What distinguishes the political agency of a tectonic plate from that of a president? Both, in some sense, shape the course of global politics. A tectonic plate shifts the ground beneath our feet and forces the redrawing of maps and the movement of populations. A president signs treaties and negotiates the terms on which governments deal with one another. Despite their obvious differences, International Relations (IR) increasingly describes entities as different as these as political agents. From theoretical debates on subjects and objects to grounded studies of walls, drones, pipelines, and satellites, scholars are working towards what could be described as a ‘global politics of things.’ In making sense of such a vast (and continuously growing) array of political agents, there has been an increased interest in thing theory these past few years (Van Wingerden 2025). Yet, as I argue, this expansion of political actors has outpaced our vocabulary for understanding agency in global politics.

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The growing attention to things reflects a wider transformation in the conditions under which political agency is understood. Modernist imaginaries of politics, bound up with colonial and capitalist projects of control, long assumed that the world could be built and extracted at will, but this assumption is losing its grip. These logics rested on the premise that things are inert and that they could be acted upon without themselves acting back on the political and material orders that assumed mastery over them. Waste and toxins have revealed that what is extracted or discarded does not disappear but persists and circulates, and these afterlives of things are now forcing their way into political thought (Acuto 2014; Du Plessis 2024). Some AI systems are getting more autonomous as they act in ways that exceed the intentions of those who built them (Baele et al. 2024). At the same time, the deadly and unevenly distributed consequences of a warming and destabilizing planet are exposing the limits of political visions that assume a single, universal human subject (Chandler, Müller & Rothe 2021). The turn toward things marks a return, however belated, to an understanding of the world in which projects of extraction and control are never as total as they were assumed.

These developments, among others, have pushed IR scholars to reconsider the boundaries of political agency by extending attention from human actors to an expanding range of technological, biological, and geological entities. This expansion has drawn on multiple and often concurrent strands of scholarship, from studies of embodiment and racialized exclusion to work on technologies such as drones and algorithms, animals and plants, and planetary and geological processes. Yet, the concept of agency itself has changed remarkably little. The category of political agent has been stretched to include bodies previously excluded from it as well as entities newly considered as agents at all, but without a corresponding account of how their agencies differ or what properties they share. Therefore, in this essay, I consider what kinds of agency things have in global politics and what distinguishes things like tectonic plates, presidents, and drones once they are all described as political agents.

In so doing, this essay develops the concept of a global politics of things to bring together a diverse set of debates that have expanded the category of political agent in different ways. I attempt to show that what appears like a series of separate developments is better understood as a broader reconstitution of political agency in IR. In this essay, I suggest that autonomy and responsivity offer useful dimensions for considering the different forms agency can take. I explore how these dimensions become politically consequential as things facilitate and resist relations of control and domination that order global politics. I further argue that treating political agency as uneven and distributed brings into view a form of excess that some existing branches of thing theory, such as infrastructure studies, multispecies politics, and planetary politics, have registered in their own terms but have not yet articulated together.

Things All the Way Down

In recent years, IR scholars have recognized that the things we take for granted are often the things that make global politics possible, including the infrastructures, technologies, and resources that sustain systems of power and inequality. Yet, to speak of the agency of these different things is a recent development. In this essay, I use “thing” rather than “object” to indicate a vitality or excess that resists settled objecthood. A brief genealogy helps situate the development of thing theory. Initially, expanding agency led scholars away from material things toward the political agency of ideas. Early constructivism challenged the assumption that agency was a fixed property of rational, interest-maximizing states, and argued that it is socially constituted through norms, identities, and processes of recognition (Wendt 1999; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). This shifted attention from agency as an inherent possession to something produced and contested through social relations. Constructivism thus opened broader questions about how agency is constituted and who or what counts as agentic.

Feminist IR continued this exploration by insisting that the questioning of agency had to pass through the body. Feminist scholars challenged the disembodied rational subject of classical IR by showing that agency could not be separated from the situated, gendered, and often violated bodies through which international politics is experienced and enacted (Tickner 1992; Sylvester 1994). Postcolonial and decolonial IR extended this critique by demonstrating that the boundaries of who could appear as a legitimate political subject and agent had always excluded and racialized subjects (Chowdhry and Nair 2002). This work also showed that colonial projects of violent rule and extraction depended on refusing precisely the forms of agency, and the relations to land, water and other life, that the cosmologies they violated had long recognized. This literature thus shows that the current turn to things can be read in part as a belated recovery of a plurality that colonial modernity worked hard to unmake.

IR scholars drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) took up the approached the question by turning directly to materiality itself by arguing that agency emerges through heterogeneous assemblages of living beings, technologies, and material objects (Latour 2005; Bennett 2010; Barry 2013). Within IR, this perspective first found expression in studies of security technologies, with scholars examining how drones and other emerging technologies reshape conflict and war (Holmqvist 2013; Wilcox 2015; Hoijtink and Leese 2019). It also informed early work on the materiality of border and security politics, which explored how passports, visas, and checkpoints help enact and contest state power (Salter 2015). More recently, infrastructure has emerged as a distinct object of theorization within IR, as scholars have begun asking what kind of thing infrastructure is and how it organizes international politics from within (Bueger, Liebetrau, and Stockbruegger 2023; Bakonyi and Darwich 2024).

Posthumanist IR built on these developments by challenging the discipline’s residual humanism as a mode of domination and asking whether agency should be recognized in other living beings (e.g., Cudworth and Hobden 2025; Pereira and Renner 2023). Scholarship on other animals and vegetal life showed how animals, plants and other forms of life participate in the creation of political worlds and complicated the assumption that agency depends on intention, mobility, or even........

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