Conceptualizing Planetary International Relations: From Foreign Policy to Planetary Politics of Reparation

Anatomy of a Planetary Crisis: Delineating Planetary Boundaries

As critical IR scholars argue, both realist and liberal frameworks emerge as normative (as opposed to analytical/descriptive) political projects. ²⁷ In other words, they do not describe the reality; they help to create it. The notion of an international anarchic system of sovereign states that constitutes the analytical terrain of IR, serves the political function of historical revisionism, legitimizing the ‘civilizing projects’ of colonial era and the subsequent global injustice of the liberal world order.

If, against the mainstream IR logic, we posit a historical account of ‘the international’ as one characterized by ‘territorially expansive, internally diverse, hierarchically organized political communities called empires’, ²⁸ then the realist foreign policy quests of maximizing national interests across the international sphere emerge as not too dissimilar from liberal internationalism, which imposes the universal ‘rational’ logic of extractivism in the interest of purported economic prosperity ²⁹ and locks the majority of the world in systems of economic subordination under the guise of the rules-based international order.

Liberal internationalism is not threatened by planetary crises; it produces them. As Jahn ³⁰ explains, liberalism emerges as a normative project that promises social stability through economic development that markets, liberated from state intervention, are supposed to deliver. By abolishing the commons and establishing the system of private property, liberalism shifts social, as well as political, relations, which necessitates the expansion of frontiers beyond state borders for the project to be enacted. Enter colonial dispossession. It is this internal contradiction of liberalism, as attainment of social welfare through dispossession, that produces power politics as a crucial normative element of seemingly technical capitalist logic of profit maximization through rational resource use. ³¹ These same power politics propose social stratification through racialized and gendered narratives in the supposed interest of economic production, seen as a proxy of Western ‘improvement’, often pursued through foreign policy. ³² The ongoing colonial logic of improvement presumes endless growth based on a flawed assumption of inexhaustible planetary resources.

Yet, our planetary limitations are increasingly harder to ignore. As Dalby notes, ‘the humanity is now changing “natural” systems on such a scale that we have in effect become a new geological force in the biosphere’. ³³ The Earth systems science ³⁴ (ESS) literature shows that since 1950s, the intensification of human activity has reached levels that interfere with the ability of the Earth’s ecosystems to reproduce themselves, with biophysical systems (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, and cryosphere) getting increasingly anthropogenic (human-mediated). ³⁵ A crisis of just one of these systems triggers cataclysms ESS is unable to fully predict, let alone avert. The recent acknowledgement that the Earth will most likely surpass the tipping point of the global mean surface temperature (GMST) increase beyond 1.5°C (with increases beyond 3° likely without radical reversals of our socio-economic organization), promises a devastating domino effect. ³⁶ A GMST increase of 3° we are set to exceed by 2050 would expedite the Greenland Ice Sheet melting, which in turn is expected to slow down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, resulting in faster melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that will shift the Intertropical Convergence Zone and impact weather patterns across the Amazon rainforest. In anthropocentric terms, three billion people would be exposed to health-threatening levels of heat. ³⁷

Our ‘planetary boundaries’, demarcated as points of anthropogenic disruption of the Earth’s ecosystems, we can tolerate without catastrophic consequences, are increasingly transgressed. Out of nine planetary boundaries, six are already transgressed (climate change, biodiversity, land-system change, freshwater change, novel entities, and biogeochemical flows). ³⁸ Our ability to sustain and reproduce life on Earth is meeting geophysical and social dead ends. Given the reasonably shared interest in addressing planetary crises of climate change and rapidly declining biodiversity, as well as the bio-chemical, geological, and socio-political catastrophes resulting from them, the traditional IR agenda of deterrence due to a potential mutually assured destruction of nuclear warfare should cede ground to a shared agenda of planetary safeguarding in the interest of mutually assured survival. However, our global governance is not designed for collaborative politics of planetary repair. IR has traditionally rejected the hybridity of ‘multiple sites of political authority’ that characterize relational forms of governance, we need to address the planetary crisis of interconnected Earth systems. ³⁹

The IR dogma of states’ exclusive sovereign control over territorially delineated fragments of ecosystems relegates land, bodies of water, biosphere and atmosphere to the category of national resources, governed within state borders, leading to a global race to resource grab. ⁴⁰ ‘Global commons’, currently encompass only natural areas outside of state jurisdictions (such as Antarctica, the outer space, the high seas, and deep seabed), leaving limited space for international collaboration in the interest of the preservation of planetary ecosystems. ⁴¹ The IR imaginary of an anarchical set of horizontally organized and geographically delineated states, therefore, obfuscates the ecological entanglements that transcend state boundaries.

Moreover, ESS and IR affirm general categories of ‘the state’, obfuscating geopolitical responsibility for planetary depletion, as well as its repair. Those least responsible for the planetary breakdown (the majority of the people in historically exploited countries) are the most exposed to its material consequences. High-income countries produce 34% of global emissions while hosting merely 15% of the human population. ⁴² The already unequal global economic exchange is exacerbated by the ecological uneven exchange, as low- and middle-income countries suffer debt burden and unfair trade conditions, which limit state capacity to amortize human and environmental costs of planetary degradation. ⁴³

Rich countries continuously quash efforts to reform global governance (in particular the international financial architecture and trade) in line with planetary concerns and in continuation of anti-colonial, internationalist, and eco-feminist agendas. ⁴⁴ Given the stronghold of high-income countries over global resources and multilateral organizations, Southern initiatives for global governance redesign are integrated in, instead of being fundamentally opposed to, colonial capitalism. Climate justice initiatives like commitments to reducing carbon emissions folded into global capitalist relations produce perverse effects such as further dispossession of unpaid (including social reproduction and earthcare labour across historically exploited regions. ⁴⁵

As a result, many radical worldmaking projects are emerging outside of (and explicitly against) existing statal and supra-statal institutions. In this context, the unresolved questions of global (in)justice IR ignore with its bias towards the status quo of global governance ⁴⁶ emerges as an obstacle of articulating a shared agenda of planetary survival. Reiterating my disagreement with Burke et al.’s understanding of planet politics as unidirectionally future-oriented, the question of ‘who is responsible [for] the world we have created’ ⁴⁷ they believe should be disregarded must, instead, be recognized at the core of our collective re-orientation towards planetary survival.

Planetary alternatives must account for the racialized and gendered hierarchies through which capitalist accumulation and depletion are organized. As eco-socialist feminists remind us, planetary degradation is intimately tied to the crises of social reproduction because the capitalist logic of ever-growing accumulation demands ongoing exploitation of biophysical processes and human labour needed to reproduce human and non-human forms of life. ⁴⁸ Capitalism requires social reproduction through which workers are born, cared for, educated, and kept healthy enough to work, yet it depletes it by dispossessing people of time, environmental conditions, and physical and psycho-social capacity they need to perform it. ⁴⁹ As Barca ⁵⁰ highlights, the environmental breakdown has impeded ‘earthcare’, the praxis of caring for the environmental systems and enabling their reproduction, fundamentally reorienting workers from economic to environmental actors.

The call to re-organize global and local economies is ever-louder, as cyclical crises of capitalism further erode social welfare, labour conditions, and resources to care for one another and the rest of our environment, transfer knowledge, and provide psycho-social and economic security. ⁵¹ Collective efforts to co-produce alternative models of societal organization, moving beyond capitalist categories of production, land, and social reproduction, as Lyn Ossome ⁵² suggests, are a political project that binds micro-level, every day, practical strategies for resisting politics of planetary depletion across economic, state, and cultural divisions. ⁵³ Restructuring eco-social relations calls for a careful delineation of an ontological turn towards planet politics.

Recovering the Heritage of Planet Politics

Our anthropocentric ontology, whereby nature is a fixed, predictable, and unmitigable environment in which humans wield full agency, is untenable. Replacing a global econometric lens with a planetary understanding of humans as a part of nature challenges the modernist logic of commodification, which is ‘an essential condition of possibility for capital accumulation’ through dehumanization in the form of racialization, as well as heterosexualism, sexism, and ableism. ⁵⁴ By highlighting the continuities of capitalist harm to humans and the rest of nature, planetary ontologies help us trace the interconnections between seemingly fragmented political struggles for political recognition, economic redistribution, and ecological reparation.

By re-casting the human into the broader world ecology, inexorably connected to all other forms of life on Earth, a planetary lens expands the focus from global economic activity to the broader set of biophysical as well as labour processes that organize societies and ecologies. ⁵⁵ Within the global frame, humans are inescapably nested within a totalizing system of capitalist economy: everything is reducible to an economic category. ⁵⁶ Instead, planetary ontologies point to the limitations of human agency, especially over natural ecosystems, allowing us to understand humans as ‘planetary subjects rather than global agents’ ⁵⁷ bound by the mutuality of relations that make life on Earth possible.

Planetary ontology underpins many projects of anti-colonial liberation. Achille Mbembe ⁵⁸ traces planetary politics back to Fanon’s writing, while Joanna Crow ⁵⁹ and Inés Valdez ⁶⁰ point to the anti-colonial Latin American socialist projects grounded in the recognition of Indigenous eco-conscious and subaltern onto-epistemologies (as well as material proposals of land restitution and reparations for slavery). Similarly, many anti-colonial Pan-African projects criticized the modernist bias of development teleologies, pointing to the importance of African cosmologies in the advancement of continental reconciliation, spiritual and psychological repair, and collective reconstruction of post-colonial societies. ⁶¹ Many Indigenous ontologies, notwithstanding their diversity, share a planetary ontology of humanity fulfilled in relation with the territory and a broader episteme of interconnectedness. ⁶² Therefore, planetary ontology informs a praxis that positions any and all human (in)action as a political intervention that either threatens or aims to repair conditions for life on Earth. ⁶³

Planetarity informs anti-colonial projects of liberation that encompass (the unachieved) economic sovereignty of the majority of the world, but also territorial sovereignty that allows for the repair of Indigenous ecologies, understood as a set of relations in which humans and nature exercise agency.^64,65 As Whyte, Caldwell, and Schaefer ⁶⁶ explain, colonialism involved a violent replacement of Indigenous ecologies, ⁶⁷ which ‘physically manifest Indigenous governance systems through origin, religious, and cultural narratives, ways of life, political structures and economies’ with settler ecologies that only recognize human agency over nature.

Diverse Indigenous ontologies contemplate the spirit in non-human life, which mediates their relationship to the rest of nature and to humans. For Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples, for instance, human thought and action are understood as deriving from specific places and historical events. Colonial displacement and the imposition of settler ecologies, therefore, forecloses Indigenous futurity by limiting Indigenous people’s ability to not only self-govern but also exercise agency in line with their own cosmologies and ethics that derive from them. ⁶⁸ In this sense, the question of sovereignty and agency emerge at the heart of anti-colonial paradigms that are, unlike modernist quests for domination over nature, embedded in more-than-human diplomacies. More than a struggle for land ownership, Indigenous claims of sovereignty are reclaiming collective agency to repair ‘qualities of relationships of the colonized societies that have developed over many years’, including motivation, which is an affective and reciprocal kind of responsibility humans nurture alongside the rest of nature in the interest of mutual survival. ⁶⁹

Planetary cosmologies have generally been excluded from IR statist frameworks, which have folded Indigenous ecologies, and political projects aimed at their preservation, to the pre-modern, underdeveloped terrain of legitimized capitalist intervention. ⁷⁰ As Stewart-Harawira ⁷¹ shows, the liberal approach to Indigenous resistance translated demands of sovereignty into rights-claims under the ‘right to development’ approach that promised, but never delivered, socio-economic welfare in exchange for collaboration with settler states, such as the sale of land and the agreement with projects of natural extraction.

The resulting settler-Indigenous relations reflect the kind dependency that characterizes Western developmentalism, with settler colonial states seen as the only legitimate agentic actors bearing responsibility over Indigenous peoples within their colonial borders. ⁷² By contrast, Indigenous claims of self-determination reflect an ontology that dictates reciprocal autonomy (responsibility towards one another), grounded in place-based interdependence. ⁷³ In this sense, Indigenous ontologies fundamentally re-orient the field of IR away from the statist worldviews grounded in the ‘logics of sovereign authority and territorial exclusivity’ ⁷⁴ and towards ‘relational autonomy’, conducive to the creation of political communities mediated by relationships deriving from the respect for ‘the ontological significance of other’. ⁷⁵ Within this framework, sovereignty is defined as ‘multiple and overlapping’, ⁷⁶ as well as attributed to both human and non-human life, given the independence of natural ecosystems whose biophysical laws the humanity is called to respect. ⁷⁷

Relational ontologies position care (as opposed to capitalist production) at the centre of societal organization. ⁷⁸ Recovering forms of such ecological diplomacy requires the configuration of ‘peace formations that can and do often entail zones of conflict’ without creating a ‘relation of capture’. ⁷⁹ Shifting from global governance to planet politics ‘offers thus an epistemic path (. . .) to advance explorations in how inequalities are embedded in complex interactions of biogeochemical cycles, governance, and socio-political pressures to allocate resources and outline distinct development trajectories at multiple spatio-temporal scales’. ⁸⁰

Overall, planet politics emerge as an open-ended epistemic orientation; not a clearly defined political agenda. Moving beyond modernism and secularism, without necessarily renouncing historical materialism, planetary thinking allows for pluralistic and coalitional politics that can prefigure alternative societies we need for planetary survival by binding seemingly diverse political agendas into generally (but not exclusively) compatible projects of planetary repair. Enveloped in this ontological vastness, Burke et al.’s ⁸¹ invitation to conceptualize planet politics emerges a relatively abstract project. Without ambitions of delineating a finite political agenda, I offer possible directions in the subsequent section, drawing on Canada’s apparent foreign policy impasse, and the alternatives to settler colonial projects amidst shared planetary crises.

Nation-Building Amidst Forest Fires: The Inevitable Self-Betrayal of Settler Colonial Politics

Despite its ostensibly feminist framing, Canada’s foreign policy reaffirms colonial mechanisms of domination. ⁸³ Layering liberal cosmopolitanism on top of realist foreign policy frameworks has yielded rhetorical but immaterial political change, while obfuscating the failure of the Canadian state to uphold human rights within and outside its borders. Smith and Ajadi ⁸⁴ highlight the historical continuity of foreign policy implementation gaps, with commitments to human security (in late 1990s) and feminism (since 2015) failing to materialize across the institutional change-resistant framework of trade, military, and diplomacy. Similarly, the Trudeau Government’s twofold agenda of improving nation-to-nation relations within its settler colonial borders, while advancing feminist global futures, has fallen short ⁸⁵ despite the (unacceptably delayed) 2021 ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Moreover, Midzain-Gobin and Dunton ⁸⁶ show that Canada’s foreign policy perpetuates coloniality through developmentalist approaches to international assistance, undermining domestic promises of the reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Canada’s policy capacity to not only produce the feminist foreign policy framework announced in 2021 (and then abandoned in 2025) ⁸⁷ but also implement any transformative commitments has been deemed insufficient and likely to distract from the government’s lacklustre promotion of Indigenous sovereignty and racial justice in the ‘domestic’ sphere. ⁸⁸

An incoherent medley of realpolitik and liberalism leaves unresolved tensions between the vaguely defined feminist ethics ⁸⁹ and self-interested trade policy, resulting in paradoxes of Canada as a ‘nation of feminist arm dealers’, as Vučetić ⁹⁰ provokes. By conflating national interests with the interests of Canadian corporations, particularly those involved in large-scale mining, Canada promotes extractive economies that undermine the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples (on Turtle Island and globally). ⁹¹

Foreign policy threats are leveraged to legitimize domestic projects of environmental devastation. Globally, Canada ranks 12th for total carbon emissions and second for greenhouse gas emission per capita. ⁹² Yet, with the excuse of the US tariffs and threats of territorial annexation, the Carney Government spearheaded Bill C-5 in the first months in office, which fast-tracks energy infrastructure operations explicitly proclaimed as ‘nation-building projects’. Indigenous and settler academics and civil society groups have decried Bill C-5 as an attempt to abrogate Indigenous rights to prior and informed consent, as well as a reversal of Liberal Party promises to prioritize environmental protection. ⁹³ Given climate change repercussions, Carney Government’s domestic ‘nation building’ agenda assumes global proportions, threatening our planetary survival.

The Canadian government is sleeping through the alarms. The 2025 wildfire season represented the second worst wildfire in the Canadian history, displacing 85,000 people, including 45,000 people from 73 First Nations communities, and affecting 8.3 million hectares of land. ⁹⁴ During the worst season, recorded in 2023, fire engulfed an unprecedented 15 million hectares (7 times the annual average) and forced 200,000 people to evacuate due to fire-related health concerns. ⁹⁵ Further catastrophes resulting from environmental breakdown include mutually exacerbating as well as increasingly frequent and severe floods and droughts, overwhelmed municipal infrastructure, degraded water quality, eroded soil conditions, triggered water and food scarcity, promoted waterborne disease, increased home insurance and repair costs, and worsened mental health crises. ⁹⁶

Indigenous communities are the most affected by climate change due to historical and ongoing systemic inequalities. For example, about 80% of Indigenous communities are in or near fire-prone regions, ⁹⁷ which is why 42% Parks Canada evacuations happen in communities whose population is primarily Indigenous. ⁹⁸ In addition to the material damage and health hazards, forest fires threaten Indigenous cultural preservation (e.g. by obliterating sacred sites or threatening traditional subsistence activities such as foraging, fishing, or hunting). Due to declining biodiversity and worsening climate change, Inuit communities, in particular, are facing existential risks, with their housing, access to food and clean water, as well as livelihoods, threatened by land erosion, melting permafrost, loss of lakes and rivers, and drastic biosphere loss. ⁹⁹

Planetary crises are exacerbated by the Government disregard for Indigenous land custodianship. For example, disregard for Indigenous warnings about unsustainable forestry practices, as well as the ban of Indigenous-controlled burning, despite the proven ecological advantages such as preventing or mitigating large fires, have been cited as a contributing to the country’s wildfires. In the context of our planetary breakdown, the government is pressured to reconsider its increasingly life-threatening frameworks that ignore Indigenous praxis. Indigenous practices are, however, as Midzain-Gobin shows, only accepted insofar as they can be lodged within settler colonial epistemic and political rationality. ¹⁰⁰

Much like the recent reversal on the ban of Indigenous-controlled burning, Canada is called to reconsider the self-proclaimed superiority of modernist frameworks of socio-economic organization. Yet the Canadian state is not denouncing its settler projects of domination over nature. Even before Carney’s ‘nation-building projects’, Royal Bank of Canada forecasted investments of $525b in natural resource projects over the next decade, with only $50b expected to benefit Indigenous communities onto whose land these projects are planned. ¹⁰¹ Furthermore, Canada protects the interests of mining companies registered in the country, which make up for 75% of this global industry, which holds a track record of human and environmental rights abuse. ¹⁰² State support for mining companies is often legitimized through the marginal benefits the sector has on the economy, although it only accounts for 6% of the gross domestic product. ¹⁰³

Canada protects mining interests at home and abroad through the abrogation of Indigenous rights. Latent symmetries of colonial violence emerge in the comparison of, for example, Canada’s deployment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) against the Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their allies in British Columbia ¹⁰⁴ and the support for private mining companies’ violation of human and environmental rights abroad, documented across Argentina, Chile, Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, ¹⁰⁵ as well as Brazil and Ecuador, ¹⁰⁶ and against the Indigenous tribes in what is colonially known as Wrangell Island, Southeast Alaska^107,108. This state-sanctioned violation of rights is enabled by the IR logic of states’ exceptional sovereignty and in the interest of state provision of economic welfare.

As Midzain-Gobin explains, it is through the promise of settler colonial economic comfort, guaranteed through continuous economic and territorial expansion, that the Canadian state implicates its citizens in the violation of Indigenous rights. ¹⁰⁹ Indigenous rights are portrayed as against the project of Canada’s nation-building through the pursuit of economic and social welfare. The recent nation-building projects, therefore, rest on the lasting IR imaginary of Indigenous identities, cosmologies, and political projects like land claims as situated ‘outside of the discourse of sovereignty’. ¹¹⁰ By legitimizing projects of state-led expansion at the expense of the Indigenous other, IR categories obfuscate the power relations across a multitude of political communities within Canadian borders. ¹¹¹ Therefore, the fictional yet constitutive categories of IR, such as the foreign/domestic binary and the sovereign exclusivity of the Canadian state as the only territorially sovereign actor, rests on the traditionally opposing material interests between Canadian settlers on one hand, and those dispossessed by the Canadian politics within its borders and abroad on the other.

However, in the context of a planetary breakdown, extractive economies pose an existential threat to all life on Earth. The benefits of settler colonial comfort are eroded by the everyday reality of breathing in the forest fire smoke, navigating flooded streets, and budgeting for the ever-rising price of basic commodities. In this context, the answer to King’s question ‘whose national interests is Canada’s foreign policy serving?’ reveals a degree of shared betrayal of both Indigenous and settler interest in survival and, therefore, convergence of political agendas.

Resisting Canada: Politics of Rights and Reparation

Through the resistance of Canada’s settler colonial project, and its cultural, economic, and environmental governance predicated on modernist domination over nature, we can articulate diverse yet interconnected agendas that reject the false binary of foreign and domestic spheres of intervention. Planetary resistance questions Canada’s sovereignty, defined through the colonial logic of territory as ‘the spatial ontology of the productive society’. ¹¹² The colonial myth of terra nullius is the foundational dogma of liberalism, ¹¹³ legitimizing dispossession of lands and the largest genocide in human history. ¹¹⁴ Globally, this myth emerges as simultaneously politically rejected (e.g. in UNDRIP and related commitments to the reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples) but also latently embedded in the liberal logic of rational economic productivity, oriented at profit maximization through ‘rational’ exploitation of nature (seen as economic resources). ¹¹⁵ By de-legitimizing Indigenous onto-epistemologies and resulting ecologies and economies, the liberal logic erases Indigenous peoples from the record of history and projects for the future. ¹¹⁶

In constitutional terms, Canada’s governance is set up in function of the colonizer (the British monarchy), with delegated authority to execute imperial orders across the ‘treaty nations’. ¹¹⁷ Canada’s sovereignty warrants scrutiny, even if we ignore the vast unceded lands within Canada’s borders, as Youngblood Henderson warns that the colonial interpretation of existing treaties violates the Indigenous principles of ‘empathetic and consensual federation’. ¹¹⁸ Through historical revisionism, Indigenous hospitality, as an invitation to shared, consensual, and overlapping sovereignty, understood as land custodianship and a planetary equilibrium, has been supplanted with imperialist narratives of capitulation to the ‘technologically superior’ colonizing sovereign. This reductionist interpretation of treaties delivers colonial mandates for the violation of Indigenous sovereignty in pursuit of capitalist accumulation. ¹¹⁹

Recuperating para-diplomacy based on multiple and overlapping sovereignties that govern ‘relationships that are many, varied, connected and – crucially – occurring between and across multiple sovereign nations’ within Canada’s borders ¹²⁰ implies a rejection of the domestic/foreign policy dualism. Instead, the agenda of relational diplomacies revisits the historical responsibility for reparation, which must precede reconciliation. Crucial for this agenda are ongoing claims of Indigenous self-government of Indigenous peoples, with over 92% of 600+ Indigenous communities in Canada lacking a self-government agreement. ¹²¹ The exceptional 8% of communities obtained agreements through lengthy judicial action, with the notable historical example of the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement resulting from the opposition of the Inuit and Cree peoples of a hydroelectric development project on their unceded lands. ¹²² Another key historical precedent is the 1997 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada, which recognizes the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en peoples’ land rights (Aboriginal title). More recently, the 2006 Nunavik Inuit Land Claims Agreement resulted in the creation of Cree Regional Authority and the Kativik Regional Government, with mandates that include service provision of healthcare, education, and social services, as well as other functions such as wildlife management.^123,124

Indigenous judicial pursuits are lengthy, costly, and difficult to enforce, with the Canadian government often operating outside domestic and international law. ¹²⁵ Indigenous peoples are forced to pay for legal representation by borrowing from the Canadian state, therefore reducing the eventual settlement. Meanwhile, Canada’s legal representation is underwritten by taxpayers, with the Crown-Indigenous Relations Canada, for example, spending over $100m on court battles with First Nations during its first years of existence.^126,127

Despite obstacles, Indigenous judiciary pursuits continue to limit Canada’s colonial over-reach. For example, in 2023, the Human Rights Tribunal approved a $23.4b settlement for Indigenous victims of Canada’s discriminatory child welfare system ¹²⁸ and in 2024, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against the Province of Quebec, affirming Indigenous people’s rights to self-government with respect to child and family services. ¹²⁹ Moreover, after the unanimous ruling in favour of the Anishinaabe people residing in the area of the 1850 Robinson-Superior treaty, the Government of Canada is left to negotiate a settlement worth billions of dollars due to 174 years of denied proper annuities in exchange for the lands and water use. ¹³⁰

Indigenous claims of self-governance are more than judiciary claims of economic redistribution (which stands as a requisite, but not the totality of Indigenous struggle). As Walcott ¹³¹ explains, Indigenous resistance transcends contestations of territorial sovereignty, conjuring ‘a quite specific refusal of forms of history that bind to original and imagined homelands. (. . .) especially when national claims are at stake and history is addressed as a kind of bind that can blind one to continued injustices’. For Ritskes, ¹³² resisting Canada is a counter-hegemonic project, or politics of truth-telling: ‘it is not merely a rejection of the violence of the state, but a generative stance, the opening of otherwise possibilities’. In this sense, Indigenous challenges of Canada aim to redress precisely the type of historical revisionism that critical IR scholars decry. ¹³³ Ritskes ¹³⁴ explains that ‘Indigenous nationhood demonstrates for us a possibility that requires a different sort of embodied relationality and accountability to one another, and to the land on which we live. (. . .) In refusal (. . .) we open space for otherwise possibilities to be dreamt and built into being’.

Under a planetary lens, Indigenous resistance of Canada is not about exclusive rights-seeking within the neoliberal citizenship (which as Beier ¹³⁵ warns leads to subordination of Indigenous ontologies), but a collective articulation of a reciprocal responsibility to ensure societal organization that allows us to repair social, political, and environmental conditions for life. An example of such politics is the 2021 memorandum of understanding, Nunavik Inuit, Cree, and Naskapi peoples in Northern Quebec signed to articulate a joint pursuit of Indigenous self-government and joint wildlife management. ¹³⁶ Similarly, in October 2025, Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation Chief Roger Redman, alongside delegates from Indigenous representatives residing within the colonial borders of Canada, United States, and Mexico, announced the re-establishment of long-standing trade routes, forming an Indigenous-led trade corridor and recovering the nation-to-nation relationships colonial borders severed across the Turtle Island. ¹³⁷

The project of Indigenous self-governance is one of planetary interconnections, as the political fight is not based on fixed identities but collective potentiality in relation to the territory: who we can become, by caring for one another and the planet. Planet politics recognize settler colonialism as a project that has ruptured nation-to-nation relationships and the intercultural translation and mediation that must underpin them. Refusing Canada is, therefore, not merely a deconstructive exercise but a dialectic from which a ‘refounding’ of a nation may be possible. ¹³⁸ As Little Bear ¹³⁹ argues:

If Canada were to be a true nation, it’s going to have to (. . .) acknowledge its Aboriginal roots. Canada may have a constitution. Canada may have a government. Canada may have a legal system, [. . .but] it doesn’t arise from a mutual relationship with the totality of the ecology of the territory.

If we understand planet politics as an agenda of developing a mutual relationship with the totality of the ecology, then it emerges as undoing of the totalizing project of capitalist domination, organized through the practices of epistemic negation, erasure, bordering, and control. Indigenous diplomacies occupy the empty space left from Canada’s abdication of its responsibility to the environmental protection and propose a collective articulation of mutual (nation-to-nation) relationships with the territory onto which Indigenous and settler communities are participating in a variety of worldmaking projects. ¹⁴⁰

Undoing the colonial logic of depletion requires concrete reparations. Citing Taiaike Alfred, Milward calls for ‘massive restitution of land and economic resources [needed] to help Indigenous peoples regain their dignity and strength’. ¹⁴¹ As Walcott ¹⁴² notes, moving beyond colonial co-optations means binding the ethical commitment to recognizing Indigenous rights but also Indigenous cosmologies, in all their diversity, with political (as in material) reparation: ‘to conceive of the ethical without the political is to unhinge the very difficult but necessary question of what justice might look like’. Planetary politics, therefore, do not encompass exclusively agendas that are mutually compatible, but it does require an unwavering commitment to consensual solutions that reflect past and ongoing injustice towards Indigenous peoples.

As Manuel ¹⁴³ argues, nation-to-nation negotiations are long overdue, given Canada’s failure to respect the outcomes of the 1996 Royal Commission, the Charter of Rights, and Supreme Court Rulings recognizing the Aboriginal title, all of which give grounds for discussion about an economic relationship characterized by an enormous debt after over a century and a half of land and resource dispossession, as well as psycho-cultural harm. In addition to financial reparations, the recognition and the application of Indigenous self-governance would lead to a co-construction of structures of environmental repair, grounded in Indigenous values. To allow for what is otherwise an economically divisive platform, a profound re-examination of the ethics of the Canadian state must take place across diverse Canadian societies.

Indigenous Diplomacies as Planetary Diplomacies

Recuperating the mutuality of relationship with the territory does not imply protectionist localism. On the contrary, a planetary approach that draws on Indigenous onto-epistemologies offers a direction for transcending the limitations of our current global diplomacy. As Beier ¹⁴⁴ notes, Indigenous diplomacies ‘underwritten by autonomous and purposeful agency’ have reoriented from ‘Indigenous globalism’ (of vertically integrating various disjointed local Indigenous agendas across global fora, which reflects the status quo of our global governance) to ‘global indigenism’ (horizontal networks of Indigenous peoples across the world with solidaristic and coordinated interventions). Indigenous diplomacies emerge as not only inevitably international, located in territories with overlapping sovereign claims, but also traditionally pursued in international diplomatic fora given the limitations of justice pursuits within settler jurisdictions. ¹⁴⁵

Manuel ¹⁴⁶ traces century-old project of global indigenism, dating back to the 1923 appeal of the hereditary chief of the Cayugas, Deskaheh (Six Nations Iroquois) to the League of Nations to intervene in Canada’s failure to uphold Indigenous land rights. Although ultimately unsuccessful, this expedition was followed by the establishment of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) in 1975, with the objective of representing the Fourth World ‘trapped within states in the First, Second, and Third Worlds who had been kept isolated and voiceless for too long’. ¹⁴⁷ Over the following decades, WCIP advanced collective Indigenous rights at the United Nations, ultimately producing UNDRIP in 2007. Today, UNDRIP offers international challenge of state sovereignty, with articles 26, 27, 28, and 32 in direct contradiction of Canadian land claims. Indigenous globalism promotes parallel nation-to-nation diplomacies and treaty-making across and within colonial lines of jurisdiction grounded in shared relationship to the territory. ¹⁴⁸ Therefore, it represents a possible model for planetary diplomacy that transcends narrow statist frameworks.

Indigenous diplomacy can also inform the kind of solidarity we need to address states’ diverging interests before planetary challenges. For instance, Indigenous peoples of the Inuit Circumpolar Council have made an exception in their global opposition of persistent organic pollutants (which disproportionately harm Inuit communities) for the benefit of poor communities in the tropical, malaria-prone, regions who use these substances to produce mosquito repellents. ¹⁴⁹ By establishing relationships of mutual care, grounded in shared understandings of diverse connection to natural ecosystems humans inhabit, Indigenous diplomacies are able to account for diversity even in the case of seemingly competing interests.

Coalitions for Planet Politics

Internationalist ethics of planet politics translates to Canada, given its inherently international ‘domestic’ sphere. Outlining alternative politics of settler-Indigenous solidarity, Walcott borrows Brand’s notion of ‘diaspora consciousness’, pointing at the internationalist ethic ‘that refuses current transnational capital’s organisation of our lives’, inviting us to ‘rethink the terms of belonging from merely those of a multicultural recognition to those of an ethic of hospitality’. ¹⁵⁰ Planetary solidarity helps to re-orient us away from settler colonial multiculturalism of market-inclusion without denying its hegemonic influence among the immigrant community in Canada based on the consciousness arising from effective implicatedness in its tragedies. In other words, as rampant forest fires, floods, and rising economic inequality expose the limits of Canada’s settler colonial comfort, collective interests across Canada’s diverse demographic groups are converging. As Pratt reminds us: ‘stereotypes suppose that only Indigenous people, not colonizers, became inextricably embedded in landscape, ecology, and place. But of course, that is entirely false. In that ruined house, the chronotropic power of geography and history, for better or worse, [holds] them all’. ¹⁵¹

The interconnectedness of social, environmental, and economic agendas of planetary reparation are particularly clear in Canada, where 44% of people are first- or second-generation settlers. ¹⁵² By virtue of their settlement, they are implicated in Canada’s ongoing colonial project, as many immigrated fleeing conflict, political persecution, or economic deprivation as a direct or indirect consequence of colonial capitalism. Once in Canada, recent immigrants receive lower salaries and are less likely to access public services like healthcare. ¹⁵³ Canada’s migration policies further advance capitalist aims through market-driven policies: high-paid immigrants are granted a permanent status and a path to citizenship, while low-paid agricultural workers generally get only temporary visas and are denied labour conditions and social safety nets reserved to other migrant/citizen categories. ¹⁵⁴ Politics of migration and citizenship, for the most part, are based on perceived prospective contributions to the capitalist project. However, as Midzain-Gobin ¹⁵⁵ notes, the implicatedness of Canadian settlers does not necessarily imply complicity.

Canada’s recent settlers, from a planetary lens, are also victims of the ‘global Canada’. The ‘push’ factors of forced migration to settler colonies from formerly colonized or otherwise economically dispossessed ecologies reveal shared histories but also political interests in the dismantlement of the ‘political ecology of colonial capitalism’ which operates on racialized logic that has subjugated Indigenous and Black cosmologies, but also land rights, labour, and bodily autonomy to expansive colonial projects. ¹⁵⁶ Opposing the totalizing project of colonial capitalist depletion, therefore, reveals a terrain for coalitional politics that, in the current stage of planetary crisis, emerge as politics of mutually assured survival.

Refusing Canada’s settler colonial project involves a conscious rupture with the socio-political and economic system in which virtually everyone is implicated as a citizen, migrant, consumer, political subject, community member, etc. These coalitions take the form of, for example, settler-Indigenous solidarity that characterizes social movements defending Indigenous land rights as a collective project of recovering conditions for life, as a whole. Historically, settler colonial states have strategically divided quests for Indigenous and, for example, racial justice, with descendants of Black enslaved people and other historically marginalized groups affirming the Canadian state through their pursuits of political and economic rights. ¹⁵⁷ However, joint political struggles against state (including police) violence, suppression of cultural (including linguistic) heritage of Indigenous and racialized peoples, and other forms of systemic racism have produced forms of cultural, socio-political, and ecological coalitions (see Néhéh-Nombré ¹⁵⁸ ).

As the settler environmental movement in Canada shifts from environmental conservationism, traditionally grounded in white supremacy, ¹⁵⁹ to political ecology informed by the devastation of colonial capitalism, Indigenous-settler solidarity moves away from the ‘relationships of capture’ ¹⁶⁰ and towards reciprocal responsibility of resisting planetary depletion (e.g. the conversations of Climate Activists and Indigenous Land Defenders ¹⁶¹ ).

Intensification of transversal solidarity in protection of Indigenous notions of sovereignty, which poses an inherent challenge to the Canadian state, ¹⁶² is exemplified by the aforementioned resistance of the Canadian usurpation of Wet’suwet’en land rights in the interest of the Coastal GasLink energy project. In response to RCMP repression of protest and arrests of Indigenous youth and elders, as well as allies and journalists, settlers and other Indigenous peoples blocked railway corridors and ports, interrupting some of the most lucrative economic routes from coast to coast and stranding hundreds of millions of goods during the 2-week shutdown. ¹⁶³ In addition to mass solidarity protests organized in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, allies all across Canada directed solidarity statements to Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, which included those from the British Columbia Government Employees Union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, postal workers and nurses’ unions, as well as the largest union group in Canada, the CUPE. ¹⁶⁴

After the blockades, a Canada-wide coalition of 150 organizations signed a petition for a COVID-19 just recovery, including demands of upholding Indigenous rights and as the government responsibility of ensuring free, prior and informed consent before any projects on Indigenous land. ¹⁶⁵ The same coalition called on a global consortium of banks to withdraw funding from Coastal GasLink, given their failure to uphold the Wet’suwet’en rights, reflecting a clash between global capitalism and the coalition of eco-conscious, planetary actors. ¹⁶⁶

The Canadian media largely portrayed land defenders as threats to the country’s sovereignty, echoing racializing and criminalizing frames often deployed in othering asylum seekers, despite the international law protections of both groups’ rights. ¹⁶⁷ Yet, solidarity groups spoke against the police intervention, as well as the subsequent criminalization of 20 land defenders, including the sentencing of the Chief Dsta’hyl for peaceful protest. ¹⁶⁸ Increasingly, the Canadian state’s disregard of Indigenous rights, the international law as it pertains to migration, social rights across federal and provincial levels, as well as its own electoral promise of regularizing temporary migrant workers is creating conditions for solidarity networks across social workers, temporary migrant workers, and Indigenous land defenders. ¹⁶⁹

Ultimately, the solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en land defenders highlights ties across union picket lines, migrant right claims, and Indigenous people’s self-determination, weaved with rising recognition of the totality of the struggle against colonial capitalism onto which the Canadian settler state is predicated. Planetary politics are, therefore, grounded in the geophysical interconnectedness of our shared planetary crises but also coalitional action denouncing the exploitation of Indigenous peoples with that of the historically dispossessed peoples around the world, as well as the increasingly stratified, racialized, and immiserated population within settler colonial states. ¹⁷⁰ In this sense, abandoning traditional IR categories of exceptional state sovereignty and an assimilatory agenda of ‘national interests’ allows us to adopt a more critical lens attentive to the intersectionalities of struggle against capitalist depletion within and beyond political borders.

An ontological turn towards the planetary reveals a political direction of material politics of every-day resistance. Centuries-long Indigenous resistance of settler sovereignty encompasses praxis of claiming epistemic authority to narrate cultural stories, passing down languages, conserving rituals, beliefs, histories, and art through repetition, co-constructing Indigenous institutions, and mobilizing coalitional action (e.g. to defend land or hold the Government accountable for failed promises). Coalitional politics emerge from the equifinality of diverse interests overlapping across the priorities of environmental repair, social care and public health, and pursuit of dignified life, grounded in the material reality of shared struggle. As public health, housing, and general affordability crises mount concurrently to the environmental emergency, planet politics emerge as urgently needed reciprocal responsibility to recover conditions for life within Canada’s colonial borders and globally. Outlining the ethics of overlapping struggles on stolen lands and a burning planet emerges grounded in the empirical reality that traditional IR analytical categories tend to deny. Therefore, our ability to construct urgent discussions about our collective survival is predicated on our willingness to part from them.

Rather than a consensus about the need to reconstitute planetary ecologies, what is lacking are political arenas in which planetary ethics is taken seriously. The overall crisis of the environmental breakdown must be understood as intimately bound with the exhaustion of social reproduction, as with each crisis, we lose capacity to care for one another, sustain life, and fulfil our generational duty towards those who came before us, whom we, as Canadians, left to die abandoned in elderly care facilities during COVID-19, ¹⁷¹ and those who will inherit our burned forests, drained wetlands, contaminated lakes, and arid fields. Returning to Verónica Gago’s ¹⁷² argument about the connection between hyperlocal and transnational agendas, planetary alternatives emerge through court cases and formal challenges of the Canadian exceptional sovereignty but also everyday practices, compromises, and alternative structures for mutual and earthcare.

At the brink of planetary destruction, radical re-envisioning of our governance, economic, and social structures can no longer be dismissed as unreasonable. Therefore, feminist coalitions for social reproduction, which are creating alternative structures and pressuring the Government to set up public structures for childcare, improve the elderly care system, and address the heightened social reproduction burden that racialized and recent immigrant women are disproportionately forced to carry, emerges as a part of planetary politics of repair that positions social contracts over fiscal conservativism.

In the current context, the IR trade-offs between, for example, domestic economic interests and the respect for Indigenous rights, or between a trade surplus and the violation of labour and environmental rights abroad, reveal itself as a destructive logic of colonial capitalism. Political refusal of such trade-offs is not only feasible; it is underway. Through the creation of mutual aid groups, anti-policing intervention tactics, protests of Canada’s complicity in the genocide against Palestinians, land defence campaigns, strategies for electoral participation (despite the blatant limitations of electoral politics), neighbourhood cooperatives, mutual aid collectives, diaspora fundraisers, efforts to construct alternative infrastructure that is required to 1 day supplant the capitalist structures in which we seem to be currently stuck are emerging. Granted, the scale and the intensity of these worldmaking projects pale in comparison to the enormity of our planetary threats. However, existing (and historically continuous) models of resistance remind us that another world just might be possible.