Savage Ecology

“In Savage Ecology Jairus Victor Grove gives us a weirdly hopeful eco-pessimism. ‘We broke the planet,’ he writes, and ‘now it is our planet.’ Agree or not, the breadth of his archive (neuro-torture, algorithmic warfare, drone strikes, and cybernetic nation-building) and audacity of his thinking (biopolitics is now ‘almost quaint,’ he says, given the geopolitics of the Anthropocene) are simply exhilarating. Your thinking cannot survive this book unchanged. Fortunately, Grove says, ‘the end of the world is never the end of everything’ (though it may well be the end of us).” - Bonnie Honig, author of Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair

“What Beck did for risk society, Hardt and Negri for empire, and Barad for technoscience, Jairus Victor Grove does brilliantly for global violence, delivering an ecology of warfare that is not only a corrosive critique of the three horsemen of our now daily apocalypse—geopolitics, biopolitics, and cybernetics—but a creative strategy for sustaining life now and thereafter. Grove is a philosopher with a hammer, writer with a stiletto, and artist with a spray can.” - James Der Derian, Michael Hintze Chair of International Security Studies, the University of Sydney

"An impressively informative and instructively presented work of meticulous scholarship, Savage Ecology is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to community, college, and academic library Contemporary Environmental Issues collections in general, and political theory and warfare supplemental studies lists in particular." - Michael Dunford, Midwest Book Review

“Savage Ecology is an extraordinarily rich text. . . . Wading through Savage Ecology uncovers a wondrous diversity of thought.”

"Grove offers one of the most robust and erudite examples of a critical ethos of pessimism I have read to date. . . . Rather than distancing total destruction from our current moment in order to propose a redemptive, critical utopia, Grove is immersed in catastrophe as an immanent condition of critique." - Davide Panagia, Public Books

“Savage Ecology is not an easy read. Grove draws on an expansive archive, engages with an abundance of theoretical interlocutors and sets forth bold claims with far-reaching implications…. Whether they agree with this radically anti-positivist position or not, I am convinced that the book will prove a rich, challenging and thought-provoking encounter for graduate students and scholars interested in geopolitics, new materialism, critical war studies and international political theory.”
  - Adam Bregnsbo Fastholm, International Affairs

“In an oddly provocative manner Jairus Victor Grove has provided an eloquent and impassioned tribute to war and its savage ecology. This book is a twofer, a thoughtful intervention in current policy debate and a scorching critique of mainstream IR theory, with its arrogant pretensions and its plenitude of crucial failures and catastrophic consequences. It will be tragic if activists and the discipline’s leading practitioners fail to read it.” - John Buell, Informed Consent

“Grove takes a postmodern approach to the study of ecology in global politics, penning an engrossing if brooding and pessimistic book that is itself a unique expression of this theoretical tradition in IR theory.... [H]e offers an honest realism, one could say, whose rendering is brutal only because the current predicament facing us bears the brutality of the martial logic that brought us here in the first place. - Shannon Brincat, Perspectives on Politics

“Savage Ecology speaks to a wide audience of critically-minded theorists of politics, environmental studies, and international relations.... Its bridge-building between theoretical traditions will be perhaps leave its stage-setting for interdisciplinary exchange as the book’s signature contribution.” - Michael P.A. Murphy, Security Dialogue

“Savage Ecology is a most challenging and thought-provoking account of the condition of life on Earth today. This work will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students across the social sciences and the humanities.” - William French, Journal of Political & Military Sociology