Faculty

Profile

Rafi Youatt is Associate Professor of Global Politics at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. His research focuses on questions relating to environment, ecology, anthropocentrism, and planetary politics, as they relate to practices of international relations. His most recent book is, Interspecies Politics: Nature, States, Borders (University of Michigan Press, 2020). His first book was Counting Species: Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics, published with University of Minnesota Press in 2015. His work has been widely published in journals including Millennium, International Political Sociology, Political Research Quarterly, and Environmental Values. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of International Relations and Development. His current research studies the relationship of terrain to collective political violence in a series of imperial borderlands, both historical and contemporary. Ongoing work includes a collaborative project on the global rat; a short book on the politics of collective walking; and a research cluster on multiple mobilities,  

Degrees Held

PhD 2007, University of Chicago, Political Science

MA 2001, University of Chicago, Committee on International Relations

BA 1997, University of California, Berkeley, Political Science

Recent Publications

BOOKS

Interspecies Politics: Nature, States, Borders (University of Michigan Press, 2020).

Counting Species: Biodiversity in Global Environmental Politics. University of Minnesota Press, (2015).

ARTICLES/CHAPTERS

'Ecologies of Globalization: Mountain Governance and Multinatural Planetary Politics.' in J. Pereira and A Saramago, eds. Nonhuman Nature and World Politics: Theory and Practice. (2020) 

'Anthropocentrism and the Politics of the Living' in Eroukhmanoff, C. and M. Harker, eds. Reflections on the Posthuman in International Relations: The Anthropocene, Security, and Ecology. (2017)

'Images Unwalled: Walls of Water' with Multiple Mobilities Research Cluster. Anthropology Now. (2017) 

‘Personhood and the Rights of Nature: The New Subjects of Contemporary Earth Politics’, International Political Sociology. (2017)

‘Sovereignty and the Wolves of Isle Royale.’ In Political Theory and the Animal-Human Relationship. Grant, J. and V. Jungkunz, eds. (SUNY Press, April 2016).

‘Interspecies.’ Entry for Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. Gabrielson, T., Hall, C., Meyer, J., and Schlosberg, D., eds. (Oxford University Press, 2016).

‘Interspecies Relations, International Relations: Rethinking Anthropocentric Politics.’ Millennium Journal of International Studies. 43(1) (2014), pp. 207-223.

‘Pain, Power, and the Interspecies Politics of Foie Gras.’ Political Research Quarterly. 65(2), (2012), pp. 346-358.

‘Counting Species: Biopower and the Global Biodiversity Census.’ Environmental Values. (2008). 17(3), pp. 393-417.