Sue Donaldson (Queen’s University, Canada)

Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University, Canada)

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For the past 150 years, citizenship has been a lodestar of progressive politics. The historic task of progressive politics was to turn ‘subjects’ into ‘citizens’, and the status and identity of citizenship was seen as a crucial guarantor of dignity and agency. Today, an increasing number of critical voices reject the liberatory potential of citizenship, which they see as inherently exclusionary — privileging the interests of insiders over outsiders, of majorities over minorities and indigenous peoples, and of able-bodied neurotypical adults over children and people with disabilities. In response to this critique, defenders have argued that citizenship can be reformed and rescued so long as it is suitably pluralised. Rather than thinking of citizenship as a single, unitary, and homogeneous status, a truly inclusive citizenship would recognise that there are different forms of political community, and that there are different ways of enacting citizenship within those different communities. 

Our new book Animals and the Right to Politics sides with those who seek to preserve and pluralise citizenship, but we argue that the project of pluralising citizenship needs to go much deeper, in two respects. The first is an expanded conception of who can belong to the polity. The second is an expanded conception of the relevant kinds of polities and politics.

Our project tackles these challenges through the unique lens of bringing animals into politics.[1] Our primary motivation for focusing on animals is to address the almost unimaginable levels of violence humans impose on animals, but we firmly believe that reflecting on the animal case also sheds light on possible and desirable kinds of political agency and political community for humans. A conception of citizenship that can make room for animals can also, we argue, help address some of the other exclusions and oppressions associated with traditional ideas of citizenship.

Pluralising the Who

We begin with a summary of our arguments for insisting that animals are zoon politika – they are political beings with a right to politics. The assumption that only humans are political animals is foundational to the Western tradition of political theory, typically grounded in some version of a nature/culture distinction. On this view, animal lives follow fixed biological scripts, and changes in their modes of living occur through evolutionary adaptation alone, not through minded and flexible collective practices of society, culture and politics. By contrast, humans have the capacity through culture to rise above nature and make decisions about their future, and politics, on this view, is precisely the vehicle by which humans rise above their animality to make collective decisions about how to lead their lives and how to shape the future of their societies.

Over the last 60 years, and especially since the turn of the 21^st century, ethology has decisively rejected this reductionist view of animals,[2] but the social sciences have yet to catch up. While perhaps acknowledging that animals are sentient beings who can be harmed and are therefore due moral consideration, the social sciences generally, and citizenship theory in particular, have yet to grapple with the implications of the fact that many animals are genuinely social, cultural and political beings, and that the study of society and politics must be seen through an interspecies lens.

In our book, we canvass many examples of how animal communities (pods, clans, flocks, herds, etc.) engage in politics to navigate the challenges of group life. They have diverse ways of making collective decisions, of generating and distributing effective leadership authority, of building consensus in the face of potential conflicts and of securing reconciliation after conflicts emerge. As in the human case, the ability of animals to engage in these forms of politics rests on a number of underlying social processes – such as social learning, communication, social and cultural norms – which in turn depend on a variety of psychological processes such as orientation to the group and desire to conform; pro-social emotions like trust and caring, the desire to cooperate, and capacities for emotional self-regulation. Every day new research is revealing this web of animal politics, sociality and psychology.

Some sceptics argue that even if animals do engage in politics in these ways, they do it badly: some have suggested that animal societies are the equivalent of “failed states” which have forfeited any rights to self-government. This reflects long-standing prejudices that animal societies function according to ‘brute’ (!) power and ‘rule by bullies’. In reality, many animal societies achieve remarkable levels of peaceful cooperation, coordination and care within their communities, achievements which rely on capacities for empathy, emotional regulation, toleration, and a sense of reciprocity — not simply the exercise of raw power. According to Bernard Williams, the “first question of politics” is whether disagreements within a society are resolved through peaceful cooperation or instead through violence. Viewed this way, many animal societies successfully answer the first question of politics: they have adopted the path of peaceful politics. Moreover, they do so in ways that are environmentally sustainable, achieving a kind of “grounded authority” that further legitimates their claim to collective self-determination. (For application to animals see here.) If the legitimate right to self-government depends on meeting a sustainability proviso, as theorists like Margaret Moore argue (in her contribution to this edited volume), then animal politics is often more legitimate than many human politics.

Animals’ ways of doing politics are much less abstract than (some forms of) human politics. Animal political cultures are emplaced and embodied, and change occurs through response to experience, not theoretical models or abstract principles. There has been considerable investigation of politics within and across different kinds of primate groups, which highlights dramatic differences in how they meet the challenges of group living. Across 20 species of macaques, for example, there is remarkable diversity ranging from highly despotic political cultures (more centralised authority enforced through coercion and threat) to more egalitarian cultures that engage in more shared and cooperative decision-making (see study here). And when rhesus macaques from more despotic communities are raised with stump-tailed macaques from more tolerant and cooperative communities, they adopt more peaceable ways of interacting (discussed here). In other words, these are socially learned behaviours, not genetic adaptations.

A fascinating case study of change in political culture was observed amongst olive baboons by Sapolsky and Share. Tuberculosis killed off the dominant males in the community. The group’s traditional culture relied heavily on strict dominance hierarchies and coercive compliance, but after this event killed off the high-ranking despots, what happened is not that other baboons scrambled to claim their position. Rather, the surviving baboons, led by adult females, adopted more cooperative, tolerant and shared ways of doing things. When adolescent males from outside communities joined the group (as is the standard practice) they were socialised to this more peaceable political culture. Moreover, this new political culture was maintained across generations, continuing even after all the original group of survivors had died. It seems that having had the opportunity to practice a more tolerant and peaceful political culture, the baboons actively transmitted and maintained it over time.

This is just a glimpse of the rich evidence about how politics operates across animal groups. But it is enough, we hope, to show that there is no basis for assuming that only humans have the capacity, and the need, to engage in politics. When studying the world as it exists, and imagining possible futures, political theorists should assume a world rich with animal politics.

Why does this matter for citizenship theory? A sceptic might acknowledge that animals are zoon politika, but insist that animal politics and human politics can and should be kept in separate silos, each operating apart from the other. Human politics is here; animal politics is over there somewhere, and it is possible and appropriate for citizenship theory to focus exclusively on politics here while leaving it for others to study animal politics over there. The reality is that human and animal societies are deeply entangled, not just geographically and ecologically, but through histories of human violence and domination. For millennia, humans have asserted sovereignty over animals, incorporating them into human societies and activities through domestication; colonising their territories; inflicting violence without end. Human societies, nations and their citizenship practices are constructed on this edifice of oppression, dispossession, and exclusion, including ongoing violation of animals’ own rights to collective self-determination and belonging. Human modes of belonging, mutual responsibility and governance rely on the destruction of animals’ capacities to do the same, thus undermining any moral foundation to our own claims to self-government and citizenship. This situation calls for urgent remedy, and one that re-thinks citizenship for a world we share with other animals who also have a right to politics.

Three Patterns of Human-Animal Politics

While the separate silos view is untenable given the facts of human-animal entanglement, this is not to say that all animals are equally entangled with all humans, or entangled in the same ways. We have found it useful to think along the two axes of social and geographic entanglement. This yields three broad categories of relationship: (1) some animals share both a social world and a physical territory with humans; (2) some animals share a physical territory with humans, but are not part of a shared scheme of social cooperation; (3) some animals are both physically and socially remote from humans. These distinctions shape the possibilities for human-animal politics. In this essay, we will focus on the first two cases, but let us briefly start with the third group: those animals who are geographically and socially remote from humans.

(i) Wild Animals and Interspecies Diplomacy

Dwindling numbers of animals live in shrinking regions that are still remote from human settlement like alpine peaks, harsh desert and arctic environments, the boreal forests, the ocean. These ‘wild animals’, as we call them, are not free of human impacts, like global warming, but their daily lives involve minimal contact with humans, let alone thick forms of social connection and interdependency. The places where wild animals live may have been colonised or annexed in political terms (i.e. incorporated into the territorial claims of nation states, or into territory defined as a human global commons such as the high seas), but wild animals do not perceive themselves as part of shared communities with humans in physical, sociological or psychological terms.

On our view, humans can (and should) withdraw their territorial claims from many of these areas where wild animals live, recognising them as autonomous territories where animals can, and have the right to, exercise their own forms of self-government. Humans are also under an obligation, we would argue, to expand and connect these areas to increase the connectivity and resilience of wild animal communities in part as restitution for ongoing injustice. Respecting the self-government of wild animal territories calls for distinctive kinds of interspecies political relationship, which we characterise as a kind of international diplomacy or treaty federalism. In chapter 9 of our book, we explore how our model draws upon, but also goes beyond, existing and developing practices in global conservation policy and rights of nature (RoN) frameworks, such as approaches that secure autonomous regions and protected wilderness areas within federal entities; or as dependencies or microstates under international law; approaches that grant rights to nature or recognise that nature owns itself (as in the New Zealand Te Urewara agreement); creation of Indigenous-led conservation regions, and similar undertakings. We believe that many of these initiatives can be redescribed and restructured to support the self-government of wild animal communities.

For the rest of this essay, however, we turn to those animal communities that do overlap significantly with humans in either geographic and/or social terms, where denser forms of interdependency are desirable or unavoidable. In these contexts, shared forms of governance are required that go beyond diplomacy between largely independent self-governing entities, and which pose a more direct challenge to traditional citizenship theory.

(ii) Domesticated Animals and Co-Citizenship in the Agora

Consider animals who are both socially and geographically entangled with humans. This is true, most obviously, of domesticated animals (DAs) – i.e., animals who have been confined and selectively bred by humans over generations to live and work alongside humans, and to better serve human purposes for food, labour, companionship, entertainment or research. Justice requires ending human dominion over these animals and returning to them the possibility of leading self-determining lives. However, for many DAs, at least for the foreseeable future, their collective self-determination will unfold within shared societies with humans, at least until such time as DAs can safely exit if they so choose. The shrinking availability of non-human settled territories (and the rights of the wild animals living there), as well as loss of DAs’ social and cultural traditions for surviving without humans, make it unlikely that most DAs can exercise a right of exit at least in the short term. Moreover, many may not wish to do so, and have the right to be recognised as full members of the societies built on their blood and sweat. They are owed genuine social inclusion and distributive justice within what have hitherto been misdescribed as ‘human’ societies. Having brought DAs into society, and foreclosed other opportunities, humans are obliged to recognise DAs as co-citizens of a shared social polity with humans, one which belongs to them as much as to us. In such a shared society, health, education, recreation, social and emergency services, jobs and labour laws, public spaces, and other dimensions of a ‘shared cooperative scheme’ are shaped by and for DAs, not just humans.  

We argue, moreover, that meaningful co-citizenship is possible with DAs. While domestication has been exploitative, selective breeding and long association between humans and DAs have enhanced possibilities for close physical contact, communication, trust, attachment, mutual attunement, responsiveness, reciprocity, cooperation and forms of shared culture that ground the possibility for political relationship. We noted earlier that animals’ ability to engage in politics with other members of their social groups rests upon various social conditions (e.g., social learning) and psychological conditions (e.g., trust). A striking fact about domestication is that it generates an interspecies version of these social and psychological preconditions of politics. Domestication is only possible where animals are able to engage in social learning and trust with humans, and domestication in many cases has operated over time to strengthen these capacities for interspecies sociability that underpin interspecies politics.

The challenge is to figure out how humans and DAs can share power and co-author their shared social worlds. As we noted earlier, animals tend to have more grounded, embodied and immediate ways of doing politics. This calls for the right scale, place and pace for the development of iterative practices, shared knowledge, trusting relationships, and opportunities for political deliberation and judgement. We describe this as shared citizenship in the ‘agora’, harking back to the face-to-face politics of ancient Greece, of city states, of New England towns, and of many smaller scale tribal or kinship communities around the world.

The politics of the agora isn’t simply about aggregating pre-political interests (e.g. through impersonal decision procedures); it’s about seeing and knowing one another, and mutually shaping political desires and expectations in shared contexts. Meaningful co-citizenship for humans and DAs requires re-vitalisation and re-imagination of politics at this kind of local scale. This isn’t a naïve call to abandon politics at state and supra-state scales in a world of 8 billion humans. The agora, where humans and DAs can engage in a politics of embodied experiment, and response is only one part of the picture, and doesn’t displace politics at other scales and complexities within larger democratic systems. As the “systemic” account of democracy indicates, different spaces and places of politics serve different kinds of political needs and operate according to different political norms, and this division of labour is required to create truly inclusive and legitimate political systems. So our call is not just to recognise DAs as co-citizens in society-based polities as they currently exist, but in re-imagined democracies where the agora is the real heart of politics, and is essential to converting relations of domination into legitimate politics.

In chapter 8 of our book, we explore several concrete examples of how this politics of the agora might unfold. In some sanctuaries for formerly farmed animals, for example, animals from varied species, cultures and individual backgrounds are actively creating new forms of society with humans who are committed to respecting their self-determination. This involves humans providing a capacious and open environment (physically expansive and complex, ecologically diverse, filled with different kinds of structures and objects), carefully introducing different groupings of animals, actively mapping their physical and social interactions, responding to their proposals about how to organise the environment (e.g. building a larger pond, or more heat shelters or climbing structures, or planting larger wooded areas), observing emergent social norms (e.g. how the animals share space, diffuse conflict, greet and incorporate newcomers, or interact with liminal animal visitors like wild turkeys or foxes.) In this situation, animals aren’t simply reverting to some sort of pre-domesticated species type. They are actively figuring out how to shape and share a peaceful society that might include cows, sheep, emus, pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, turkeys, goats, ducks and some atypical humans who desire simply to live with them, not dominate them. In our view, the micropolitics of sanctuaries for formerly farmed animals can prefigure and help identify the kinds of desires, norms and processes that might shape the broader societies that humans share with domesticated animals.

(iii) Liminal Animals and Co-Denizenship in the Commons

We now turn to our third broad group of animals, those we call liminal animals. Liminal animals are not domesticated, but they live in geographic proximity with humans in human-built environments, agricultural areas, regions of resource extraction, nature recreation and so on (often called ‘urban wildlife’). They include synanthropic animals like brown rats and house mice, who only exist in conjunction with human-built environments. They include opportunistic animals who move into areas of human settlement, like raccoons, coyotes, crows, and rhesus macaques, as well as many seasonal migrant animals — either for the opportunities afforded or because they are forced to do so as their habitats disappear.[3]

Liminal animals live in geographic proximity or their habitats overlap with those of humans, but unlike DAs, they don’t typically share close social relationships with humans, or participate in shared society, activities, economic practices, and so on. Indeed, many humans view liminal animals as ‘pests’ and ‘invaders’ who don’t belong in the city, and subject them to violent eradication and deterrence campaigns. While many liminal animals find ways to benefit from human-built environments (warmth, shelter, food availability, protection from predators), they tend to be wary of humans for good reason. For example, many liminal animals become nocturnal even though their wild relatives are diurnal, thus making the most of urban opportunities while avoiding actual humans as much as possible.

On our view humans have many obligations vis-à-vis liminal animals (to which we return in a moment), but these flow from the fact of physical entanglement, not social membership. Humans haven’t forcibly confined and bred them to be dependent on humans for food, shelter, protection from predators, or assistance with health issues stemming from breeding practices. Humans aren’t responsible for helping to raise and socialise young coyotes, to make our buildings and transportation systems more accessible to them, to develop kinds of play or work that they might find fulfilling (or vice versa). And they, in turn, don’t typically seek our protection or company or cooperation but simply that we avoid harming them.

The political task, therefore, is to figure out how socially separate groups can live on the same territory and coordinate the sharing of that territory. Put that way, the task is already a familiar one in many human political traditions. In her classic studies of ‘the commons’, Elinor Ostrom considered many cases where multiple distinct communities rely on the same “common-pool resource” (such as a forest, or grazing land, or aquifer), and the forms of governance that typically emerge in these situations where different groups need to share access to place and resources in a fair and sustainable way. Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe treaties like The Two Row Wampum and The Dish With One Spoon also instantiate ideas of how separate self-governing peoples who depend on shared lands can generate forms of governance (treaties, law) to jointly care for and share the place they both occupy. (See discussion here and here.) Our work draws inspiration from these discussions, from recent work on the idea of place-based duties,  and from work on the idea of “bioregions”.

What these diverse traditions and sources have in common is that they distinguish those who share a society and its governance from those who simply share a place and its governance. And this in turn prompts our own proposal to distinguish two different kinds of polities: society-based polities, concerned with the governance of a cooperative social scheme; and place-based polities, concerned with governing a geographical region that is shared by multiple self-governing social groups.

One of the fundamental problems with traditional citizenship theory is that it has conflated these two different images of the polity, assuming that all who share occupancy of a place also share a society. That assumption was often wrong and dangerous even in the human case, and becomes absurd when we also consider the animal societies who share territories with humans. It is crucial, we argue, to avoid conflating society and place, or reducing one to the other: they are distinct grounds for political community, responding to different political needs. Social animals, including human animals, need political mechanisms to govern their shared society, and they also need political mechanisms to govern shared lands.

So to return to the case of liminal animals, we suggest that humans (and DAs) should be seen as sharing place-based polities with liminal animals. We call these place-based polities a multispecies ‘commons’, and we refer to the human and animal inhabitants as ‘denizens’. The commons, as a place-based polity, recognises that all denizens have occupancy and use rights, coordination and sustainability responsibilities, and negative rights of non-interference, but it does not assume that the parties seek to form a common society with thicker forms of sociality and social integration. In short, we do not assume that those who share denizenship in a place-based polity seek to become co-citizens of a societal polity.

In chapter 10 of our book, we explore several examples of how a multispecies commons can be governed in a way that is responsive to the place-based rights and duties of human and animal denizens, while still leaving room for each to govern their own societies. For example, in our own city of Kingston, there is a societal polity composed of humans and DAs, roughly bounded by the urban and suburban residential boundaries, governed by the municipality. But overlapping with this territory are countless liminal animal groups like swan flocks, crow or squirrel colonies, beaver clans, and coyote packs. The place-based polity they share as denizens with humans and DAs, were it recognised, wouldn’t have the same boundaries as the human/DA societal polity. It wouldn’t be defined primarily by human built environments, but more by ecological and animal-constructed environments like rivers, woods, food sites, or green corridors that connect to the nearby countryside. The primary raison d’etre of the place-based polity would be to protect this environment for all denizens. So, for example, the human/DA societal polity of Kingston couldn’t simply build highways or construct buildings or block waterways that posed hazards to liminal animal denizens of the shared place-based polity or impede them from access to resources. At the same time, it would be quite appropriate to use food storage best practices and hazing techniques to discourage coyotes from approaching humans and DAs. We also consider various ways in which the terms of denizen co-existence could be created with liminal animals through multispecies design and other emergent practices for actively involving animals in the design of spaces, buildings and ecologies.[4]

Conclusion

This essay provides only a very schematic overview of our account of animal politics, and its challenge to citizenship theory. Thinking about how to do politics with animals is in its infancy, and in our view, this can only be learned with animals themselves, through ‘experiments in living’ together.

We realise that our account may seem utopian: some readers cannot imagine that humans will ever relinquish their sense of entitlement to exploit domesticated animals and to colonise wild animal territory. Whether due to alleged “natural carnivory”, greed for the resources of the earth, or sheer pleasure in dominating animals, some doubt that humans can change. This is a serious worry, but note the paradox. We began this essay by noting the near-universal assumption in citizenship theory that only humans can engage in politics, only humans can rise above their natural instincts to replace violence with politics. But here we are confronted with the reverse view: perhaps it is the human species that is incapable of being political animals. If peaceful political relations cannot be established between humans and cows, it is not because cows cannot peacefully negotiate and regulate their relations with humans, but because humans cannot restrain their violence against cows.

We do not share that pessimistic view of humans, and in the conclusion of our book, we offer reasons for thinking that humans, too, are capable of politics in their relations with animals. Unfortunately, citizenship theory has to date been an obstacle in that path, rendering invisible both animals’ capacities for politics and the human violence that suppresses animal politics.

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[1] We use ‘animals’ not in the biological sense (which includes homo sapiens), but as the political class of sentient beings subject to domination for not being human, those whom Cary Wolfe calls the “animalised animals” over whom humanised animals have sought to assert superiority and domination.

[2] The study of animal minds and animal culture has exploded in recent years, but we try to highlight the developments in ethology, cognitive ethology and philosophy of mind that we see as most relevant for political theory in Chapter 5 of our book.

[3] Liminal animals also encompass those who survive in micro habitats surrounded by human development that has cut them off from wilder areas, and animals from formerly domesticated species who have effectively rewilded, and continue to live in proximity with humans, such as pigeons, and various populations of pigs, camels, and horses to name a few.

[4] Eva Meijer has explored the various forms of political communication and negotiation between geese and humans regarding land use around airports in her book When animals speak: Toward an interspecies democracy. Stanislav Roudavski discusses how birds are “discerning clients” of the built environment, and how architects and urban planners can incorporate their proposals and feedback at multiple stages of design.