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This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global ‘present’ are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, which fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. In so doing, the book puts into question the ways in which social scientists and normative theorists diagnose ‘our’ post-Cold War times. The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political and international theory. The second part examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new ‘untimely’ way of thinking about time in world politics.
3200TimeandWorldPolitics.qxd:2935 The Biopolitics 18/7/08 07:57 Page 3 1 Introduction to the question of world-political time Introduction N The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that our grasp of the world is inescapably structured through space and time. In other words, whether we like it or not, our experience of any object is always located in a spatial field and temporal duration, conceived in Newtonian terms. The novelty of Kant’s argument was that he effectively bracketed the question of the ontological status of space and time, thus evading long
Part III World politics and philosophy of history The clowns of world peace1 Across the world, in opposition to the united and self-conscious camp of the victorious peace, stands another camp, which is less self-conscious and also less united: the supporters of peace through conciliation, of durable peace and p acifism. Among the Central Powers, the idea of peace through conciliation is based upon the famous July resolution passed by a majority of the parties in the German Reichstag. The catalyst for a durable peace was the proclamation of King Charles I of
This book offers a theoretically and empirically rich analysis of humour’s relevance to world politics. Drawing on literature from a range of disciplines including International Relations (IR), literary theory, cultural studies and sociology, its central claim is that humour plays an underappreciated role in the making and unmaking of political subjectivities. As such, humour not only provides an illuminating way into debates about identity and the everyday production and reproduction of order, but also opens up hitherto under- or even unstudied sites where this production and reproduction takes place. With reference to the ancient comic figure of the parasite, the book suggests that humour has historically been understood in relation to anxieties about subjectivity, estrangement and the circumscription and protection of the political sphere. It identifies three distinct spaces where humour has informed, enabled or defined ‘parasitic’ engagements with world politics. In the body of artwork produced by detainees in concentration camps, in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and others (LGBTQ+) responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and in carnivalesque tactics of contemporary mass protest, one can observe actors engaging through humour in the interrogation, negotiation and contestation of social, political and international relations. Through these detailed studies, the book demonstrates how everyday practices like humour can draw from, feed into, interrupt and potentially transform world politics.
ponder the fate of Jon Snow, who had apparently met his demise in a cold betrayal. Even before it was back on US screens, Game of Thrones ’ return was a cultural and political event, with commentators discussing the show and using it as a way to understand America’s contemporary world politics. Most pertinently to the moment, The Daily Show ’s Trevor Noah asked who would win ‘the game of who wants to be president’? One month previously, the US House of Cards had ended its fourth season in dramatic fashion. Viewers, seemingly unanimously, concurred that the season
This book addresses a critical issue in global politics: how recognition and misrecognition fuel conflict or initiate reconciliation. The main objective of this book is to demonstrate how representations of one state by another influence foreign policymaking behaviour. The key argument is that representations are important because they shape both the identity of a state and how it is recognised by others. States respond to representations of themselves that do not fit with how they wish to be recognised. The book provides a thorough conceptual engagement with the issues at stake and a detailed empirical investigation of the fraught bilateral relations between the United States and Iran, which is perhaps one of the most significant flashpoints in global politics today. Despite Iran and the US finally reaching an agreement on the nuclear issue that allows Iran limited nuclear technological capacity in exchange for the lifting of certain sanctions, the US withdrew from the deal in May 2018. However, questions remain about how best to explain the initial success of this deal considering the decades of animosity between Iran and the US, which have previously scuppered any attempts on both sides to reach an amicable agreement. Increasing concerns about declining Iran–US relations under the Trump administration suggest even more so the power of recognition and misrecognition in world politics. Scholars and strategists alike have struggled to answer the question of how this deal was made possible, which this book addresses.
7 Everyday resistance and everyday order in world politics D espite the increasing involvement of peacebuilding strategies in spheres of sovereign authority after the Cold War, and despite the fact that these strategies aim to reconstitute state authority, peacebuilding continues to be thought of as external to the conflicts and violent dynamics it addresses. The critical peace and conflict studies literature has challenged this vision, but in trying to understand the power dynamics in peacebuilding processes it has reified a binary vision by analysing these
Small states are survival artists. Understanding the story of small state survival requires a clear focus on the international states system. This book finds that different variations of the Westphalian states system had very different effects on small state survival. The most hostile environment for the small state was the late nineteenth-century concert system; the most supportive environment was the bipolar world of the later twentieth century. The book investigates the era of the classic balance of power which began after the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and ended during the French Revolutionary Wars and the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. Surprisingly, the crude balance-of-power system of the eighteenth century proved fairly accommodating of small state survival. Looking to the future, a modest rise in the number of small states can be predicted. The book views international relations since at least the mid seventeenth century to be driven by concerns over state power. Consequently, it deals with power, weakness, and power politics. To do so properly, a theoretical framework was needed that puts power and power balancing front and center. Power and power politics are important concepts in the academic discipline of International Relations theory, and particularly in Realist thinking.
This chapter focuses on political impostors, or people who assumed the identity of a royal personage in order to achieve either a personal goal or that of a political faction, in early modern England. These people were either genuine members of the royal dynasty or ordinary men or women who claimed to be the real heir to the throne and therefore challenged the legitimacy of the current ruler. The former are often labelled as pretenders or claimants. The chapter discusses various circumstances of a vacuum of power, including political or succession crisis, which provided fertile ground for their claims.
.), Engaging Men in the Fight against Gender Violence: Case Studies from Africa ( New York : Palgrave Macmillan ), pp. 69 – 100 . Tickner , J. A. ( 2001 ), Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era ( New York : Columbia University Press ). Tobin