Faculty

Profile

Rafi Youatt is associate professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. His main areas of research are global politics and international relations, with a focus on questions relating to environment, ecology, anthropocentrism, and the politics of the human. 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.

Collaborations at the New School include the Multiple Mobilities Research Group; he also co-convenes the Global Politics Workshop, dedicated to discussion of work in-progress by graduate students and faculty.

Willing to supervise doctoral projects in critical international relations, global environmental politics, and multispecies politics; and experimental, eclectic, and free-thinking projects interested in speaking directly to key questions in global politics.

New projects include a study of the relation of terrain to collective political violence; a short book on the politics of walking; and an ongoing project on the global rat.

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).

SELECTED 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.