This article explores how global ocean governance discourses have been reshaped during the first half of the United Nations’ Ocean Science Decade (2021–2030), with particular attention to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the negotiation of the High Seas Treaty. Drawing on Critical Fantasy Studies and the Nature Futures Framework, we analyse how political fantasies, affectively charged visions that underpin policy action, structure competing imaginaries of future oceans. Through a qualitative analysis of major policy texts, interviews, and participant observations, we identify three dominant fantasies of future oceans: the ocean as saviour, the known ocean, and re-connecting with the ocean. Each offers a distinct vision of future governance, grounded in divergent assumptions about knowledge, nature, and society. We show how these fantasies mobilize political action by combining utopian promises with dystopian fears, and how they sustain or challenge dominant policy trajectories. In particular, we highlight the risk that fantasies of salvation and scientific mastery may perpetuate policy deferrals, while imaginaries grounded in relational values open space for more transformative, justice-oriented governance. Our analysis contributes to growing scholarship on affect, imaginaries, and environmental governance by offering a novel framework for understanding the emotional, ideological, and political investments underpinning international environmental agreements. By examining fantasmatic logics this paper enhances our understanding of why some governance frameworks persist despite limited efficacy, and how alternative imaginaries might open pathways toward more inclusive and transformative ocean governance.

The Anthropocene challenges traditional distinctions between society and the environment, presenting humans as geological agents responsible for irreversible planet-scale damage. The existing global political system, dominated by nation-states and international institutions, struggles to address critical threats to the planet's life. Consequently, reevaluating lifestyles, socio-economic practices, and political institutions becomes imperative in the face of ongoing ecological crises. As societies grapple with persistent ecological emergencies and strive to adapt to rapidly changing physical circumstances, some important political questions arise about what kinds of transformations should be sought after, what policies and practices would achieve these transformations, and who participates in making these decisions. This means reconsidering conceptions of power, justice, and democracy, the last of which is the subject of this chapter. To do this, I discuss challenges for democracy in the Anthropocene, propose some convivial tools with which democracy can be reimagined, and provide proposals that aim to address some of these challenges.

In accounting for the lack of political will to meaningfully tackle environmental crises at a global level, a growing number of scholars argue that we must take seriously the role emotional and unconscious attachments play in policy discourse. In this paper, we argue that the psychic dimension of international environmental sustainability discourse (IESD) remains under-explored compared to the scholarly attention given to the structural and normative dimensions of international environmental politics. We draw on political discourse theory and critical fantasy studies to develop a framework within which to characterize and critically examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic upon IESD. We treat the pandemic as a dislocation, arguing that it provides a particularly productive vantage point from which to explore the fantasmatic underpinnings of IESD. We present an illustrative discourse analysis of relevant UN documents and media productions in 2020-22, foregrounding the political significance of fantasy in international environmental discourse.

The 2023 SDG Summit, which will take place in September during the United Nations (UN) General Assembly high-level week, aims to review the state of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. As 2023 marks the mid-point to 2030, this meeting aims to respond to the impact of multiple and interlocking crises facing the world. The COVID-19 pandemic is only one of these critical crises. The pandemic meant an enormous backlash for the implementation of most SDGs, as discussed in the UN Secretary-General's mid-term progress report Toward a Rescue Plan for People and Planet. Therefore, it is at once an important background to the Summit and one that highlights the common overarching structural issues that underlie SDG implementation, as the pandemic not only posed a global health crisis but also led to lasting changes in policy areas concerning the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda, such as health, mobility, trade, industry, finance, and sustainability. This paper engages with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the practices of the UN High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) and the short-term policy narratives around the SDGs. Its goal is to document some of the changes the pandemic triggered in practices of sustainability governance, based on the findings of a 4-year project that draws on qualitative analysis of participatory observations at the HLPF meetings, document analysis, and in-depth interviews.

There is no longer any serious contender to quration as central approach to social science. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to recount the developments of the qurative turn and what they mean for our understanding of global politics.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by an emergent democratic imaginary of a system of participatory choice that enfranchised (some) existing humans but excluded other species, the colonised spaces and Indigenous peoples from equal citizenship. In the latter part of the twentieth century, each of these excluded elements moved to centre stage, becoming a global and systemic problem for democratic (and other) political systems. In response, democratic theory and practice also shifted, trying to accommodate the practical realities of an increasingly fluid and borderless social and economic world, and recognise the needs and the ontological prevalence of the non-human world, the rights of First Peoples, and the techno-scientific artefacts. In the aftermath of a number of geoengineering failures, and other consequences of the failure to resolve the compounding crises of late twentieth century, the twenty-first century further reconfigured and speciated democracy. If the challenge of the early twenty-first century was the chain of ecological catastrophes until the concept of normalcy vanished, the challenge of the late twenty-first century has been understanding the responses of human societies and non-human communities to this situation.

• Invites reflection on the future of International Relations in the ever changing conditions of the Anthropocene
• Mirrors conventional handbooks by offering theoretical insights along futurist conversations
• Experiments with future as method, and engages with formative political emotions of our time

The Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century (HGP22 is a unique project that diffuses the dichotomy between the factual and the fictional. In a future antérieur style, each contributor to this volume has used their creativity to ask tricky, sad, hopeful, cynical questions: Where is IR, in times of war, climate and ecological catastrophe, and deepening social and political conflicts? Looking at our discipline, a number of anachronistic, but also futurist features seem remarkable: the broken, but re-establishing trust in global cooperation, the trust in post-human techno-fixes that enhance, or sometimes even replace human cooperation thanks to benevolent algorithms, the hope for radical, more-than-human encounters.