Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.

"“In Savage Ecology Jairus Victor Grove gives us a weirdly hopeful eco-pessimism. ‘We broke the planet,’ he writes, and ‘now it is our planet.’ Agree or not, the breadth of his archive (neuro-torture, algorithmic warfare, drone strikes, and cybernetic nation-building) and audacity of his thinking (biopolitics is now ‘almost quaint,’ he says, given the geopolitics of the Anthropocene) are simply exhilarating. Your thinking cannot survive this book unchanged. Fortunately, Grove says, ‘the end of the world is never the end of everything’ (though it may well be the end of us).”" - Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair

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“Savage Ecology is an extraordinarily rich text. . . . Wading through Savage Ecology uncovers a wondrous diversity of thought.”

"Grove offers one of the most robust and erudite examples of a critical ethos of pessimism I have read to date. . . . Rather than distancing total destruction from our current moment in order to propose a redemptive, critical utopia, Grove is immersed in catastrophe as an immanent condition of critique." - Public Books

"“In an oddly provocative manner Jairus Victor Grove has provided an eloquent and impassioned tribute to war and its savage ecology. This book is a twofer, a thoughtful intervention in current policy debate and a scorching critique of mainstream IR theory, with its arrogant pretensions and its plenitude of crucial failures and catastrophic consequences. It will be tragic if activists and the discipline’s leading practitioners fail to read it.”" - Informed Consent

"“Grove takes a postmodern approach to the study of ecology in global politics, penning an engrossing if brooding and pessimistic book that is itself a unique expression of this theoretical tradition in IR theory.... [H]e offers an honest realism, one could say, whose rendering is brutal only because the current predicament facing us bears the brutality of the martial logic that brought us here in the first place." - Perspectives on Politics