Suchergebnisse

"Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror's intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror's work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror's production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror's own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror--faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11--to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today's often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies"--The publisher

Language matters in international relations. Constructivists have contributed the insight that global politics is shaped by the way agents narrate history and produce discourses about themselves and about the world. This insight has induced a profound reexamination of assumptions in the study of international relations. The contributors to this volume examine (Part I) the critical linguistic/discursive techniques of postmodernists and constructivists, and apply them (Part II) to international relations.

Time and again the United Nations has deployed peacekeeping missions in trouble spots around the globe: Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda. Has peace ensued? Have these missions, in fact, made any difference in the disorder and destruction they are purported to forestall? Or are they, as François Debrix contends in this critical revisiting of UN interventions, an illusion-more virtual peacekeeping than actual interventions in international affairs?

Comments and reflections on Lisa Ann Richey (ed), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power (London: Routledge, 2016), and Ilan Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (London: Routledge, 2013).

Comments and reflections on Lisa Ann Richey (ed), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North-South Relations: Politics, Place and Power (London: Routledge, 2016), and Ilan Kapoor, Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (London: Routledge, 2013). ; Published version

In order that the war which the United States is fighting in Iraq be presented as acceptable, successful and perhaps pleasurable to the American public, an aesthetic imagination that relies on the sublime has been mobilised. This sublime aesthetic of war, relayed by contemporary media and popular cultural forms (photo-journalism and television shows in particular), consists of producing spectacular, violent and shocking images of `others' in distress or harm's way in places where America's wars are being fought. The recent FX network programme Over There and some photo-journalistic displays of dead or tortured Iraqis in news magazines or commemorative volumes are examples of the logic of sublime spectatorship. An ideology of America at war is enabled through a visual experience that consists of forcing the spectator's imagination not only to go through unbearable and shocking images but also to transcend this initial painful experience by discovering beyond it readily available reasons and larger-than-life truths that can make sense of it all and justify those horrific scenes. The production of sublime spectatorship is indeed an ideological exercise. The sublime images examined in this article suggest that an ideology of American humanism as/in war is at stake. It is an ideology that postulates that only Americans (even if they are soldiers) are equipped to provide hope, morality and humanity to the Middle East (starting with Iraq). This article argues that the sublime image of war transforms the idea of what counts as an event today into a spectacle that requires understanding, acceptance and even enjoyment to be achieved by the audience, but only at the cost of going through the ordeal of the unpleasurable image and of finally adhering to a set of ideological beliefs. Yet, in a counter-ideological fashion, this article also concludes that a more resistant event or image today, one that might open up the political to new and unplanned critical and democratic possibilities, becomes visible too.