Suchergebnisse

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the 'agenda' of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the 'agenda of IR' and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy 'ethics and IR' and towards 'an ethical International Relations'. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the 'dangerous ontology' of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an 'ethos of survival' has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR.

This article explores the ability of comedy to challenge the hegemony of the rational narrative in political study & practice. It argues that the production of laughter by comic narratives appears to have lost its prominence in the political sphere with the advent of modernity. This is especially true for international relations, where the gravity of the subject matter is said to require the unrelenting exercise of the rational. Comedy, the article suggests, can participate in the search for the site from which the hegemony of the rational can be questioned. Juxtaposing the narrative of the "democratic peace" with Aristophanes's comedy Peace, it illustrates that comedy has a number of political functions. Primarily, comedy expands the political outlook of the polis by introducing Dionysian elements to rational political debate. Furthermore, comedy has a critical function, by which it renders "the everyday" strange & recovers new possibilities embedded within it. Finally, the comic narrative indicates the limits of discourse, as exemplified through its exploration of terms such as peace & democracy. Adapted from the source document.