What distinguishes the political agency of a tectonic plate from that of a president? Both, in some sense, shape the course of global politics. A tectonic plate shifts the ground beneath our feet and forces the redrawing of maps and the movement of populations. A president signs treaties and negotiates the terms on which governments deal with one another. Despite their obvious differences, International Relations (IR) increasingly describes entities as different as these as political agents. From theoretical debates on subjects and objects to grounded studies of walls, drones, pipelines, and satellites, scholars are working towards what could be described as a ‘global politics of things.’ In making sense of such a vast (and continuously growing) array of political agents, there has been an increased interest in thing theory these past few years (Van Wingerden 2025). Yet, as I argue, this expansion of political actors has outpaced our vocabulary for understanding agency in global politics.
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The growing attention to things reflects a wider transformation in the conditions under which political agency is understood. Modernist imaginaries of politics, bound up with colonial and capitalist projects of control, long assumed that the world could be built and extracted at will, but this assumption is losing its grip. These logics rested on the premise that things are inert and that they could be acted upon without themselves acting back on the political and material orders that assumed mastery over them. Waste and toxins have revealed that what is extracted or discarded does not disappear but persists and circulates, and these afterlives of things are now forcing their way into political thought (Acuto 2014; Du Plessis 2024). Some AI systems are getting more autonomous as they act in ways that exceed the intentions of those who built them (Baele et al. 2024). At the same time, the deadly and unevenly distributed consequences of a warming and destabilizing planet are exposing the limits of political visions that assume a single, universal human subject (Chandler, Müller & Rothe 2021). The turn toward things marks a return, however belated, to an understanding of the world in which projects of extraction and control are never as total as they were assumed.
These developments, among others, have pushed IR scholars to reconsider the boundaries of political agency by extending attention from human actors to an expanding range of technological, biological, and geological entities. This expansion has drawn on multiple and often concurrent strands of scholarship, from studies of embodiment and racialized exclusion to work on technologies such as drones and algorithms, animals and plants, and planetary and geological processes. Yet, the concept of agency itself has changed remarkably little. The category of political agent has been stretched to include bodies previously excluded from it as well as entities newly considered as agents at all, but without a corresponding account of how their agencies differ or what properties they share. Therefore, in this essay, I consider what kinds of agency things have in global politics and what distinguishes things like tectonic plates, presidents, and drones once they are all described as political agents.
In so doing, this essay develops the concept of a global politics of things to bring together a diverse set of debates that have expanded the category of political agent in different ways. I attempt to show that what appears like a series of separate developments is better understood as a broader reconstitution of political agency in IR. In this essay, I suggest that autonomy and responsivity offer useful dimensions for considering the different forms agency can take. I explore how these dimensions become politically consequential as things facilitate and resist relations of control and domination that order global politics. I further argue that treating political agency as uneven and distributed brings into view a form of excess that some existing branches of thing theory, such as infrastructure studies, multispecies politics, and planetary politics, have registered in their own terms but have not yet articulated together.
Things All the Way Down
In recent years, IR scholars have recognized that the things we take for granted are often the things that make global politics possible, including the infrastructures, technologies, and resources that sustain systems of power and inequality. Yet, to speak of the agency of these different things is a recent development. In this essay, I use “thing” rather than “object” to indicate a vitality or excess that resists settled objecthood. A brief genealogy helps situate the development of thing theory. Initially, expanding agency led scholars away from material things toward the political agency of ideas. Early constructivism challenged the assumption that agency was a fixed property of rational, interest-maximizing states, and argued that it is socially constituted through norms, identities, and processes of recognition (Wendt 1999; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). This shifted attention from agency as an inherent possession to something produced and contested through social relations. Constructivism thus opened broader questions about how agency is constituted and who or what counts as agentic.
Feminist IR continued this exploration by insisting that the questioning of agency had to pass through the body. Feminist scholars challenged the disembodied rational subject of classical IR by showing that agency could not be separated from the situated, gendered, and often violated bodies through which international politics is experienced and enacted (Tickner 1992; Sylvester 1994). Postcolonial and decolonial IR extended this critique by demonstrating that the boundaries of who could appear as a legitimate political subject and agent had always excluded and racialized subjects (Chowdhry and Nair 2002). This work also showed that colonial projects of violent rule and extraction depended on refusing precisely the forms of agency, and the relations to land, water and other life, that the cosmologies they violated had long recognized. This literature thus shows that the current turn to things can be read in part as a belated recovery of a plurality that colonial modernity worked hard to unmake.
IR scholars drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) took up the approached the question by turning directly to materiality itself by arguing that agency emerges through heterogeneous assemblages of living beings, technologies, and material objects (Latour 2005; Bennett 2010; Barry 2013). Within IR, this perspective first found expression in studies of security technologies, with scholars examining how drones and other emerging technologies reshape conflict and war (Holmqvist 2013; Wilcox 2015; Hoijtink and Leese 2019). It also informed early work on the materiality of border and security politics, which explored how passports, visas, and checkpoints help enact and contest state power (Salter 2015). More recently, infrastructure has emerged as a distinct object of theorization within IR, as scholars have begun asking what kind of thing infrastructure is and how it organizes international politics from within (Bueger, Liebetrau, and Stockbruegger 2023; Bakonyi and Darwich 2024).
Posthumanist IR built on these developments by challenging the discipline’s residual humanism as a mode of domination and asking whether agency should be recognized in other living beings (e.g., Cudworth and Hobden 2025; Pereira and Renner 2023). Scholarship on other animals and vegetal life showed how animals, plants and other forms of life participate in the creation of political worlds and complicated the assumption that agency depends on intention, mobility, or even sentience (Fishel 2023; Youatt 2020). Research on microbial life is noteworthy here as it showed how bacteria and viruses can shift political borders, an insight that became more widespread due to the 2020 pandemic (Fishel 2017; Du Plessis 2018). More recently, strands of thing theory have converged around the question of how diverse more-than-human, technological, and infrastructural forms of agency meet in concrete political settings, from the cowshed to the wolf fence (e.g., Kurki 2026; Van Wingerden 2026).
Alongside this expansion of who or what counts as a political agent is a shift in how objects are understood. Literature on governance objects has argued that objects are composite, as entities such as “the economy” or “the planet” exist through an ongoing entanglement of ideas, practices, and matter, hybrids that must be continuously composed and can therefore also come undone (Allan 2018). Such an object-oriented ontology collapses the distinction between subject and object, treating a president, a drone, and a tectonic plate as sharing the same basic ontological footing (Harman 2017). In this literature, objects also regularly exceed knowledge and interference. IR debates on the Anthropocene have engaged with such claims in their attention to phenomena that exceed human comprehension even as they demand political response (Bargués-Pedreny and Schmidt 2019). A different, though somewhat related debate asks whether beings and things are reducible to the relations in which they are entangled or whether they can escape and exceed them (Engelhard, Li & Van Wingerden, 2021; Torrent, 2025).
Planetary politics, moreover, has argued that responding to planetary-scale processes requires moving beyond methodological nationalism, state-centrism, and anthropocentrism toward political imaginaries oriented toward repair (as opposed to the imperial projects of control that produced those processes in the first place) (Novović, 2026). These questions resurface in emerging literatures on environments that IR has only recently begun to take seriously on their own material terms: the sea, the poles, and outer space. The sea has long served as a space between politically relevant places rather than as a politically significant force in its own right, and recent work insists that its currents and waterways enter directly into the ordering of the international (De Carvalho and Leira 2022). Work on polar regions adds to this debate, as geological phenomena like ice sheets and permafrost form the conditions of politics and transform practices of conquest as developed on solid ground (Martin-Nielsen 2012). Politics in outer space take this beyond the terrestrial to the ‘post-planetary’ as political projects of extraction and conquest need to reckon with deadly material conditions (Glaab 2025; Van Wingerden and Vigneswaran 2024; Vigneswaran and van Wingerden 2026). Political geography has pushed this convergence further by treating geological force, fire, tectonic movement, and deep time, as forms of agency in their own right (Clark 2011; Yusoff 2018).
While this might look like a simple outward movement of an expanding cast of characters, underneath these developments are quite different assumptions about how things come to matter and quite different stakes in formulating an answer. Some of these literatures locate agency in a thing’s own capacities, others in the practices that compose and sustain it, and still others in a thing’s fundamental refusal to be fully known or accessed at all. They also diagnose why particular things are not taken seriously in global politics in very different ways as they locate the relations of coloniality and domination underlying that exclusion. Altogether, they have left International Relations with a far richer but also more unwieldy picture of political agency than the discipline has yet reckoned with. In the remainder of this essay, I bring these different accounts into conversation to examine how things participate in world-making and what their different modes of agency reveal about the limits of political projects.
Political Agency from Plants to Planets
For a long time, it seemed obvious to speak as though objects fell into binary categories: the lively and the inert, the subject and the object, the thing that acts and the thing acted upon. Yet, as the previous section has shown, contemporary International Relations theorizing no longer sustains these binaries. Presidents, infrastructures, drones, plants, microbes, oceans, and tectonic plates are increasingly described as political agents. Once such different entities are all described as agents, the question becomes how to make sense of political agency in this global politics of things.
In previous work, I distinguished three broad strands of thing theory: agential things, manageable things, and withdrawn things (Van Wingerden 2025). Agential things are those treated as acting in global politics; manageable things are composite objects such as “the economy” or “the environment” that are produced and stabilized through expert knowledge and political practice; withdrawn things are entities such as climate change or the sun whose reality surpasses the conceptual and technical means through which humans seek to understand and govern them. These strands largely developed in parallel, with distinct theoretical commitments and objects of analysis. As a consequence, IR has accumulated a rich vocabulary for identifying new political agents without developing a corresponding language for comparing the forms of agency these entities exhibit.
Yet, I believe that these strands of thing theory can be brought into conversation without reducing their differences. Rather than trying to settle the question of what political agency is, I want to use this essay to consider two dimensions through which the agency of different things in global politics might be considered alongside one another: autonomy and responsivity. These dimensions shift attention beyond consciousness and intent. Things can act upon the world and participate in political processes without a clear intentional purpose of their own. Intentionality remains significant in global politics. Political worlds are profoundly shaped by intentional extractive projects, with devastating consequences. Yet, as these dimensions capture, these projects do not unfold in a world fully determined by intentional control. Things retain the capacity to act and redirect the projects that act upon them. These dimensions draw attention to the ways in which entities can generate effects through their own dynamics while also being affected and transformed through their relations with others.
The first dimension is autonomy. By autonomy, I do not mean independence from all external influence or metaphysical self-determination. Rather, autonomy refers to the extent to which an entity generates effects through dynamics that are not reducible to the immediate actions of other actors. A military drone, for example, possesses a delegated autonomy as its operations are embedded within systems of command and design, but its technical capacities also allow it to select and strike targets without continuous intervention (Hoijtink and Leese 2019; Holmqvist 2013). Infrastructures similarly show a sense of autonomy through the ways in which their material configurations shape political possibilities beyond the purposes of their designers (Barry 2013; Bueger, Liebetrau, and Stockbruegger 2023). The US-Mexico and Israel-West Bank border walls, for example, materialize clear political projects of territorial exclusion and colonial control, but also reorganize patterns of mobility in ways that exceed the purposes for which they were built, such as by producing new routes, sites of exchange and forms of evasion (Callahan 2018). Ecological and geological processes also exhibit forms of autonomy grounded in their own material processes, such as ocean currents and the biomass they transport, which defy the tidy logic of the state system as they exceed the boundaries of Exclusive Economic Zones and other maritime jurisdictions through which governments organize the oceans (Colás 2022). Autonomy points to the relative capacity of entities to produce effects according to their own modes of operation.
The second dimension is responsivity. Political agency is not only the ability to generate autonomous effects but also the ability to be affected and transformed through relations with other entities. Responsiveness refers to the capacity of an entity to modify its trajectory, behavior or organization in relation to changing conditions. This capacity draws attention away from intentional action and toward the relational and adaptive qualities through which agency emerges. A clear example are AI and machine-learning systems, which modify their outputs in response to new data and recalibrate their operation through interaction with changing informational environments (Baele et al 2024). The ‘wood wide web’ of global forests constantly responds to droughts, diseases and other changing ecological conditions by redistributing nutrients and chemical signals, which makes the forest a critical adaptive actor in global politics (Fishel 2023). Earth systems respond to extractive and industrial practices through processes such as warming and ocean acidification, even if these responses unfold through feedback loops and enormous timescales (Chakrabarty 2021; Dryzek and Pickering 2019). Responsivity is about how political capacities emerge through ongoing processes of mutual adjustment.
These dimensions help us make sense of the different configurations through which things participate in global politics. Any sort of thing in global politics can have a different degree of autonomy and responsivity, and these dimensions do not need to move together. An entity that is autonomous but minimally responsive, such as a tectonic plate, tends to act through persistence, in that it shapes political possibilities by maintaining its own dynamics across changing circumstances. An entity that is highly responsive but comparatively less autonomous, such as an exchange rate, exercises agency through its capacity to register and respond to shifts in its relations with other entities. An entity that combines autonomy and responsiveness, such as a drone, sustains its own trajectory while adapting through relations with other entities.
These configurations matter, in particular, for how things resist political projects. Political agency is expressed through the capacity of entities to maintain their trajectories despite attempts to influence or govern them. In my conception, resistance is about the ways in which entities frustrate or redirect political projects because they cannot be fully incorporated into external designs, and this often generates new political relations and forms of knowledge in the process. Resistance can at times be highly autonomous and visible, such as in the case of orcas off the Iberian coasts, whose ramming of boats since 2020 has been understood as a form of playful physical violence that keeps human interference in their waters at bay (Hardt, 2024). However, it can also be more responsive and invisible, but thereby no less effective, as pathogens adapt to human interventions, with antibiotic overuse driving the emergence of resistance that reshapes global health cartographies (Du Plessis 2018). This shows how political resistance can take different forms depending on how entities generate effects through their own dynamics and how they respond to changing conditions.
Not all political agency takes this form, however. Some things defeat political projects not by responding to them directly, but by following a logic (whether self-generated or responsive) that those projects cannot control. In Montserrat, for example, the nonhuman powers of the Soufrière Hills Volcano challenged colonial conceptions of risk management by compelling residents to develop ways of living with the volcano, while scientists and British authorities remained committed to its control and prediction (Donovan 2021). Similarly, permafrost in Siberia has long frustrated Russia’s imperial projects, and now that it is thawing in response to a warming planet, the Russian state faces cracked infrastructure, costly drilling and development efforts, and ground that becomes increasingly difficult to map and control (Halauniova 2026). Beyond our planet, Mars’s thin atmosphere, lower gravity, and different orbital period frustrate extractive and colonial projects as they lead to deadly circumstances, tricky building materials and time lags (Valentine 2025; Van Wingerden & Vigneswaran 2026). In these cases, political projects run up against material dynamics that exceed their control.
A Global Politics of Things
From plants to planets, things often do not do what political projects require of them. Things generate effects through their own dynamics and respond to conditions in ways that cannot always be anticipated. In doing so, they frustrate, redirect or otherwise exceed political projects. It is this excess which is at stake within many, though not all, of the literatures discussed in this essay, from infrastructure studies to multispecies and planetary politics. While these literatures have different subject matters, they illuminate points at which the world exceeds the forms through which political projects attempt to organize it. Bringing these literatures together makes this excess itself subject to analysis. While IR theorists may seem concerned with adding more characters to the cast of agents in global politics, this excess may be one of the more fundamental issues at stake.
This also gives a different answer to the question with which the essay began: what distinguishes the political agency of a president from that of a tectonic plate? It becomes clear that the difference is neither that one is political and the other is not, nor that one possesses more agency than the other. Rather, they differ in how autonomous and responsive they are, and therefore, in the form and degree of excess through which their agency becomes politically consequential. A president in a democratic setting tends to be highly responsive to institutional obligations and social pressures while also exhibiting autonomy to influence and reprioritize political issues. However, their political agency remains largely contained within the political relations through which it is exercised. By contrast, a tectonic plate does not recognize political authority or adjust its activity in response to political demands, yet its autonomous geological processes can transform the conditions of political life on timescales and at scales that exceed any attempt to direct them. While I have deliberately chosen a pairing that is slightly absurd, this is meant to reveal the issue of excess as a core concern thing theory literatures address in similar ways.
This article has suggested that autonomy and responsivity, and the excess they generate, are what distinguish political agency across such different kinds of entities. By way of conclusion, I want to open up the wider question of what this excess means for global politics. A global politics of things, as I imagine it, is precisely concerned with how and when things disrupt and exceed the relations through which global politics is organized. Many (if not most) of these relations are colonial and extractive in nature, and because they depend on control, this is where excess becomes most stark and promising. As new political entities emerge, such as orbital infrastructures, synthetic organisms or deep-sea mineral deposits, it is not enough to add them to an expanding inventory of political actors. What matters instead is how their particular capacities enter into relations of control and domination, and where those relations can be interrupted or steered in different directions. This is an invitation to ask how things come to matter politically and in so doing, become alert to how the world exceeds attempts to compose it.
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Enrike van Wingerden is Lecturer in History and International Relations at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her multidisciplinary research is centered on the international relations between societies, environments, and technologies in the (post)colonial world. Current research projects focus on multispecies politics, climate change and displacement, and the politics of outer space.
Editorial Credit: Yana Sadeghi