International relations as a three dimensional space

International Relations scholarship has traditionally represented the territory of a state as a contained claim to the flat surface of the Earth. Concerns for the workings of power across land are, for its part, so commonplace and taken for granted in the discipline that scholars writing thirty years ago, observed that land and its territoriality, referring to claims to its exclusive access and use, were remarkably little studied by students of the discipline. However, deepening environmental challenges like climate change and some of the activities and technologies aimed at supporting the shift away from fossil fuels, such as deep-sea mining in search of critical materials for the renewable energy transition, are constantly bringing the limitations of this conception of the state into view. Although several ways for moving out of this ‘container’ conception of the state have been put forward, this conception remains dominant. This dominance renders International Relations underprepared for meaningfully engaging with the off-land environmental risks that threaten to destabilize the political order that is the object of its study. Meaningful engagement can, however, be facilitated by putting traditional understandings of the territorial state in IR into productive dialogue with debates on volume unfolding in Political Geography. These debates have intensified largely in response to calls for scholars to complement their focus on the flatness of territory with increased and explicit attention to height and depth. International Relations, too, would benefit from more interdisciplinary engagement with these debates. This could be enabled through renewed attention to scale, materiality, and movement that does not adhere to the fixed, container logic of the territorial state. Studying IR in three dimensions might improve the awareness of IR scholars of the shifting material conditions for political organization and the likely consequences of these shifts on the institutional aspects of global order.