Political theorist, philosopher, and scholar of world politics and international law.
Anthony Burke is professor of environmental politics and international relations at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. He is co-principal of the Planet Politics Institute and a senior fellow of the Earth System Governance network.
He also worked as a principal research officer in the Senate environment, communications and arts committee where he led the drafting of reports on Australia’s response to climate change and the Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu national park, among others, and was an activist on campaigns for independence in East Timor and West Papua and against the war on Bougainville with the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement.
“[We have created] a vast and aporetic gap between politics, law, and the biospheric conditions of reality itself. What results is a destructive earth-scale paradox: a tear in planetary reality in which the anthroposphere cannot responsibly inhabit or acknowledge the biosphere, at the same time as it alters, damages, and distorts the biosphere in ever more profound ways that reach deep into the geological future. The biosphere is appropriated for the human yet cannot be seen properly by the human, by its discourses, its institutions, or law. The biosphere is in/visible.
Such failures of connection, care, and regard are also failures of fear and respect. We are learning too slowly that warming seas, forest fires, hurricanes, and pandemic-causing viruses are more-than-human powers with destructive potentials as great as any weapon. Yet, we evince surprise when they appear in our midst.”
—Anthony Burke & Stefanie Fishel, The Ecology Politic (MIT Press, 2025), p. 32.
Research & Writing
Anthony is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across philosophy, social theory, political ecology, international relations, earth system science, and international law. His recent work has focused on environmental political theory and new models of earth system governance for the Anthropocene: proposals for ecoregion assemblies and an earth system council, a coal elimination treaty, and a climate governance architecture for a net zero world hovering at planetary tipping points.
This research has been published in the books The Ecology Politic: Power, Law, and Earth in the Anthropocene (with Stefanie Fishel, MIT Press, 2025) and Institutionalising Multispecies Justice (with Dany Celermajer et al., Cambridge University Press, 2025), and articles such as “Interspecies Cosmopolitanism” (Review of International Studies, 2023), “An Architecture for a Net Zero World” (Global Policy, 2022), “Blue Screen Biosphere” (International Political Sociology, 2019), and “Planet Politics” (Millennium, 2016).
Anthony is also an engaged public commentator and analyst, publishing articles on the Paris Agreement COPs for the Lowy Interpreter, environmental crimes and nuclear crisis in Ukraine for The Washington Post and Nature, and ecocide and biodiversity politics for The Conversation.