Event Date: September 14, 2015 - 12:00
Location: FSS 4007; en présentiel et sur Zoom, 120 Université, Université d\'Ottawa

BENTLEY B. ALLAN, Johns Hopkins University.

Presented by the CIPS and the International Theory Network (ITN).
Free. In English. Registration is not required. Seating is limited and available on a first come, first served basis.

From the 16th century until the 1950s, “the climate” referred to local weather patterns. Today, it is a global geophysical system of molecules and forces subject to a growing governance structure. What explains the emergence of climate governance? How did we get the idea that there was a global climate to be regulated and how did it come to include diverse things like Chinese factories and Indonesian forests? This raises a puzzle for International Relations theory which has focused on how problems end up on the agenda of states, or how they are framed in bargaining and institutional design, but generally ignores the question of how objects of governance are constituted. In this paper, I show that state agencies, especially elements of the U.S. military, shaped the constitution of the climate both by funding the geophysical sciences during the Cold War and by pressing IO experts to expand the climate in the 1990s. Scientists and experts, while influenced by state power, retain the epistemic authority to define, order, and calculate the details of the climate.

Bentley B. Allan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He completed his PhD at Ohio State University in 2012. Allan has research interests in science and global politics, environmental politics, global governance, and qualitative methods. His book manuscript, From Means to Ends: How Scientific Cosmology Transformed International Politics, 1550-2015, traces how scientific ideas have entered international orders since the 16th century to show the effects of scientific cosmologies on the goals of states. His broader research builds on this to promote a nuanced understanding of scientific and expert knowledge in international politics. In addition,with Ted Hopf (National University of Singapore) and Srdjan Vucetic (University of Ottawa), he is working to build a database of national identity reports.

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