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.
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“There is a war being waged across society as profound as that waged daily upon nature. It joins with racial, gender, and colonial injustices that steal from all of us the room to live and breathe on a planet with finite boundaries and tolerances. There is no direction to history, no dialectic, because the horrors of the Anthropocene dissolve all narratives of human progress, which now appear absurd. This is a period of incredible compression and peril. The oil- fueled modern collapses in on itself yet cannot be turned off.”
—Anthony Burke & Stefanie Fishel, The Ecology Politic (MIT Press, 2025), p. 221.
Research & Writing
Anthony is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across philosophy, social theory, political ecology, international relations, earth system governance, 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 The Ecology Politic: Power, Law, and Earth in the Anthropocene (with Stefanie Fishel, MIT Press, 2025), which received Honorable Mention in the International Studies Theory book award in 2026. Other key works include 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.