Chapter 1 – The Humanisation of Global Politics – provides an overview of the books central claim of a growing humanisation of global politics. Humanisation denotes the growing reference to and the appearance of the individual human being in global politics. The chapter describes the apperance of the individual human being in global politics with reference to the three discourses on prosecution, protection, and killing the individual human being which the book studies. The chapter presents the research questions and the three arguments the book makes. The chapter also presents the books's contribution, and outlines the abductive research logic and the interdisciplinary approach as well as the books interpretative methodolgy. Finally, the chapter gives an overview of the books structure and the chapters of the book.

Chapter 8, The Individual Human Being as a Category – A Conclusion and an Outlook, returns to theory. To this end, the chapter weaves together the results of the case studies and the theoretical and methodological considerations. The chapter, serving as a conclusion to the book, simultaneously summarises the book, revisits the issue of interdisciplinarity, and presents its results. It also discusses the book’s contribution and value added. Most importantly, it demonstrates how the results of the empirical case studies are relevant for IR theory and what implications for IR theory, IL scholarship, and the study of global politics can be derived from these results. Finally, the chapter outlines future research based on the book’s results.

Chapter 2 – Humanisation in IR Theory and International Law – critically reviews the relevant IR and IL literature. The objective of this chapter is to identify gaps, strengths, and weaknesses of several approaches in both disciplines concerning the book’s objective, arguments, and research questions. In addition, it provides an answer to whether alternative approaches to the chosen framework provide a viable pathway to conceptualise the humanisation of global politics. Regarding alternatives approaches in IR, I discuss realist and liberal approaches, the literature on human rights and human security, and literature dealing with concepts such as self, identity, and agency. Regarding IL, I discuss, for similar reasons, the notion of mediation and how the individual human being, the international community, and the state relate to each other. And I offer a discussion of international law and the individual human being.

This chapter focuses on the precipitous decline of wild animals. It identifies the inception of ‘defaunation’ with the emergence of human empires as well as animals’ philosophical displacement in comparison to the distinguished human, both reaching back to classical antiquity. The chapter then discusses defaunation today – its recent causes and ecological consequences. It argues that this disappearance of animals impoverishes the world by stripping away manifestations of diverse animal minds. Divested of animals' presence and their numinous expressions, landscapes and seascapes also become disenchanted. This reinforces a notion that animist cosmologies are ‘fantastical’ and that the dominant zeitgeist of the universe as mechanical and purposeless is sensible. The chapter ends by decrying the humanisation of the Earth and calls for humanity to scale down and pull back, to allow for a resurgence of wild animal life.