Border Thinking On The Edges Of The West

Drawing on scholarly and life experience on, and over, the historically posited borders between "West" and "East," the work identifies, interrogates, and challenges a particular, enduring, violent inheritance – what it means to cross over a border – from the classical origins of Western political thought. The study has two parts. The first is an effort to work within the Western tradition to demonstrate its foundational and enduring, violent conception of crossing over borders. The second is a creative effort to explore and encourage a fundamentally different outlook towards borders and what it means to be on, at, or over them. The underlying social theoretical disposition of the work is a form of post-Orientalist hermeneutics; the textual subject matter of the two parts of the study is linked using Walter Benjamin's concept of the storyteller. The underlying premise of the work is that the sense of violent possibility on the borders between "West" and "East" existed well before the more recent "age of imperialism" and even before there was a "West" or an "East" to speak of. That sense is constitutive of a political imagination about borders developed deep within the revered sources of Western culture. On the other hand, confronting the influence of such violent imaginaries requires truly novel modes of hermeneutical openness, hospitality and solidarity. Seeking to offer a new understanding and opening in the study of borders, this work will provide a significant contribution to several areas including international relations theory, border studies and political theory.

International Relations continues to come under fire for its relative absence of international perspectives. In this exciting new volume, Pinar Bilgin encourages readers to consider both why and how ‘non-core’ geocultural sites allow us to think differently about key aspects of global politics. Seeking to further debates surrounding thinking beyond the 'West/non-West' divide, this book analyzes how scholarship on, and conceptions of, the international outside core contexts are tied up with peripheral actors’ search for security. Accordingly, Bilgin looks at core/periphery dynamics not only in terms of the production of knowledge in the production of IR scholarship, or material threats, but also peripheral actors' conceptions of the international in terms of 'standard of civilization' and their more contemporary guises, which she terms as ‘hierarchy in anarchical society’. The first three chapters provide a critical overview of the limits of ‘our’ theorizing about IR and security, as well as a discussion on the track record of critical approaches to IR and security in addressing those limits. The following three chapters offer one way of addressing the limits of ‘our’ theorizing about IR and security: by inquiring into the international in security, security in the international. Each of these chapters makes a theoretical point and illustrates this further in a spotlight section that further illustrates the point to aid student learning. A genuinely innovative contribution to this rapidly emerging field within IR, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of critical security, international relations theory and Global IR.

This book examines how Indigenous peoples’ rights and Indigenous rights movements represent an important and often overlooked shift in international politics - a shift that powerful states are actively resisting in a multitude of ways. While Indigenous peoples are often dismissed as marginal non-state actors, this book argues that far from insignificant, global Indigenous politics is potentially forging major changes in the international system, as the implementation of Indigenous peoples’ rights requires a complete re-thinking and re-ordering of sovereignty, territoriality, liberalism, and human rights. After thirty years of intense effort, the transnational Indigenous rights movement achieved passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in September 2007. This book asks: Why did movement need to fight so hard to secure passage of a bare minimum standard on Indigenous rights? Why is it that certain states are so threatened by an emerging international Indigenous rights regime? How does the emerging Indigenous rights regime change the international status quo? The questions are addressed by exploring how Indigenous politics at the global level compels a new direction of thought in IR by challenging some of its fundamental tenets. It is argued that global Indigenous politics is a perspective of IR that, with the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ collective rights to land and self-determination, complicates the structure of international politics in new and important ways, challenging both Westphalian notions of state sovereignty and the (neo-)liberal foundations of states and the international human rights consensus. Qualitative case studies of Canadian and New Zealand Indigenous rights, based on original field research, analyse both the potential and the limits of these challenges. This work will be of interest to graduates and scholars in international relations, Indigenous studies, international organizations, IR theory and social movements.

This work seeks to explore the widely held assumption that the discipline of International Relations is dominated by American scholars, approaches and institutions. It proceeds by defining 'dominance' along Gramscian lines and then identifying different ways in which such dominance could be exerted: agenda-setting, theoretically, methodologically, institutionally, gate-keeping. Turton dedicates a chapter to each of these forms of dominance in which she sets out the arguments in the literature, discusses their theoretical implications, and tests for empirical support. The work argues that the self-image of IR as an American dominated discipline does not reflect the state of affairs once a detailed sociological analysis of the production of knowledge in the discipline is undertaken. Turton argues that the discipline is actually more plural than widely recognized, challenging widely held beliefs in International Relations and it taking a successful step towards unpacking the term 'dominance'. An insightful contribution to the field, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars alike.

This book looks at the development of thinking about security in Brazil between 1930 and 2010. In order to do so, it develops a new framework for thinking about intellectual history in Brazil and applies it to the development of knowledge on security in that country. Building on the Gramscian literature on ‘late modernization’ and ‘conservative revolution’ and drawing on the idea of ‘Emotional Theory of Action’ proposed by Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza, this book sets out to establish an innovative framework with which to analyse the development of ‘thinking about security’ in Brazil in three specific historic contexts. This theoretical framework is then used to argue that one specific discourse of Brazilian identity has been the main source of knowledge production in that country since the 1930s. In doing this, the book offers thought-provoking arguments about the role of intellectuals in Brazil and reassesses the exclusionary ideas embedded in the politics of identity and security. This book not only introduces a novel framework to analyse intellectual production outside the core, it also sheds light on how security has been historically thought of outside the core and will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Critical Security Studies and Latin American Studies.

Despite its prominent place in contemporary political discourse and international relations, the idea of the "global order" remains surprisingly sketchy. Though it's easy to identify the nations and actors who comprise the major players, but pinning down concrete definitions can be more difficult. This book not only clarifies a number of related key terms--including the use of international versus global and system versus order--but also offers a variety of perspectives for theorizing global order.

This edited volume offers arguably the first systemic and critical assessment of the debates about and contestations to the construction of a putative Chinese School of IR as sociological realities in the context of China’s rapid rise to a global power status. Contributors to this volume scrutinize a particular approach to worlding beyond the West as a conscious effort to produce alternative knowledge in an increasingly globalized discipline of IR. Collectively, they grapple with the pitfalls and implications of such intellectual creativity drawing upon local traditions and concerns, knowledge claims, and indigenous sources for the global production of knowledge of IR. They also consider critically how such assertions of Chinese voices and articulation of their ambition for theoretical innovation from the disciplinary margins contribute to the emergence of a Global IR as a truly inclusive discipline that recognizes its multiple and diverse foundations. Reflecting the varied perspectives of both the active participants in the Chinese School of IR debates within China and the observers and critics outside China, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of IR theory, Non-Western IR and Chinese Studies.

How we define border studies is transforming from focussing on “a line in the sand” to the more complex notions of how constituting a border is practiced, sustained and modified. In the expansion of borders studies, the areas explored across Europe and Asia have been numerous, but the specific themes that arise through comparative case studies are novel when approach Europe and Asian borderlands. Comparing the border experiences in East Asia and Europe in a number of thematic clusters ranging from economics, tourism, and food production to ethnicity, migration and conquest, Borders in East and West aims to decenter border studies from its current focus on the Americas and Europe.