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8 Rel.: Beyond Anthropocentrism 7 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/relations8 and id is 1 raw text is: Finding Agency in Nonhumans Introduction Anne Aronsson - Fynn Holm - Melissa Kaul Universitit Zarich DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/rela-2020-0102-intr anne.aronsson@aoi.uzh.ch fynn.holm@uzh.ch melissaann.kaul@aoi.uzh.ch In November 2020, after a year of protests against social and racial injustices, a controversial election that left the nation, and a rampaging pandemic causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, US President- elect Joe Biden addressed the nation prior to Thanksgiving in a speech in Delaware: I know the country has grown wary of the fight, but we need to remember, we're at war with the virus, not with one another, he declared. Uniting a nation by declaring war against an outside enemy is an old (and often effective) political strategy. However, we have to wonder: Is it possible to wage a war against a virus? Normally, we would expect that a war is fought between groups of humans, in modern times often represented by nation-states. Even the more abstract war on drugs or war on terror are ultimately against human enemies (drug cartels and terrorists respectively). The use of nonhumans as weapons of war, for example in germ warfare, is not unheard of, but becoming a party in a war does imply that one can intentionally act and counteract against the enemy in a way that will decide the war in favor of one of the sides. In other words, one has to have agency in order to be considered an active participant in a war. But does a virus, which most natural scien- tists do not even consider to be a living organism, and whose only means of reacting to outside pressure is the random mutation of its genome, have agency '? 'For more on the topic, see Dupr6 and Guttinger 2016; Crawford 2018. Relations - 8.1-2 - November 2020 https://www.ledonline.it/Relations/ - Online ISSN 2280-9643 - Print ISSN 2283-3196 7