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Process-based approaches avoid ontological consideration of social entities as substances, avoid epistemological reification of social entities or phenomena into static units and, on the contrary, integrate the idea of change into their whole conceptualisation of the social world. Finally, process-based approaches also aim to endogenise social phenomena theoretically in order to have a better understanding of their complexity. In sum, the key ideas of process-based approaches basically lie in the prioritisation of process over substance, relation over separateness, and activity over passivity. Starting from this position, the aim of this article is to offer a more concrete approach to a specific dimension of the `international' by focusing on the identity— alterity nexus. It will be shown how the spatial understanding of the `international' still characteristic of most contemporary IR theories is at odds with issues about the identity—alterity nexus that is partly constitutive of the `international', which rather than being thought of as a spatial dimension should be thought of as a process in itself. The French `veil affair' will be presented as an example to highlight the limits of our current spatial perspective about the `international'.

This article aims to understand how the politics of alterity in Japan led to a misdirected understanding of the West during the early Tokugawa period and the interwar periods. By means of two specific narrative matrices shinkoku [land of the gods] and kokutai [national polity essence], conceptual frameworks that operate with powerful begetting capabilities, it is shown how parallel structurations are at work in two distinct, but decisive, confrontations with the West. Shinkoku and kokutai discourses were specific self-understandings/representations promoted by ruling elites, which combined internal and external elements, and which developed the notion of a group and a related process of identification. originating in medieval times, the shinkoku discourse was used during the early modern period to confront alternative self-understandings/representations, perceived as seditious and pernicious; in particular, christianity. Within the country, shinkoku discourse contributed to the design of the Tokugawa's knowledge and moral spaces, in which a Japanese national identity was to be situated. The kokutai discourse, although essentially "spiritual" in the first half of the nineteenth century, rapidly became the same kind of knowledge and moral-spaces marker as the shinkoku discourse. This became more evident and dramatic during the Showa era when kokutai became a legal tool, in the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, to counter the perceived threat of what was described as either modanizumu [modernism] or Amerikanizumu [Americanism]. By means of these two narrative matrices, it will be shown that the constant aim of the Japanese ruling elites was to develop and implement a politics of alterity. The aim was therefore to unify, homogenize and naturalize a specific self-understanding/representation for the Japanese people that eradicated diversity and difference. Thus, orthodoxy and normalcy in Japan should be seen as misdirected understandings of the West, aimed at constructing a Japanese national identity.

Trying specifically not to fall into either eclecticism or redundancy, this paper is an attempt to develop a dialogical understanding of international relations within the meta-theoretical field of constructivism. Dialogism holds that the social world is constructed through an interweaving of mutually-responsive discourses between several agents. Further, it provides an interpretative tool, the hermeneutical locus, to understand agents' identities as a factor in international relations by discerning their expressivity, contextuality and relationality. Dealing more closely with the questions of identity and identity formation within the discipline of International Relations, the paper further regards national identity as a factor which is expressed in a particular aspect of foreign policy: the politics of alterity. Grounding my approach in the works of the Russian intellectual Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, in the first part of the paper I define what is to be understood by dialogism and its constitutive notion of transgredience. The second part is dedicated to the actual integration of dialogism within the discipline of International Relations. An example drawn from Japanese domestic and foreign policy prior to the Second World War further facilitates the comprehension of the theoretical argument concerning the link between the national and the international in a politics of alterity.

Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, die existierende Vorstellungen über Subjektivität und Reflexivität innerhalb der Theorie internationaler Beziehungen (IR) zu diskutieren. Hierzu wird die klassische, positivistisch inspirierte Perspektive mit einer dialogischen Perspektive kontrastiert. Die dialogische Perspektive bemüht sich um eine Integration der spezifischen Verknüpfung von Identität und Alterität. Als reflexives Instrument wird der sog. "Hermeneutical Locus" vorgeschlagen: Dieser soll Möglichkeiten des Zugangs zu Subjektivität eröffnen, ohne in eine Verdinglichung oder in eine reflexive Archäologie der Disziplin IR selbst zu verfallen. In diesem Sinne ist es der Wunsch des vorgestellten, dialogischen Ansatzes, ein reflexives Instrument für und über die Theorie internationaler Beziehungen anzubieten.

Security Studies: Critical Perspectives introduces the analysis of security from critical and interdisciplinary perspectives. Taking a student-centred approach to understanding contemporary security themes and cases, it provides an accessible set of analytic steps so that students develop the critical thinking skills and confidence to ask important questions about security and our worlds in contemporary politics. Common-sense security assumptions that reproduce forms of oppression and domination are revealed and their justifications decentred while perspectives inclusive of class, gender and sexualities, ethnicity and race, religion, disability, culture and ideology, political belonging, and the global south are introduced. In doing so, the authors combine critical analysis with concrete empirical issues that connect students to the social and political worlds around them.

This book engages the intense relationship between citizenship and security in modern politics. It focuses on questions of citizenship in security analysis in order to critically evaluate how political being is and can be constituted in relation to securitising practices.In light of contemporary issues and events such as human rights regimes, terrorism, identity control, commercialisation of security, diaspora, and border policies, this book addresses a citizenship deficit in security studies. The chapters introduce several key political themes that characterise the interplays betwee