Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential, controversial and complex thinkers of our time, has come to be at the centre of many political debates. This is the first book to consider the political implications of Derrida's deconstruction. It is a timely response both to Derrida's own recent shift towards thinking about the political, and to the political focus of contemparary Continental philosophy.Richard Beardsworth's study, Derrida and the Political, locates a way of thinking about deconstruction using the tools of political philosophy. Richard Beardsworth has provided studen
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Globalization has been contested in recent times. Among the critical perspectives is cosmopolitanism. Yet, with the exception of normative theory, international relations as a field has ignored cosmopolitan thinking. This book redresses this gap and develops a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and international relations. The dialogue is structured around three debates between non-universalist theories of international relations and contemporary cosmopolitan thought. The theories chosen are realism, (post-)Marxism and postmodernism. All three criticize liberalism in the international domain, and, therefore, cosmopolitanism as an offshoot of liberalism. In the light of each school's respective critique of universalism, the book suggests both the importance and difficulty of the cosmopolitan perspective in the contemporary world. Beardsworth emphasizes the need for global leadership at nation-state level, re-embedding of the world economy, a cosmopolitan politics of the lesser violence, and cosmopolitan political judgement. He also suggests research agendas to situate further contemporary cosmopolitanism in international relations theory. This book will appeal to all students of political theory and international relations, especially those who are seeking more articulation of the main issues between cosmopolitanism and its critics in international relations.
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"Globalization has been contested in recent times. Among the critical perspectives is cosmopolitanism. Yet, with the exception of normative theory, international relations as a field has ignored cosmopolitan thinking. This book redresses this gap and develops a dialogue between cosmopolitanism and international relations. The dialogue is structured around three debates between non-universalist theories of international relations and contemporary cosmopolitan thought. The theories chosen are realism, (post- )Marxism and postmodernism. All three criticize liberalism in the international domain, and, therefore, cosmopolitanism as an offshoot of liberalism. In the light of each school's respective critique of universalism, the book suggests both the importance and difficulty of the cosmopolitan perspective in the contemporary world. Beardsworth emphasizes the need for global leadership at nation-state level, re-embedding of the world economy, a cosmopolitan politics of the lesser violence, and cosmopolitan political judgement. He also suggests research agendas to situate further contemporary cosmopolitanism in international relations theory. This book will appeal to all students of political theory and international relations, especially those who are seeking more articulation of the main issues between cosmopolitanism and its critics in international relations"--Provided by publisher
Political leadership on climate and the 1.5°c limit: A normative framework Richard Beardsworth, Professor of International Relations and Head of School at POLIS, University of Leeds, walks us through political leadership on climate and the 1.5°C limit and discusses if this limit remains a meaningful normative framework for climate action. In 2015, 196 governments came together at the UN-held international climate meeting COP21 to sign the Paris Agreement. In this non-binding international treaty, almost all governments of the world pledged to "hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C," aware that the risk of irreparable damage to life rapidly increased at the 2°C threshold.
COP28: The fossil fuel COP and political leadership on climate Richard Beardsworth, Professor of International Relations and Head of School from POLIS, University of Leeds, reflects on COP28, focusing on the fossil fuel COP and political leadership on climate. The 2023 Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai has been designated by participants (governments as well as the UN secretariat and civil society actors) as the 'fossil fuel COP'. What are the stakes in this designation and what political leadership is required to address them? This article rehearses these stakes as well as the political response necessary. Although it will be evident by the time this article is published to what extent COP28 has been a successful 'fossil fuel COP', the political leadership so desperately needed for the average global temperature increase of 1.5°C to retain meaning will remain an absolute priority for climate leaders throughout 2024.
Climate leadership now: Climate finance & political will Richard Beardsworth, Professor of International Relations and Head of School from POLIS, University of Leeds, looks at climate finance and political will among national governments and international institutions, aiming to break the stand-off between developed and developing countries. Overall, this evaluation of climate finance provides the key to breaking the deadlock between developed and developing countries by aligning the strategies of mitigation with adaptation and loss and damage. Aiming to understand climate action and ambition, Professor Beardsworth analyses the Conference of the Parties (COPs) and their role in mitigation with development and adaptation. He explains that distrust between the two sets of countries is embedded in the international politics of climate change. In this analysis of climate leadership now, he looks to the COP27 decision text and the G20 Bali joint declaration, which emphasise the need for 'major international financial reform to support developing countries'. The language of both agreements is informed in part by the Bridgetown Initiative, which Professor Beardsworth explores in extensive detail. As we are in an age of polycrises and deep transformation, he argues, we must change how we respond to the plurality of interdependent and mutually reinforcing crises (climate, health, energy, food, inequality, poverty), our energy systems, our current economic and financial models, as well as our present ways of governing.
After COP27: Whither climate leadership? The twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties (COP27) – tasked, like every annual UNFCCC conference, to accelerate climate ambition and action – duly laboured under the current global crises. What and where next? 2022 has been a year of multi-dimensional crises as the Russian invasion of Ukraine fostered an energy crisis, deepened the food crisis and, intensified the water crisis and the 'post-Covid' debt crisis. COP27 certainly felt the impact of these crises. Expectations of the conference were low. Indeed there was understandable worry from the environmental community that the oil and gas sector, heavily represented at Sharm El-Sheikh, would turn the climate conference into a 'world gas trade fair' (pushing gas as the solution to the energy crisis). The dilemmas posed, for the developed countries, between short-term energy security and longer-term climate action and, for the developing countries, between development and climate action were not addressed head-on.
Approaching COP27: some questions for climate leadership The focus on 'following the science of 1.5°C' constituted a major pillar of the UK COP presidency. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, together with the ensuing energy, food, and cost of living crises, climate leadership has been faced with an acute dilemma: how to square the long-term transition to a net-zero energy system, one that follows the science, with short-term energy security. Here Richard Beardsworth, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds asks is it possible for climate leadership to begin the long-term transition to net-zero.
This article considers what is necessary politically to respond to the empirical challenge of climate change and to the present calls of climate science (a carbon-neutral world by 2050). Its basic argument is that, among an array of national and international actors, it remains the state that can drive a successful politics of climate change. Without the heavy-lifting of the state and the state's ability as a national entity to motivate behavioural change, neither the daunting scale nor imminent time-horizon of climate mitigation and adaptation is possible. The article shows how this specific argument, far from pitching anew nationalism against internationalism, can bring the two presently polarized movements together. The article then suggests that if these arguments are essentially valid, the discipline of International Relations needs to focus much more on the climate challenge, re-engage with its traditions of thought on the state and help harbour a specific disposition or mindset in the research and teaching of the discipline for the next decades: a fierce optimism.
National interest and national security need to be reconfigured so as to accommodate a state's response to global threats and challenges. This requires in turn addressing the following paradox: the pooling and ceding of sovereignty must be made in the very name of national sovereignty. The article maintains that it is one of the foremost challenges of political responsibility and political leadership today to assume this paradox and thereby align national and global interests and practices. The alignment can, it is suggested, effectively oppose sovereigntism and nationalism, on one hand, and abstract global governance, on the other. To promote this alignment, the article advances a renewed understanding of state responsibility to citizenship under conditions of globalization.
This article considers convergence between classical realism and critical theory in relation to pressing political problems. It argues that the spirit of both traditions can help develop critical reflection on the state as an agent of change. I suggest that too much recent critical theorization has avoided the state in its attention to social movements, but that a critical concept of state leadership is now required to address global threats and challenges. The article rehearses this critical concept in three stages. It considers, first, how the concept of national interest drives statecraft in the authorship of Hans Morgenthau and how complex this concept is both in its own terms and with regard to the political effects of the nuclear revolution. It develops, second, a multi-layered concept of responsibility as the guiding concept of statecraft in a world of increasingly incompatible demands. It argues, third, that these concepts of national interest and responsibility need to be aligned with global imperatives so that a greater marriage between the global and the national is possible. I conclude that it is the task of contemporary critical thought to address this present through a reimagined political realism.
Responsibility for the provision of global public goods is generally couched in moral terms: terms that, to one side of the important moral argument, signal the deficit of global collective action despite recent engagements in the normative concept of "sovereignty as responsibility." In this context the article seeks greater emphasis, in morally informed reflection on world politics, on political responsibility. The argument is made in two steps. The article considers first the specificity of moral responsibility and the inextricability of moral and political interest in international relations. Having situated both with regard to the decision-making structures of national government, the article argues, second, for a normative reconfiguration of political duty in terms of task-efficacy, republican legitimacy, and political leadership. As a result, a badly needed marriage between national priorities and global threats and challenges is made possible.
