Search results

This article pursues two trajectories of investigation: one which explores how the construct of autonomy shorn of its liberal sovereign inheritances could serve as a resource for creative enactments of 'the political'; and the other, which takes up the problematic aspects of the absence of the body in current International Relations scholarship. It will be argued that a relational version of autonomy is what enables and sustains the shift from an ethic centred on liberal atomistic selves to an ethics of engagement between self and other. Engagement, however, involves bodily enactments and, pace Shapiro, the willingness to be afflicted by the performance of the other. Thus the crucial aspect of the body that we must consider is how we might begin to theorise the body as a surface for the resistance of sovereign power that not only operates to individuate and separate but to render docile and disciplined. In the global war on terror, sovereign power's exercise has reached its most abstract levels yet, as bodies are disappeared within increasingly technologised and biologised forms of war. Abstraction is the key technique that sovereign power wields over fleshy, material bodies and it is our responsibility to stop empowering sovereign power by driving the discourse into ever more abstract lines of argumentation while losing site of the primary resource we wield in this struggle, the creative and relationally autonomous body.

"Sovereignty as a Problematic Conceptual Core" published on by Oxford University Press.

This paper considers the postmodern concept of agonism and its relationship to the concept of peace. Connolly's concept of `agonistic respect' is seminal in this regard because it can be argued that such a formulation gestures towards an iteration of postmodern peace. However, this paper will reread Connolly's version of agonism through Foucault's analytic of war and peace to draw attention not only to Connolly's own deeply entrenched indebtedness to `liberal peace' but to indicate why Foucault's more expansive analytic of agonism is better suited to interrogating international relations' most intractable sources of conflict. I seek to reposition the discussion of agonism in such a way that it opens up a critical research agenda with the potential to resist the trap wherein peace emerges as just another tactic for reinscribing hegemonic structures of domination, exclusion, and marginalisation. The implications of such an approach are significant because it ultimately requires that we problematise considerations of respect and recognition when we approach the study of conflicts and that we self-reflexively question our own moral analytical frameworks embedded in the structural components of the peace we strive to create.

This paper considers the postmodern concept of agonism & its relationship to the concept of peace. Connolly's concept of 'agonistic respect' is seminal in this regard because it can be argued that such a formulation gestures towards an iteration of postmodern peace. However, this paper will reread Connolly's version of agonism through Foucault's analytic of war & peace to draw attention not only to Connolly's own deeply entrenched indebtedness to 'liberal peace' but to indicate why Foucault's more expansive analytic of agonism is better suited to interrogating international relations' most intractable sources of conflict. I seek to reposition the discussion of agonism in such a way that it opens up a critical research agenda with the potential to resist the trap wherein peace emerges as just another tactic for reinscribing hegemonic structures of domination, exclusion, & marginalisation. The implications of such an approach are significant because it ultimately requires that we problematise considerations of respect & recognition when we approach the study of conflicts & that we self-reflexively question our own moral analytical frameworks embedded in the structural components of the peace we strive to create. Adapted from the source document.

This article describes an experientially based approach to the teaching/learning of international relations (IR) theory. The course is designed with the pedagogical goal of decentering the classroom, which implies taking the focus off of the instructor & creating a more collaboratively oriented learning environment. Students actively engage in peer editing, & review of one another's written work, they work in small discussion/interpretive circles, they utilize the class website to create an international issues forum, they design, format, & participate in a mock conference at the end of the semester, & their capstone project involves the creation of their own IR theory writing portfolio. The theoretical perspectives of realism, liberalism, globalism, constructivism, feminism, & postmodernism are introduced as a series of "lenses" through which students will view various international issues, problems, & events. Our operative premise is that all international events are given meaning by their interpreters; therefore, the lens through which we view the world is crucial. This course is designed to introduce students to the work of the IR theorist in a collaborative & actively engaged educational setting. References. Adapted from the source document.