Through the surrealist looking glass: international theory, imagination, and the Anthropocene

This article explores surrealism as an overlooked critical resource for International Relations theory (IR) and argues that surrealism’s legacy for international theorizing lies in its capacity to provoke radical reimaginings of the political status quo and to offer engagements with catastrophes that are not grounded in end time. Tracing the movement’s intellectual genealogy beyond its artistic origins, this article draws on key surrealist texts, particularly those of its founder, André Breton (1896–1966), to emphasise surrealism’s value as a sophisticated intellectual response to the horrors of the early and mid-twentieth century: nationalism, industrial warfare, rationalism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. The article offers two main contributions. First, its historico-political reading of surrealism enables a reinterpretation of the long-standing debate between realism and utopianism in IR. Highlighting important intersections between surrealism and international theory – most notably classical realism – it shows that the surrealist stress on the imagination as a radical, transformative force offers a stark reminder to contemporary IR theory of the necessity of utopian thinking. Second, the article claims that the surrealist foregrounding of myths opens imaginative pathways for confronting the Anthropocene, providing a crucial counterpoint to contemporary IR scholarship that predominantly frames planetary challenges through narratives of imminent collapse.