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Introduction -- 1. Objects among objects -- 2. Intellectuals as experts -- 3. The final core of uncertainty -- 4. Humanitarianism, humanity, human -- 5. Memory and the future -- 6. Loss of loss -- 7. Tracing disappearance -- 8. Stardust -- 9.. The grenfell tower file -- 10. From one world to another Conclusion.

Vol. 1 Critical spaces, theoretical resources -- Vol. 2 Empirical interventions 1: economy, development, identity -- Vol. 3 Empirical interventions 2: movement, violence and accountability -- Vol. 4 The future of critical international relations: protest, aesthetics, pedagogy.

In this interesting study, Jenny Edkins explores how we remember traumatic events such as wars, famines, genocides and terrorism, and questions the assumed role of commemorations as simply reinforcing state and nationhood. Taking examples from the World Wars, Vietnam, the Holocaust, Kosovo and September 11th, Edkins offers a thorough discussion of practices of memory such as memorials, museums, remembrance ceremonies, the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress and the act of bearing witness. She examines the implications of these commemorations in terms of language, political power, sovereignty and nationalism. She argues that some forms of remembering do not ignore the horror of what happened but rather use memory to promote change and to challenge the political systems that produced the violence of wars and genocides in the first place. This wide-ranging study embraces literature, history, politics and international relations, and makes a significant contribution to the study of memory

We see famine and look for the likely causes: poor food distribution, unstable regimes, caprices of weather. A technical problem, we tell ourselves, one that modern social and natural science will someday resolve. Jenny Edkins responds to the contrary: famine in the contemporary world is not the antithesis of modernity but its symptom. A critical investigation of hunger, famine, and aid practices in international politics, Whose Hunger? shows how modernity frames our understanding of famine-and, consequently, shapes our responses. Edkins examines Malthus and the origins of famine theory in notions of scarcity. Drawing on the work of Lacan, de Waal, Foucault, Zizek, and particularly Derrida, she considers Amartya Sen's entitlement approach, the Band Aid/Live Aid events, and food for work projects in Eritrea as examples of the technologization and repoliticization of famine. From the politics of famine to the practices of aid, from the theories of modernity to the complex emergencies of modern life, from the broad view to the telling detail, this searching book takes us closer to a clear understanding of some of the worst ravages of our time.

Despite the imperative for change in a world of persistent inequality, racism, oppression and violence, difficulties arise once we try to bring about a transformation. As scholars, students and activists, we may want to change the world, but we are not separate, looking in, but rather part of the world ourselves. The book demonstrates that we are not in control: with all our academic rigour, we cannot know with certainty why the world is the way it is, or what impact our actions will have. It asks what we are to do, if this is the case, and engages with our desire to seek change. Chapters scrutinise the role of intellectuals, experts and activists in famine aid, the Iraq war, humanitarianism and intervention, traumatic memory, enforced disappearance, and the Grenfell Tower fire, and examine the fantasy of security, contemporary notions of time, space and materiality, and ideas of the human and sentience. Plays and films by Michael Frayn, Chris Marker and Patricio Guzmán are considered, and autobiographical narrative accounts probe the author's life and background. The book argues that although we might need to traverse the fantasy of certainty and security, we do not need to give up on hope.

Prompted by Elizabeth Dauphinee's The Politics of Exile, the article explores the political potential of novel ways of writing in international relations. It begins by examining attempts to distinguish between narrative writing and academic writing, fiction and non-fiction, and to give an account of what narrative might be and how it might work. It argues that although distinctions between narrative writing and academic writing cannot hold, there are nevertheless ways of judging the practical political effects that writing can produce. It briefly examines feminist, postcolonial and other international relations scholars who collect other people's stories or tell their own, and points to an instructive body of work in fiction and literary non-fiction beyond the discipline. It argues that writing that disrupts linear forms of temporality and instead inhabits 'trauma time' can open the possibility of an aesthetic political practice, and suggests that we foster such a creative practice in international relations.

The faces of the missing are held aloft on placards in demonstrations or posted on walls in the aftermath of disappearances. They appear massed on the pages of newspapers and in the displays of genocide museums. Often nothing more than family snapshots given a public place, such images can be compelling. Although photographs of atrocity and war have frequently been discussed, little attention has been paid to these other images: images that do not show suffering but still seem, at least potentially, to be politically effective. How do these photographs work? What form of personhood do they instantiate and what politics do they point to? How are they different from other photographs? This article examines what might be special about a photograph, especially a photograph of a face, and how its political impact might be understood. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of trauma and subjectivity, the article suggests that a photograph embodies in its very temporal structure a personhood that is inimical to contemporary structures of sovereign power. The destabilizing political potential of a photograph, like that of certain forms of literary text, could be understood as arising from its potential as an encounter with the trauma that inhabits sovereign power and sovereign subjectivity but that is generally concealed. The account presented offers an alternative approach to the analysis of the politics of a photograph and gestures toward other manifestations of personhood and politics.

AbstractIn the aftermath of the 7th July 2005 bombings in London, communication with those searching desperately for relatives and friends was one-way or non-existent. The authorities dealing with the processes of the identification of the bodies of those killed or the treatment of those injured adopted procedures and protocols derived from emergency or disaster planning that were framed in terms of an instrumentalisation or objectification of persons. This article traces how these procedures reflect biopolitical forms of global governance that involve the production of life as 'bare life' and details how inappropriate and brutal these forms of governance seemed both to those searching for the missing and to the London Assembly 7th July Review Committee. It concludes that attention needs to be paid to the proliferation of such forms of politics as administration and the objectification they entail before we reach a stage where all life becomes nothing more than bare life, life with no political voice as such.