In this response, I answer some of the critiques that were raised in the Forum. In particular, this response clarifies the role of practices and pragmatism, the limits of inter-disciplinarity, and the authority and assumed foundations of law in a post-foundational time. Even though this contribution does not attempt to solve these issues once and for all, it provides avenues for future engagement.
This paper examines the changing meaning of 'territoriality' by focusing on the problem of representation. It examines the two-dimensional homogenous space as it has been increasingly used in 'mapping' the international system as an area of mutually exclusive zones of jurisdiction. This way of mapping has reinforced the notion of 'sovereignty' as exclusion, despite the growth of competing jurisdictional claims based on a variety of principles, which the emergence of private international law attempted to mediate during the heydays of the nation state. It also placed international regimes and international organizations 'above' the state where they became 'invisible', thereby again reinforcing the territorial conception of law and politics. The new systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and Gunther Teubner claims to provide a better representation of contemporary social and political reality, as it no longer uses the part/whole distinction as its main conceptual tool and is thus more open to 'legal pluralism' both domestically and internationally. Nevertheless, the conceptualization of autonomous functional systems does not do justice to the special role that law plays in constituting and transforming these supposedly autonomous 'auto-poietic' systems. For that reason the new systems theory fails to address also problems of non-territorial 'imperial' formations as evidenced by the political project of 'governance' and 'best practices', universal human rights, and extra-territorial regulation as exemplified e.g. by the European REACH initiative and the EU's neighborhood policy.
Discusses the personal, disciplinary, methodological, & professional difficulties in engaging in fruitful interdisciplinary scholarship for the fields of international law, international relations, & sociology. References. D. Edelman
This article examines the politics that emerge from three different conceptions of the "inter": exchange, interest and identity. It argues that the classical focus on "distributive justice" in political analysis is too narrow since it excludes important issues such as non-cognitive factors (loyalty) and inter-generational questions that are of particular importance to politics. It thus draws attention to the "particular" and (historically) contingent as defining characteristics of politics which have been marginalised by the contemporary emphasis on the "universal" in both epistemology and (analytical) ethics.
ABSTRACTThis article revisits some of the theoretical debates within the field of IR since Ashley and Cox challenged the mainstream. But in so doing it attempts also to show that the proposed alternatives have their own blind spots that are subjected in the second part to discursive criticism. Neither Ashley's celebration of the wisdom of old realists nor their 'silence' on economics, nor the notion of 'internationalisation of the state' and of the world order are adequate for understanding politics in the era of globalisation. Instead, a critical theory has to examine the political projects that were engendered by the Hobbesian conception of order and rationality. Highlighting the disconnect between our present political vocabularies and the actual political practices, I argue that a critical theory has not only to 'criticise' existing approaches but has to rethink and re-conceptualise praxis, which is ill served by the analytical tools which are imported to this field from 'theory'.
In responding to the critics of my Tartu lecture, I firstly examine a little further the community aspect of science as a practice, because I do not quite share Lebows's optimism that ethics applied to the scientific enterprise are powerful enough to prevent its derailments. Secondly, I admit that a lack of an explicit historical dimension in my lectures noticed by Suganami was dictated more by circumstances than by an oversight or a denial of its importance. While Suganami believes that a sense of history, as well as some criticism of both international relations (IR) and history on the meta level, are sufficient for a new and fruitful beginning of IR analysis, I'm emphasizing the contribution which ordinary language philosophy could make to a new type of social analysis and, in particular, the theory of speech acts and of institutions a la Searle. Thirdly, instead of putting up a straw man and knocking him down, as Wight has done in his misunderstanding of my position, I'm addressing the issue of scientific realism and its alleged predominance in the philosophy of science, the question of ontology and epistemology and, finally, the issue of whether the claims that nature directly speaks to us is of any help in explaining actions rather than events. Adapted from the source document.
