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Simon Dalby is a Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University, a Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. From 2012 to 2018, he held the CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He co-edited Reframing Climate Change (Routledge 2016) and Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Routledge 2019), and authored Anthropocene Geopolitics (University of Ottawa Press 2020), Rethinking Environmental Security (Edward Elgar 2022) and Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate Disrupted World (Agenda 2024). Simon Dalby was educated at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Victoria and holds a Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University. Before joining Laurier and the Balsillie School he was Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies and Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I straddle a number of fields, those of international relations, climate change, geopolitics, security and the whole fascinating discussion of earth systems and the Anthropocene. The most exciting discussions are where multiple contemporary perspectives intersect with a common understanding that conventional modes of thought and policy making are not adequate to grapple with what is most recently being discussed as a global polycrisis. Welcome to the Anthropocene!

Post-colonial arguments are challenging the premises that much of international relations is based upon. Is international relations anything more than the conceptual infrastructure of American hegemony? How might subaltern or Southern scholars argue for more inclusive approaches to international relations research or should they in fact start somewhere else and address different audiences than the policy makers in the Global North? Earth systems analyses are pointing to looming tipping points in the earth system which emphasize the point that modern categories are part of the problem given their inability to effectively grapple with this novel material context. Globalization powered by fossil fuels is unsustainable, and this dawning realization is now upsetting assumptions of economic growth and progress as the promise to resolve policy difficulties.

The promises of the end of the cold war have foundered in part because of the failures of Western policy makers to recognise the consequences of their actions both for other states and the planetary ecology in general. This requires some very hard thinking about who or what is now being secured by which means where. In short scholars, researchers and, yes activists, face numerous new challenges which rework the classic themes of security, peace, war and environmental security. All this as a revival of militarism is suggesting the return of geopolitics in the sense of great power rivalries. But those great powers are mostly empires, so the geographical categories too need updates. We do indeed live in interesting times!

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I hope that my understanding of the world has become more sophisticated and perhaps even nuanced. Part of that is simply a matter of living longer, teaching more courses and writing all sorts of things over the course of nearly four decades. One learns, and hopefully becomes a better thinker, rather than suffering from a premature hardening of the categories as one engages in scholarly and political debates. Reading outside one’s own immediate disciplinary focus helps and having one foot institutionally in geography and one in international relations has been a useful stimulus to thought.

In so far as I have changed my views over time they have shifted both because new topics and research areas have emerged, requiring different intellectual tools and because “the times they are a changing.” As times change topics emerge and new questions arise that require engagement. That said, Michel Foucault’s question, in the preface to his Order of Things, concerning “how is it possible to think that”? has been a constant in my thinking ever since I struggled to figure out American geopolitical discourse in the revival of the cold war in the late 1970s.

While I was struggling to think my way through those issues I read Neil Smith’s Uneven Development and was left puzzled by his formulations of the ideology of nature. It took years for me to think my way out of my early environmentalist strait jackets so that I could also grapple effectively with his ideas of the production of nature, a theme which works its way through much of my work on the Anthropocene. All by way of saying that being aware of and then tackling the blindspots, the aporias and silences in one’s own thinking is essential if intellectual activity is to be........

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