What, this essay asks, is the relation between contemporary IR scholarship and the existentialist intellectual and cultural tradition? How is our discipline informed and animated by existentialist thinking? Is existentialism a heritage to be recovered, claimed, and embraced by IR scholars, or a shadow to be escaped? And what resources does it furnish us for thinking through the kind of issues that IR scholars are called upon to grapple with today? These questions are not purely theoretical. There are practical and political reasons, not only for considering them, but for considering them now. Living through what has been termed an unfolding ‘Age of Anxiety’, we find ourselves confronted by existential questions and existentialist ideas at almost every turn. It is, however, unclear how substantive or meaningful this apparently existentialist moment truly is. Does existentialism have something to say to contemporary IR, or does it flatter to deceive? We think the time is ripe to take stock of existentialism as it relates to IR and global politics. This is the purpose of this article and of the collection of essays it introduces.

The Nuclear Age is said to be defined by the notion of existential threat. The ability to destroy human societies in their entirety with a single class of weaponry raises profound questions about human existence. It even gives us a new form of species extinction – ‘thermonuclear omnicide’. Unsurprisingly, existentialism was a philosophy that found its feet in the shadow of the bomb. This article explores the possibilities and limits of an existentialist approach to nuclear dangers. It contrasts the views of two figures central to early existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. Sartre responded to the existential threat of nuclear war with moral outrage about the ‘unreality’ of the Cold War politics driving the arms race and an existentialist call to reject militaristic social norms. Aron, a key figure in early IR realism, famously rejected existentialism and turned instead to outlining norms for an international society that might better restrain nuclear-armed decision-makers. Bringing Sartre’s and Aron’s post-Second World War discussions into the new century, this article argues that the ongoing, and even growing, threats posed by nuclear weapons highlight the limits of Sartre’s approach as a guide to authentic existence in modern life. Instead, it supports Aron’s more conservative approach but also draws on Existentialism to extend it, strengthening the nuclear taboo for the sake of human survival as a persistent but urgent political project. At a moment in IR when scholars and other analysts are once again critiquing the fragile norms of global order and speculating about the dawn of a ‘Third Nuclear Age’, theoretical reflection on the politics of existential threats and the hard choices they entail remain indispensable aspects of IR’s theoretical toolkit. While Sartre and other existentialists argued convincingly that existence precedes essence, Aron reminds us that survival remains a precondition for both.

IR scholars increasingly turn to the writings of Existentialists to make sense of the multiple and entangled planetary crises that characterise the twenty-first century. In this article, I argue that two postwar intellectuals, Günther Anders (1902–1992) and J. G. Ballard (1930–2009), offer a rich intellectual ancestry and inspiration to such scholarship. Both authors critically and creatively reworked central Existentialist ideas in the context of postwar technological acceleration and the development of nuclear weapons. To Anders and Ballard, nuclear weapons symbolised, and were the most extreme manifestation of, the pathologies they associated with technological modernity: mass consumption, spectacular violence, a deadening of affect, and an increased inability of humans to psychologically process and grasp the destructive capacities of science and technology. To counter these trends, they both firmly relied on Surrealism to bolster the human imagination as a catalysator for personal and social transformation. I argue that their work offers an opportunity to reconnect the study of nuclear weapons in IR to broader existentialist questions and suggest that their respective attempts to foreground human being in the nuclear age as ‘being-towards-extinction’ holds important lessons for recent attempts to recentre the study of IR around planetary imaginaries of extinction.

Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first modern post-apocalyptic pandemic novel, but also as an important source for the existentialist tradition, dystopian literature, and their intersections with what I call ‘Literary IR’. Comparing The Last Man with its probable sources and influences – from Thucydides and Vattel to Orwell and Camus – reveals Shelley's ethical and political concerns with the overlapping problems of interpersonal and international conflict. The Last Man dramatises how interpersonal conflict, if left unchecked, can spiral into the wider sociopolitical injustices of violence, war, and other human-made disasters such as species extinction, pandemics, and more metaphorical ‘existential’ plagues like loneliness and despair. Despite these dark themes and legacies, Shelley's authorship of the great plague novel of the nineteenth century also inspired a truly hopeful post-apocalyptic existential response to crisis and conflict in feminist poliscifi by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Emily St. John Mandel.

The Anthropocene, a proposed new geological age marking the planetary impact of humanity, is no longer a newcomer to the field of International Relations (IR). Several scholars have recognised the value, as well as the danger, of the Anthropocene for theorising international relations. This article focuses on the existentialist questions and ideas derived from IR’s engagement with the Anthropocene, particularly on the anxieties surrounding the extinction of the human species, the meaning of the Anthropos, and humanity’s planetary stewardship. By drawing on scholarly discourses on these physical, spiritual, and moral anxieties, I argue that existentialist thinking helps expose IR’s anthropocentric, universalist, and hubristic tendencies, which are also prevalent in the broader Anthropocene discourse. It also serves as a reminder of the freedom to explore possibilities, albeit with a lack of certainty, for reimagining the place of humanity and IR as a discipline in this new geological age. Therefore, existentialism reveals IR’s dissonance with the paradoxes and uncertainties that the Anthropocene brings while offering a path toward theorising the “end of the world”.

Just war theory appears ever more alienated from the practice it ostensibly regulates, warfare. An increasingly abstract and esoteric discourse, it can seem very remote from the mud-and-blood actualities of warfare. This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the study of, on the one hand, the ethics of war, and, on the other, the lived experience of war. Seeking to address this problem, this article asks: How can we recentre just war thinking as a ‘lived’ theory? It proposes that we can reconnect just war theory to the lived experience of warfare by restoring its historical dialogue with existentialism. It develops this position by reading just war theory through the prism of Albert Camus's writings on political violence. It concludes that Camus's political thoughts provides a set of signposts for the development of a mode of just war theorising that places that the lived experience of warfare at the heart of our ethical thinking about war.

For a discipline as philosophically and temporally sensitive as International Relations, it is curious that Martin Heidegger, widely considered the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, has only recently begun to receive disciplinary attention. It is also noteworthy that as IR begins to grapple with right-wing extremism, it has not addressed Heidegger’s fascist politics. Conducting a close reading of his account of existence in time, this article argues that from his magnum opus to his final diaries, Heidegger prefigured many existentialist discussions, but his particular conceptualisations of time, temporality, and authentic Being lent political life a dangerous edge. Scrutinising both the conceptual and practical consequences of Heidegger’s thought, this article traces key tensions in his claims that, to realise true Selfhood, we must overcome social time on the road to death. This antagonism encourages overly individuated and aggressive habits of thought and action that reject the possibilities of co-existence. We can see this in how Heidegger’s obsession with authenticity over time pushed him deeper into Nazism, and in the ways that his existential vernacular resounds through today’s right-wing renaissance. Juxtaposing authenticity, then and now, helps draw out the distinctively temporal dynamics of Heidegger’s existentialism as well as the existential politics of our time.

This paper contributes to this special issue by examining the existentialist themes re-emerging in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and does so by proposing an under-explored and overlapping terrain regarding the function of myths and ontological security. What Blumenberg calls the ‘absolutism of reality’ becomes something to avoid through the process of telling, retelling, and adapting myths to suit our existential needs. The paper distinguishes our existentialist intervention into OSS from recent ones within that research community and then draws examples of the work on and of myth from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking to the need for OSS to develop an ethical-political perspective to not only explain but also change the world, the account we develop here also provides a pathway for an alternative politics based in counter-myth. It discloses, therefore, a promising and, in the face of rising authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces, necessary moral ethos regarding prescriptive ideas about what to do and how to confront and and counter the mounting challenges of global politics in the 2020s and beyond.

Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy Roads to Freedom is written against the backdrop of the crises between 1938 and 1940 that led to war and the Fall of France. In this article I argue that Roads to Freedom can be read as an IR text, and I concentrate on four areas. First, a refocusing on the international relations of the everyday. Second, the anatomy of a crisis from an existentialist viewpoint that can enrich our understanding of crises. Third how the interactions of the main characters reveal the ‘mediation of estrangement’ at the heart of diplomacy, first explored by Der Derian in his 1987 On Diplomacy. Fourth, it calls into question our emphasis in IR on the centrality of causes to understand a crisis. Rather, Roads to Freedom refocuses our gaze on the diverse effects in everyday IR. The argument of the article is interwoven with my own experiences reading the trilogy for the first time, and how it influenced my decision to study IR.