zoos’ basic make-up, premised on ‘dogmatic ontologies that privilege human life’ and ‘the separation between the natural and human worlds’ (Eroukhmanoff and Harker 2017). Moreover, since zoos around the globe are deeply steeped in imperial histories – originating out of aristocratic menageries, evolving into 19th-century venues of scientific modernity and public displays of colonial exoticism – they provide further insight into how imperial extraction practices have sat at the foundation of international status-seeking, and how these practices reverberate into contemporary international political hierarchies (Subotić 2025).

This project will therefore investigate the role of zoo operations in intersecting the maintenance of human-nonhuman and Global North-South modes of supremacy. Comparing the London and Amsterdam Zoos and their respective (non-)engagement with issues of ecological (post-)imperialism, the project seeks to explore the ways in which hegemonic anthropocentric discourses and practices continue to reinforce the convergence of human-fauna domination with (post-)colonial international politics. Besides the most egregious similarities between (historical) speciesism and racism found in (neo-)imperial narratives, zoos may 1) serve to white-wash states’ (post-)colonial and environmental extractive practice; 2) function akin to imperial museums as repositories of ‘mankind’s heritage’, enabling a (self)-representation as ‘guardians of global nature’; and 3) constitute sites of (post-)imperial infrastructural prowess at the expense of animal well-being.

Discourses of Global Overpopulation in International Politics: Planetary IR and Numerical Ontological Insecurity

While recent IR studies of global existentialism and planetary security have focused extensively on topics like climate change, global health, nuclear threats, and AI technologies, the topic human (over)population as such has received much less attention. This project builds on recent IR research on existentialism and global anxieties about the future, delving specifically into discourses of 'global overpopulation'. Taken as a radical form of 'sociotechnical imaginaries' (Jasanoff and Kim 2015), such discourses narrow down the many challenges of (planetary) existential (in)security to 'simple' quantifiable queries. Borrowing from Audra Mitchell's work critiquing anthropocentric and western-cenric discourses of exctinction and survival, this project explores how discourses of global overpopulation can serve as source of ontological security and insecurity. Emphasising the historical, colonial, and state-centric precendents to contemporary global overpopulation discourses, this project calls for more attention to this topic in Anthropocene IR, multi-species IR, and Planetary IR.