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.
“Justice is a beautiful sky, with 350 ppm of CO2. This image of justice points us toward a different kind of societal contract: a multispecies contract. This contract would begin in war and acknowledge the gross imbalance in voice, rights, and political power between the human and more-than-human, while respecting the wonder and value of all earth beings, the ways they evolve, decompose, and combine.
But a multispecies contract will not be ours to write alone. As much as we look toward a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Nature and the Biosphere, a multispecies contract will not be drafted in our political theories, our parliaments, or the halls of the United Nations. It is an existential contract to which we are all already parties: one between the Earth and its inhabitants.”
—Anthony Burke & Stefanie Fishel, The Ecology Politic (MIT Press, 2025), p. 214.
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.