Rethinking the Limits of the Concept of Agency in the International Relations Discipline: The Case of the Climate Justice Movement

For a long period of time, in the International Relations discipline, the concept of agency has been discussed within the scope of certain theoretical premises, and the question of what might be considered an agent has been neglected. However, the distinctive issues and dynamics of the 21st century necessitate to reconsider these premises. The article discusses the agency of the Climate Justice Movement on critical realist ground with a poststructuralist intervention. It suggests that the level of analysis and the agent - structure relations should be considered in tandem to grasp the Movement's agency. It claims that for decentralized agents, the lack of a decision-making mechanism might be the very reason for the agency of the political entity. The article is organized into four main parts. Firstly, the particular features of the Climate Justice Movement will be examined. Secondly, a hypothetical mechanism regarding the agency of the Movement will be retroduced. Retroduction is a mode of inference that is widely used by critical realists as a means of scrutinizing unobservable mechanisms. Thirdly, based on the agency debate in International Relations, various approaches will be analyzed to explain the Movement's agency. Lastly, the retroduced hypothetical mechanism will be scrutinized within the context of level of analysis, structure and agency.