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The aesthetic turn (AT) in International Studies stresses the ongoing task of marshalling non-western insights to better explore the agency of the globally marginalised in discourses about representability. Decolonial literature also calls specifically for more understanding of relationality and co-creativity underpinning agency and voice in global politics. Building on this decolonialising challenge, this article embeds a focus on 'ordinary language use' within a 'decolonial orientation' to open up complexities around the politics of representability. It specifically employs the concept of 'border thinking' by Walter Mignolo; and centres struggles in language by Gloria Anzaldúa as well as in the vernacular language 'Verlan' (as used by working-class racially marginalised people in France) to think 'from' the border. Highlighting how language works across (not just within) different registers and forms, the categories of 'non-standard' and 'standard', 'domination' and 'resistance' are destabilised. This provides the basis for re-centring Othered voices within a more relational co-creative ontology, by making the entanglement of discipline and resistance a space to think modernity from, rather than a space of interruption into modernity.

Many people see citizenship in a globalised world in terms of binaries: inclusion/exclusion, past/present, particularism/universalism. Aoileann Ní Mhurchú points out the limitations of these positions and argues that we need to be able to take into account the people who get caught between these traditional categories. Using critical resources found in poststructural, psychoanalytic and postcolonial thought, Ní Mhurchú thinks in new ways about citizenship, drawing on a range of thinkers including Kristeva, Bhabha and Foucault. Taking a distinctive theoretical approach, she shows how citizenship is being reconfigured beyond these categories.

This article considers a referendum which was held in the Republic of Ireland in 2004 involving a proposal to qualify the existing universal constitutional entitlement to birthright citizenship. Existing analysis of this referendum reflects dominant trends in citizenship scholarship. It does so by framing the issue in terms of two opposing perspectives - one particularistic (exclusive) and one universalistic (inclusive) - and positing the question of the 'politics' of citizenship as a trade-off between these diverging models. This article argues, however, that Rob (R.B.J.) Walker's notion of the constituent subject of (sovereign) politics challenges this dualistic framework as the necessary starting point for discussions about citizenship. It does so by problematizing the premise upon which it is based which is the taken-for-granted autonomous existence of persons (individuals) who are understood to be connected to, but ultimately separate from, 'the state.' This article concludes with reflections on what an alternative framework for exploring citizenship (based specifically on a historicization of subjectivity in relation to sovereignty) might look like. It suggests that this provides us with a different starting point to the prevalent form of a timeless dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, particularism and universalism, polis and cosmopolis currently determined by the boundaries of the Irish state. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

Using the distinction that Richard Ashley and Rob Walker drew in 1990 between two possible critical responses to crisis and the question of sovereignty, this article argues that two strands of thought can be identified, each producing a different understanding of what it means to become a citizen in Ireland. One strand articulates citizenship in terms of sovereign autonomous subjectivity, and thus in terms of horizontal or territorial relations between here and there, us and them, inside and outside. The other strand (re)articulates citizenship in terms of ambiguous paradoxical subjectivity that challenges the modern framing of the politics of citizenship as necessarily needing to be conceptualized in terms of absolute space. This divergence is explored through the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum. The concept of citizenship as "trace" is introduced in an attempt to capture how citizenship is reconceptualized differently in the second strand. It is argued that understanding this divergence is necessary in order to consider how classical conceptions of time and space are specifically integral to structures of sovereign power and how perspectives that take these as their starting point fail to account for the increasing emphasis on the nonsovereign manner in which citizenship is being experienced vis-à-vis migration.

This paper considers how a new cosmopolitan vision of integration and the integrated society associated with the work of Jurgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck has been applied by Bryan Fanning (2009) in the context of the Republic of Ireland. It suggests that there is a need to seriously consider the limitations of how subjectivity is theorised in this model. The paper specifically questions the implied necessity of having to consider how the politics of integration is always dictated in the last instance by the centrality of the nation-state to the demand for solidarity. It instead problematises the associated image which this reproduces of the absolute space of subjectivity given the emphasis on dichotomous categories such as included/excluded, national/non-national, new Irish/old Irish, guest/host. What is suggested is that this model presents a very specific conception of what and where the politics of integration can be, namely as that which must be defined in the last instance in terms of already divisible sovereign autonomous persons or autonomous groups of such persons who need to be bonded with each other. The paper uses the work of Julia Kristeva to suggest how a different politics of solidarity might be envisaged. Unlike the former politics of solidarity which is based on the question of how to build bonds between those included in and those excluded from Irish society (thus emphasizing the need for ever more integration). This is one which is based on the importance of recognizing the manner in which people are always already bonded to each other and to Irish society in many different ways associated with contingent space which dominant dichotomous categories of subjectivity cannot account for.

This exciting new text brings together in one volume an overview of the many reflections on how we might address the problems and limitations of a state-centred approach in the discipline of International Relations (IR). The book is structured into chapters on key concepts, with each providing an introduction to the concept for those new to the field of critical politics - including undergraduate and postgraduate students - as well as drawing connections between concepts and thinkers that will be provocative and illuminating for more established researchers in the field. They give an overview of core ideas associated with the concept; the critical potential of the concept; and key thinkers linked to the concept, seeking to address the following questions: How has the concept traditionally been understood? How has the concept come to be understood in critical thinking? How is the concept used in interrogating the limits of state centrism? What different possibilities for engaging with international relations have been envisioned through the concept? Why are such possibilities for alternative thinking about international relations important? What are some key articles and volumes related to the concept which readers can go for further research? Drawing together some of the key thinkers in the field of critical International Relations and including both established and emerging academics located in Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, this book is a key resource for students and scholars alike.