Suchergebnisse

Academic freedom is one of the most important principles of the modern university. Yet, defenders of academic freedom, and the associated concept of free speech, are now often projected as being either aligned with or enabling, right-wing views. This is a puzzling development. Academic freedom is typically understood to be a set of principles that protect academics from external – primarily state – interference. In this article, I examine this puzzling development and argue that academic freedom is a higher order value than free speech and that as such, it requires greater protections. Second, the biggest dangers to academic freedom today, at least in democratic societies, are coming from within the academy. Underlying these self-inflicted attacks on academic freedom is a deeper set of disagreements about the concept of truth and the production of knowledge.

This article examines change and continuity in the function, role and moral judgement of violence in international relations. In terms of change, the conclusions are mostly pessimistic if the aim is the complete eradication of political violence. The control of violence, on the other hand, and the ability to hold those who employ it to increasing moral and legal standards is perhaps one of the most significant changes in international relations from 1919 to 2019. However, this does not mean that violence has been replaced or even transformed. Violence is constitutive of the political. It is the first and the last word in politics. This is the continuity of violence. Violence, of which war is only the most visceral expression, has not been transformed or replaced, but rather it has been displaced into legal systems, institutional orders and new forms of conflict. Inter-state war may be in decline, but intra-state conflict is rising. To develop this argument, the article argues that change can only be understood as change against a horizon of continuity.

This article explores the current state of the discipline of International Relations(IR) and assesses the prospects for integration of new voices to the global conversation. The article argues that the current state of theoretical fragmentation that infects the discipline will be a severe barrier to the introduction of alternative visions of IR. Two factors explain the source of this problem. First is the dominant understanding of epistemology, which not only misunderstands the place of epistemology in the research process but also helps reproduce a social structure of fragmentation. Second, I briefly explore the dynamics of that disciplinary structure and argue that when combined with the approach to epistemology the two become mutually reinforcing, limiting the possibilities of a form of pluralism that can incorporate alternative voices unless they give up what it is that makes them different.