Deconstructing International Politics

This book is the first full-length manuscript to draw on the the insights and techniques of deconstruction to analyse international relations. Influenced primarily by Derrida, it critiques the cornerstones of international relations such as modernity, the state, the subject, security and ethics and justice.

International Relations (IR) theorists have ceaselessly sought to understand, explain, and transform the experienced reality of international politics. Running through all these attempts is a persistent, yet unquestioned, quest by theorists to develop strategies to eliminate or reduce the antinomies, contradictions, paradoxes, dilemmas, and inconsistencies dogging their approaches. A serious critical assessment of the logic behind these strategies is however lacking. This new work addresses this issue by seeking to reformulate IR theory in an original way. Arfi begins by providing a thorough critique of leading contemporary IR theories, including pragmatism, critical/scientific realism, rationalism, neo-liberal institutionalism and social-constructivism, and then moves on to strengthen and go beyond the valuable contributions of each approach by employing the logic of deconstruction pioneered by Derrida to explicate the consequences of taking into account the dilemmas and inconsistencies of these theories. The book demonstrates that the logic of deconstruction is resourceful and rigorous in its questioning of the presuppositions of prevailing IR approaches, and argues that relying on deconstruction leads to richer and more powerfully insightful pluralist IR theories and is an invaluable resource for taking IR theory beyond currently paralyzing ‘wars of paradigms’. Questioning universally accepted presuppositions in existing theories, this book provides an innovative and exciting contribution to the field, and will be of great interest to scholars of international relations theory, critical theory and international relations.

To get a better sense of power dynamics in global politics, this book presents an innovative theoretical framework, combining a critical engagement with, and further development of, Michel Foucault’s governmentality on the one hand, and the theory of world society of the Stanford School of Sociology on the other. Making an original contribution to academic debates about power and global political order, this book develops a comprehensive theoretical perspective on power relations and political dynamics. The book starts from the presupposition that any theoretical engagement of that kind requires nuanced empirical study as well. It therefore analyzes the dynamics of world-societal order in the concrete empirical example of Palestine, and raises the question of how its political and societal order comes into existence. The author argues that governmentality represents a fundamental pattern of political order in world society that also profoundly affects power dynamics in Palestine. This insight has two important implications: First, power relations do not follow dichotomous distinctions such as international/domestic or global/local, but manifest themselves within world society. Second, therefore, order that comes into existence in Palestine needs to be understood as world-societal order. Offering a comprehensive understanding of power relations and patterns of political order(ing) embedded in world society, the book provides a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics that contribute to the political and societal order of Palestine. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Middle East Studies, Palestine Studies, International Relations, International Political Sociology, International Relations Theory, Governmentality Studies, and Political Theory.

Identity politics dominates the organisation of liberation movements today. This is the case whether fighting over one's birthright to a nation, such as in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict; lobbying for civil rights, such as in gay and lesbian campaigns for marriage; or struggling for citizenry recognition as currently experienced by asylum seekers. In this book Carolyn D'Cruz investigates the nexus between what David Birch describes as ’the seemingly impossible of high theory and the seemingly accessible possibilities of popular discourse’, as encountered in liberation movements based on identity. D'Cruz reworks the logic of such movements through the unique combination of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian discourse and Levinasian ethics. Moving both within and between the domains of philosophy, politics and ’postmodern culture’ this book offers both a clear explication of complex philosophical issues and an understanding of how they relate to the political practicalities of everyday life.

This book develops a novel approach to peace and conflict studies, through an original application of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to the post-conflict politics of Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on new readings of the peace agreements and the post-conflict political systems, the book goes beyond accounts that present a static picture of ‘fixed divisions’ in these cases. By exploring how formal electoral politics and the informal political spheres of artistic, cultural, judicial and protest movements already contest the politics of division, the book argues that the post-conflict political systems in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina are in a process of deconstruction. The text adds to the Derridean lexicon by developing the idea of a ‘deconstructive conclusion’, which challenges historical understandings of conflicts at the same time as challenging their consequences in the present. The study provides a critical contribution to peacebuilding and International Relations literature, by demonstrating how Derridean concepts can be utilised to provide fresh understandings of conflict and post-conflict situations, as well as allowing for political interventions to be made into these processes.

Published in 1999. These essays are not deconstructive in the postmodern sense. None of the authors have that depth of scepticism about knowledge claims, but they are all concerned that the terms of reference of Cold War enquiry have been inappropriately bounded. The chapters by Murray and Reynolds specifically address the broad theoretical issues involved with paradigms and explanation. The chapters by Dobson, Marsh, Malik, Evans and Dix stretch out Cold War paradigms with successive case studies of Anglo-American relations; the USA, Britain, Iran and the oil majors; the Gulf States and the Cold War; South Africa and the Cold War; and Indian neutralism. All five authors challenge the efficacy of neo-realist analysis and explanation and critique the way that assumptions derived from that position have been used in historical explanation. The chapters by Ryall, Rogers and Bideleux deal with Roman Catholicism in East Central Europe, with nuclear matters and with the Soviet perspective. Each work goes beyond the limits of Cold War paradigms. Finally, Ponting places the Cold War in the broad context of world history. These essays provide thought-provoking scholarship which helps us both to nuance our understanding of the Cold War and to realise that it should not be taken as an all-embracing paradigm for the explanation of postwar international relations.

The success of individual nation states today is often measured in terms of their ability to benefit from and contribute to a host of global economic, political, socio-cultural, technological, and educational networks. This increased multifaceted international inter-dependence represents an intuitively contradictory and an immensely complex situation. This scenario requires that national governments, whose primary responsibility is towards their citizenry, must relinquish a degree of control over state borders to constantly developing trans and multinational regimes and institutions. Once state borders become permeable all sorts of issues related to rights earned or accrued due to membership of a national community come into question. Given that neither individuals nor states can eschew the influence of the growing interdependence, this new milieu is often described in terms of shrinking of the world into a global village. This reshaping of the world requires us to broaden our horizons and re-evaluate the manner in which we theorize human personhood within communal boundaries. It also demands us to acknowledge that the relative decline of Euro-American economic and political influence and the rise of Asian and Latin American states at the global level have created spaces in which a de-territorialized and a de-historicized notion of citizenship and state can now be explored. The essays in this volume represent diverse disciplinary, analytical, and methodological approaches to understand what the implications are of being a citizen of both a nation state and the world simultaneously. In sum, Deconstructing Global Citizenship explores the questionofwhether a synthesis of contradictory national and global tendencies in the term “global citizenship” is even possible, or if we are better served by fundamentally reconsidering our ideas of “citizenship,” “community,” and “politics.”

This book provides a critical deconstruction of the human development framework promoted by the United Nations Development Programme since 1990, investigating its political function since the end of the Cold War.