The Ideal River: How Control of Nature Shaped the International Order

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This book examines the geographical imaginaries that underpinned international efforts to create the first international organisations along the Rhine, Danube, and Congo Rivers. In doing so, these imaginaries helped constitute the early international order in the nineteenth century and continues to underpin modern global governance today.

Environmental politics has traditionally been a peripheral concern for international relations theory, but increasing alarm over global environmental challenges has elevated international societys relationship with the natural world into the theoretical limelight. IR theorys engagement with environmental politics, however, has largely focused on interstate cooperation in the late twentieth century, with less attention to how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century quest to tame nature came to shape the modern international order.

The ideal river examines nineteenth-century efforts to establish international commissions on three transboundary rivers the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo. It charts how the Enlightenment ambition to tame the natural world, and human nature itself, became an international standard for rational and civilised authority and informed our geographical imagination of the international. This relationship of domination over nature shaped three core IR concepts central to the emergence of early international order: the territorial sovereign state; imperial hierarchies; and international organisations. The book contributes to environmental politics and international relations by highlighting how the relationship between society and nature is not a peripheral concern, but one at the heart of international politics.

Reviews

'In sum, Yao's book makes a strong case for paying attention to and leveraging historical material in IR. This is a crucial contribution to the literature, which should inspire others to extend this framework to the study of other environmental agreements or organizations. The book will be of great interest to several research and policy audiences. Particularly, scholars within hydro-politics will find this book useful as it showcases important milestones towards the establishment of river basin governance. Here, the book persuasively demonstrates how environmental politics can enrich our understanding of international organizations more generally.'
Stefan Dring, International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 1 (January 2023)

Author Bio

Joanne Yao is a Lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London