Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000377
Sandra Pogodda, Oliver P. Richmond, Gëzim Visoka
Abstract In the face of the current decline or spectacular collapse of peace processes, this article investigates whether peace has become systematically blocked. It investigates whether the ineffectiveness of an ‘international peace architecture’ (IPA) can be explained by a more potent counterpeace system, which is growing in its shadow. It identifies counterpeace as proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational), while exploiting structural blockages to peace and unintended consequences of peace interventions. It elaborates three distinct patterns of blockages to peace in contemporary conflicts across the globe: the stalemate, limited counterpeace, and unmitigated counterpeace. Drawing on the counterrevolution literature, this research asks: Have peace interventions become the source of their own undoing? Which factors consolidate or aggravate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counterpeace edifice?
{"title":"Counter-peace: From isolated blockages in peace processes to systemic patterns","authors":"Sandra Pogodda, Oliver P. Richmond, Gëzim Visoka","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000377","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the face of the current decline or spectacular collapse of peace processes, this article investigates whether peace has become systematically blocked. It investigates whether the ineffectiveness of an ‘international peace architecture’ (IPA) can be explained by a more potent counterpeace system, which is growing in its shadow. It identifies counterpeace as proto-systemic processes that connect spoilers across all scales (local, regional, national, transnational), while exploiting structural blockages to peace and unintended consequences of peace interventions. It elaborates three distinct patterns of blockages to peace in contemporary conflicts across the globe: the stalemate, limited counterpeace, and unmitigated counterpeace. Drawing on the counterrevolution literature, this research asks: Have peace interventions become the source of their own undoing? Which factors consolidate or aggravate emerging conflict patterns? Are blockages to peace systemic enough to construct a sedimentary and layered counterpeace edifice?","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"491 - 512"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49163283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-28DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000468
Geoffrey Whitehall
Abstract Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, then (how) should international political theorists rethink animal politics? The archive ‘When They Fight Back’ records incidences of when animals ‘fought back’. It explores ways of conceptualising resistance and the implications of broadening the concept to include non-human actors via three findings: (1) Animal conflicts are everywhere and classifying them as revolt, reaction, and resistance is a creative exercise that encourages reflections about interspecies relations; (2) Most animal/human conflicts are not treated as ‘conflicts’. Instead, they are normalised within a biopolitical discourse that seeks to reduce resistance (characterised as Animal living) in order to promote living (characterised as Human resistance). (3) If excluded, animal resistance finds its way back into literatures via ethical-aesthetic figurations, traces, and desires ‘for’ the Animal. As such, the archive stages a Clausewitzian case of escalation from resistances into total war. In open hostility towards a perceived enemy, animals fight back – and because they fight back, humanism has built its own form of resistance (i.e., politics, ethics, aesthetics, biopolitics, international relations, etc.). I conclude that Human Being (as a form of resistance) must be surrendered if the war on life itself is to end.
{"title":"‘When They Fight Back’: A cinematic archive of animal resistance and world wars","authors":"Geoffrey Whitehall","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000468","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000468","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, then (how) should international political theorists rethink animal politics? The archive ‘When They Fight Back’ records incidences of when animals ‘fought back’. It explores ways of conceptualising resistance and the implications of broadening the concept to include non-human actors via three findings: (1) Animal conflicts are everywhere and classifying them as revolt, reaction, and resistance is a creative exercise that encourages reflections about interspecies relations; (2) Most animal/human conflicts are not treated as ‘conflicts’. Instead, they are normalised within a biopolitical discourse that seeks to reduce resistance (characterised as Animal living) in order to promote living (characterised as Human resistance). (3) If excluded, animal resistance finds its way back into literatures via ethical-aesthetic figurations, traces, and desires ‘for’ the Animal. As such, the archive stages a Clausewitzian case of escalation from resistances into total war. In open hostility towards a perceived enemy, animals fight back – and because they fight back, humanism has built its own form of resistance (i.e., politics, ethics, aesthetics, biopolitics, international relations, etc.). I conclude that Human Being (as a form of resistance) must be surrendered if the war on life itself is to end.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"278 - 299"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44244380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-27DOI: 10.1017/S026021052200050X
T. Lundborg
Abstract The Anthropocene rupture refers to the beginning of our current geological epoch in which humans constitute a collective geological force that alters the trajectory of the Earth system. An increased engagement with this notion of a rupture has prompted a lively debate on the inherent anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR), and whether it is possible to transform it into something new that embraces diverse forms of existence, human as well as non-human. This article challenges that possibility. It shows how much of the current debate rests on the idea fulfilling future desirable ideals, which are pushed perpetually beyond a horizon of human thought, making them unreachable. As an alternative, the article turns to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the future to come (l'avenir), highlighting the significance of unpredictability and unexpected events. This understanding of the future shows how life within and of the international rests on encounters with the future as something radically other. On this basis, it is argued that responding to our current predicament should proceed not by seeking to fulfil future ideals but by encountering the future as incalculable and other, whose arrival represents an opportunity as much as a threat to established forms of international life.
{"title":"The Anthropocene rupture in international relations: Future politics and international life","authors":"T. Lundborg","doi":"10.1017/S026021052200050X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052200050X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Anthropocene rupture refers to the beginning of our current geological epoch in which humans constitute a collective geological force that alters the trajectory of the Earth system. An increased engagement with this notion of a rupture has prompted a lively debate on the inherent anthropocentrism of International Relations (IR), and whether it is possible to transform it into something new that embraces diverse forms of existence, human as well as non-human. This article challenges that possibility. It shows how much of the current debate rests on the idea fulfilling future desirable ideals, which are pushed perpetually beyond a horizon of human thought, making them unreachable. As an alternative, the article turns to Jacques Derrida's understanding of the future to come (l'avenir), highlighting the significance of unpredictability and unexpected events. This understanding of the future shows how life within and of the international rests on encounters with the future as something radically other. On this basis, it is argued that responding to our current predicament should proceed not by seeking to fulfil future ideals but by encountering the future as incalculable and other, whose arrival represents an opportunity as much as a threat to established forms of international life.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"597 - 614"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49522327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-21DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000432
Charmaine Chua
Abstract The term disruption has become a buzzword for our times, although there is little clarity over what the term means, how it is deployed, and towards what ends. In order to understand the analytical and political stakes that are embedded in the deployment of ‘disruption’ as a rationale for various sources of upheaval, in this article I argue that these three terrains of disruption should be understood as theories of governance, and term them ‘disruption from above’, ‘disruption from the middle’, and ‘disruption from below’. Each terrain of disruption embodies different ethoses, actors, and goals: the first connoting elite-driven creative destruction and innovation; the second obfuscating the capitalist imperative that produces world-systemic upheavals; and the third seeking to expose the structures of violence and inequality built into such practices. I illustrate these three terrains through a structural account that traces the popularity of the disruption discourse from its origins to its material application; analyse an illustrative example of the assetisation of infrastructure and how it bureaucratises governance and shifts relations of power; and conclude by examining infrastructural forms of protest against such forms. I argue that the confusion over what disruption means, who exercises it, and upon whom is not a coincidence: rather, disruption's polysemy is structurally produced as a way to disguise ongoing capitalist crisis as a technical problem that market innovations can solve.
{"title":"Disruption from above, the middle and below: Three terrains of governance","authors":"Charmaine Chua","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000432","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The term disruption has become a buzzword for our times, although there is little clarity over what the term means, how it is deployed, and towards what ends. In order to understand the analytical and political stakes that are embedded in the deployment of ‘disruption’ as a rationale for various sources of upheaval, in this article I argue that these three terrains of disruption should be understood as theories of governance, and term them ‘disruption from above’, ‘disruption from the middle’, and ‘disruption from below’. Each terrain of disruption embodies different ethoses, actors, and goals: the first connoting elite-driven creative destruction and innovation; the second obfuscating the capitalist imperative that produces world-systemic upheavals; and the third seeking to expose the structures of violence and inequality built into such practices. I illustrate these three terrains through a structural account that traces the popularity of the disruption discourse from its origins to its material application; analyse an illustrative example of the assetisation of infrastructure and how it bureaucratises governance and shifts relations of power; and conclude by examining infrastructural forms of protest against such forms. I argue that the confusion over what disruption means, who exercises it, and upon whom is not a coincidence: rather, disruption's polysemy is structurally produced as a way to disguise ongoing capitalist crisis as a technical problem that market innovations can solve.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"37 - 52"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47726217","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000481
Inho Choi
Abstract While proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the ‘Chinese’ school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR.
{"title":"On being Chinese and being complexified: Chinese IR as a transcultural project","authors":"Inho Choi","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000481","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While proponents of Chinese IR pursue a national school based on the identification of Chineseness with the Chinese national culture, its critics find a limited value in the ‘Chinese’ school as a mere temporary site for non-Western agencies. In contrast, I argue a distinctive and enduring Chinese IR is possible if it adopts a non-national and non-essentialised transcultural conception of Chineseness. This transcultural Chinese IR is based first on the contested and transcultural conception of Chineseness and second on the ontology of Chineseness as immanent humanity. Chineseness has been a fiction of a privileged descent from antiquity, which various contestants claimed by redefining the meaning of Chineseness. The shi elites, in particular, developed Chineseness as an aspirational ethos that propelled it to transcend its cultural boundary by incorporating foreign influences and thereby rendered Chineseness transcultural. Also, drawing on the ontological turn and Roy Wagner's work in anthropology, I show how Chineseness as immanent humanity transcends the category of culture, transforming the division of innate nature and constructed culture. The transcultural Chinese IR, with its own complexity and universal aspiration, uses its history and ontology to complexify both its tradition internally and other IR traditions externally, promoting the pluralisation of IR.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"471 - 490"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44221890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-11DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000419
Martin J. Bayly
Abstract The Eurocentric critique of the International Relations discipline has brought welcome attention to non-European international thinkers, and anti-colonial or anti-imperial thinkers in particular. Frequently these thinkers and associated movements are rightly described in thematic terms of emancipation, equality, and justice, in opposition to the hierarchical worldview of empires and their acolytes. Notwithstanding the broad validity of this depiction, a purely oppositional picture risks obscuring those aspects of ‘non-European’ international thought that evade simple categorisation. Drawing upon archival material and historical works, this article applies approaches offered by global intellectual history to the works of late colonial Indian international thinkers, exploring the mixed registers of equality and hierarchy, internationalism and imperialism present in their writings. Concentrating on three ‘sites’ connected by the common themes of diaspora and mobility: the plight of Indians overseas in East Africa; the concept of ‘greater India’; and the international political thought of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the article complicates the internationalism/imperialism divide of the early twentieth century, showing how ostensibly opposed scholarly communities sometimes competed over similar forms of knowledge and ways of ordering the world. This offers a framework by which the contributions of global intellectual history can be applied to the study of international political thought.
{"title":"Global intellectual history in International Relations: Hierarchy, empire, and the case of late colonial Indian international thought","authors":"Martin J. Bayly","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000419","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Eurocentric critique of the International Relations discipline has brought welcome attention to non-European international thinkers, and anti-colonial or anti-imperial thinkers in particular. Frequently these thinkers and associated movements are rightly described in thematic terms of emancipation, equality, and justice, in opposition to the hierarchical worldview of empires and their acolytes. Notwithstanding the broad validity of this depiction, a purely oppositional picture risks obscuring those aspects of ‘non-European’ international thought that evade simple categorisation. Drawing upon archival material and historical works, this article applies approaches offered by global intellectual history to the works of late colonial Indian international thinkers, exploring the mixed registers of equality and hierarchy, internationalism and imperialism present in their writings. Concentrating on three ‘sites’ connected by the common themes of diaspora and mobility: the plight of Indians overseas in East Africa; the concept of ‘greater India’; and the international political thought of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the article complicates the internationalism/imperialism divide of the early twentieth century, showing how ostensibly opposed scholarly communities sometimes competed over similar forms of knowledge and ways of ordering the world. This offers a framework by which the contributions of global intellectual history can be applied to the study of international political thought.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"428 - 447"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41569390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-11DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000420
Peter Marcus Kristensen
Abstract This article contributes to the critical historical research that has demythologised the ‘noble origins’ of the International Relations discipline (IR) by exposing its imperial, colonial, and racist legacies. Where most critical historiographies have unveiled the centrality of racialised and imperialist ontologies in individual thinkers and theories, this article traces imperialist origins of international thought by reconstructing its impact on administrative-institutional infrastructures. Specifically, it interrogates the most systematic and institutionalised attempt to define the ‘subject matter’ of IR under the International Studies Conference (ISC) organised by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) of the League of Nations. Through a parallel reading of the archives from ISC's ‘administrative meetings’ and ‘study meetings’, the article contends that the seemingly academic discussions on the subject matter of IR in the ‘administrative meetings’ were in fact intertwined with the imperialist-colonial politics central to ‘study meetings’. The article thus not only challenges IR's conventional history, but its historical ontologies by revealing how race and empire were central to the constitution of its very subject matter and its early institutionalisation.
{"title":"Subject matters: Imperialism and the constitution of International Relations","authors":"Peter Marcus Kristensen","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000420","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article contributes to the critical historical research that has demythologised the ‘noble origins’ of the International Relations discipline (IR) by exposing its imperial, colonial, and racist legacies. Where most critical historiographies have unveiled the centrality of racialised and imperialist ontologies in individual thinkers and theories, this article traces imperialist origins of international thought by reconstructing its impact on administrative-institutional infrastructures. Specifically, it interrogates the most systematic and institutionalised attempt to define the ‘subject matter’ of IR under the International Studies Conference (ISC) organised by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) of the League of Nations. Through a parallel reading of the archives from ISC's ‘administrative meetings’ and ‘study meetings’, the article contends that the seemingly academic discussions on the subject matter of IR in the ‘administrative meetings’ were in fact intertwined with the imperialist-colonial politics central to ‘study meetings’. The article thus not only challenges IR's conventional history, but its historical ontologies by revealing how race and empire were central to the constitution of its very subject matter and its early institutionalisation.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"448 - 470"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49458921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-10DOI: 10.1017/S026021052200033X
Tasniem Anwar, Beste İşleyen
Abstract This article studies practices of knowledge production during counterterrorism financing court cases in European courts. Developments in international law have contributed to novel regulations to criminalise and prosecute the funding of terrorism in advance of terrorist violence. In this study, we study how court cases have become important spaces for contesting and evaluating multiple knowledge claims on terrorist threat and suspicion by analysing case proceedings from both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on recent debates in International Relations and postcolonial theory, we make two contributions. First, building on insights from postcolonial literature on ‘abyssal thinking’, we illustrate how legal practices differentiate between different ways of knowing by dismissing certain experiences as ‘emotional’ or ‘subjective’ in contrast to the assumed objectivity of other knowledge claims. We argue that decisions on what counts as knowledge in a court setting are situated in a specific sociopolitical setting, whereby particular knowledge and life-worlds are recognised at the expense of others. Second, we empirically show how the novel criminal laws shifts the responsibility to know terrorist threat from the state to ordinary citizens. We illustrate how the court reinforces new security logics where the state can entertain doubt, uncertainty, and trust in their practices, while the citizens cannot.
{"title":"Guilty knowledge: A postcolonial inquiry into knowledge, suspicion, and responsibility in the fight against terrorism financing","authors":"Tasniem Anwar, Beste İşleyen","doi":"10.1017/S026021052200033X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021052200033X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article studies practices of knowledge production during counterterrorism financing court cases in European courts. Developments in international law have contributed to novel regulations to criminalise and prosecute the funding of terrorism in advance of terrorist violence. In this study, we study how court cases have become important spaces for contesting and evaluating multiple knowledge claims on terrorist threat and suspicion by analysing case proceedings from both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on recent debates in International Relations and postcolonial theory, we make two contributions. First, building on insights from postcolonial literature on ‘abyssal thinking’, we illustrate how legal practices differentiate between different ways of knowing by dismissing certain experiences as ‘emotional’ or ‘subjective’ in contrast to the assumed objectivity of other knowledge claims. We argue that decisions on what counts as knowledge in a court setting are situated in a specific sociopolitical setting, whereby particular knowledge and life-worlds are recognised at the expense of others. Second, we empirically show how the novel criminal laws shifts the responsibility to know terrorist threat from the state to ordinary citizens. We illustrate how the court reinforces new security logics where the state can entertain doubt, uncertainty, and trust in their practices, while the citizens cannot.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"161 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44791646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-06DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000341
H. Malmvig
Abstract Humour has recently emerged as an important research topic in International Politics. Scholars have investigated how states and state leaders practice humour as part of their diplomatic exchanges, in misinformation campaigns, and nation-branding. Important knowledge has been gained as to how humorous practices partake in constituting identities, managing recognition, and international anxieties or contesting global orders. Yet, little attention has been devoted to interrogating the risk that humorous practices may give rise to in international politics, to the underside of humour's productive power. This article aims to begin unpacking these risks both theoretically and empirically. To do so, it engages with the critical thinking on humour by Kierkegaard and Foster Wallace in particular, suggesting three challenging implications: (1) humorous entrapments; (2) facile forms of detached engagement; and (3) ambiguous blurring of fiction and reality. It then shows how these unfold empirically in: Iran's meme war with the US, a Yes Men's parody during COP15, and the Pyongyang Nuclear Summit, developing a three-pronged analytical strategy for studying humorous practices and their different relations to formations of power/knowledge.
{"title":"Jesting international politics: The productive power and limitations of humorous practices in an age of entertainment politics","authors":"H. Malmvig","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000341","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Humour has recently emerged as an important research topic in International Politics. Scholars have investigated how states and state leaders practice humour as part of their diplomatic exchanges, in misinformation campaigns, and nation-branding. Important knowledge has been gained as to how humorous practices partake in constituting identities, managing recognition, and international anxieties or contesting global orders. Yet, little attention has been devoted to interrogating the risk that humorous practices may give rise to in international politics, to the underside of humour's productive power. This article aims to begin unpacking these risks both theoretically and empirically. To do so, it engages with the critical thinking on humour by Kierkegaard and Foster Wallace in particular, suggesting three challenging implications: (1) humorous entrapments; (2) facile forms of detached engagement; and (3) ambiguous blurring of fiction and reality. It then shows how these unfold empirically in: Iran's meme war with the US, a Yes Men's parody during COP15, and the Pyongyang Nuclear Summit, developing a three-pronged analytical strategy for studying humorous practices and their different relations to formations of power/knowledge.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"513 - 534"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47781788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-29DOI: 10.1017/S0260210522000389
Tamara A Trownsell, N. Behera, G. Shani
Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.
{"title":"Introduction to the Special Issue: Pluriversal relationality","authors":"Tamara A Trownsell, N. Behera, G. Shani","doi":"10.1017/S0260210522000389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000389","url":null,"abstract":"Both relationality and separateness are aspects of our everyday lives. How we engage these phenomena hinges on the particular existential assumptions that we take for granted. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), both relationality and separateness have informed how global politics is studied and practiced. How states and their relations are conceived has, for instance, varied by the distinct degrees of privilege given to separation and interconnection: from notions of completely autonomous units like billiard balls to always emergent phenomena co-constituted through relations. The plurality of trajectories that inform this Special Issue illustrate how much broader the spectrum of relational engagement can be when we are cognisant of the impact of these existential assumptions on forms of life, knowing, and knowledge production in International Relations. By highlighting a spectrum of relational engagement, we raise important questions about the way the various knowledge frames in IR are acknowledged, legitimised, limited, and reproduced.","PeriodicalId":48017,"journal":{"name":"Review of International Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"787 - 800"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44735382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}