Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations. Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Distinct Site

In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social structures (Wendt, 1999). I then revisit the origins of poststructuralism via the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to bring its founding moves to bear directly on International Relations constructivism. Engaging with constructivism’s founding fathers, Nicholas Onuf, Alexander Wendt and Friedrich Kratochwil, I show that the search for unconstructed universals, grounded in an innate ‘human nature’, persistently haunts International Relations constructivism, even when it foregrounds language as the medium of social construction, and notably when it engages the question of gender. Just as language provided the original site for orchestrating the ‘moving beyond’ (the ‘post’ of poststructuralism) fixed, naturalized structures, I argue that a return to language holds the promise of renewal, and of constructivism’s being able to fulfil its founding promise to theorize constitutivity and the constructed-ness of International Relations’ world.

scholarly journals Konstytucjonalizm wobec „zemsty postmodernizmu”

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 95-106
Author(s):  
Adam Sulikowski
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Current Situation ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Future Evolution ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Ernesto Laclau ◽  
Constitutional Discourse

CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE „REVENGE OF POSTMODERNISM”The main purpose of this article is to discuss the current situation of constitutional discourse as aresult of „Revenge of postmodernism”. This „Revenge” shows itself in taking over the methods of the leftist critique of democratic institutions by the radical right. This „Barbarization” of subtle methods of left-wing criticism leads to far-reaching consequences unforeseen by its founding fathers — Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler. The author, using various theories formulated by Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau and Artur Kozak, seeks to explain this phenomenon and to show its implications for the future evolution of the constitutional discourse.

Markets are constantly collapsing: Reconceptualizing ‘the market’ as a quantum social wavefunction

2021 ◽  
pp. 102452942098782
Author(s):  
Michael Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Open Economy ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Value Chains ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Broad Framework

The quantum moment in International Relations theory challenges the taken for granted Newtonian assumptions of conventional theories, while offering a novel physical imaginary grounded in quantum mechanics. As part of the special issue on reconceptualizing markets, this article questions if prior efforts to conceptualize ‘the market’ have been unsuccessful at capturing the paradoxical microfoundational/macrostructural because of the Newtonian worldview within which much social science operates. By developing a new, quantum perspective on the market, taking the physical paradigm of the wavefunction, I seek to explore the connections between entanglement, nonlocality, interference and invisible social structures. To demonstrate the applicability of quantum thinking, I explore how global value chains and open economy politics might be ‘quantized’, through the mobilization of core concepts of quantum social theory, within the broad framework of the market as a quantum social wavefunction.

History of the Word "Democracy" in Canada and Québec: A Political Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses

An examination of the speeches of modern Canada’s “founding fathers” reveals that they were openly antidemocratic. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on similar studies of the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term democracy in Canada shows that the country’s association with democracy was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the country’s political regime. Rather, it was the result of discursive strategies employed by the political elite to strengthen its ability to mobilize the masses during the World Wars.

scholarly journals Demanda: Literatura e Filosofia, de Jean-Luc Nancy

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (20) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Lock Farina
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière

Publicada originalmente na coleção “La philosophie en effet”, da prestigiada editora Galilée, na França em 2015, com o título Demande. Philosophie, littérature, a coletânea de textos de Jean-Luc Nancy, inédita enquanto tal e organizada por Ginette Michaud, professora da Universidade de Montreal, chega ao Brasil devido à iniciativa em parceria entre a editora da UFSC e a editora Argos, da Unochapecó. Nancy (1940-), professor emérito da Universidade de Estrasburgo, é certamente um dos filósofos mais conceituados no universo acadêmico atual, ao lado de Alain Badiou, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben e Jacques Rancière. Seu destaque se dá sobretudo em função das contribuições acerca do político e da democracia, da obra em conjunto com Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, de seus escritos sobre Jacques Derrida e da preocupação constante em relacionar a arte de maneira geral com o pensamento filosófico. Sua produção, entretanto, é ainda pouquíssimo traduzida no Brasil. Na tarefa de suprir essa falta, Demanda: Literatura e Filosofia (365 p.) reúne textos de 1977 a 2015, disponíveis até então somente em periódicos ou resultantes de conferências e entrevistas, dando mostras da trajetória do autor no que concerne o debate entre o aproveitamento da literatura e do modo singular (a singularidade para Nancy é sempre uma singularidade plural) com que ela convoca a filosofia para um pensamento conjunto, crítico e afectante a respeito da vida, da atividade política e dos sentidos nas suas concepções mais amplas.

scholarly journals THE GENESIS OF THE US FOREIGN POLICY: THE ORIGIN OF THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE TOPIC, 1610–1820S

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (73) (2) ◽  
pp. 81-93
Author(s):  
D. V. Dorofeev
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
North American ◽  
Alternative Hypothesis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

The research is devoted to the study of the origin of the historiography of the topic of the genesis of the US foreign policy. The key thesis of the work challenges the established position in the scientific literature about the fundamental role of the work of T. Lyman, Jr. «The diplomacy of the United States: being an account of the foreign relations of the country, from the first treaty with France, in 1778, to the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, with Great Britain», published in 1826. The article puts forward an alternative hypothesis: the emergence of the historiography of the genesis of the foreign policy of the United States occurred before the beginning of the second quarter of the XIX century – during the colonial period and the first fifty years of the North American state. A study of the works of thirty-five authors who worked during the 1610s and 1820s showed that amater historians expressed a common opinion about North America’s belonging to the Eurocentric system of international relations; they were sure that both the colonists and the founding fathers perceived international processes on the basis of raison d’être. The conceptualization of the intellectual heritage of non-professional historians allowed us to distinguish three interpretations of the origin of the United States foreign policy: «Autochthonous» – focused on purely North American reasons; «Atlantic» – postulated the borrowing of European practice of international relations by means of the system of relations that developed in the Atlantic in the XVII–XVIII centuries; «Imperial» – stated the adaptation of the British experience. The obtained data refute the provisions of scientific thought of the XX–XXI centuries and create new guidelines for further study of the topic.

Does ‘gender’ make the world go round? Feminist critiques of international relations

1996 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Jones
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Normative Values ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Care Giving ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Human Individual

In the last two decades, the classical tradition in international relations has come under sustained attack on a number of fronts, and from a diverse range of critics. Most recently, feminist thinkers, following in the footsteps of neo-Marxists and critical theorists, have denounced IR as ‘one of the most gender-blind, indeed crudely patriarchal, of all the institutionalized forms of contemporary social and political analysis’. Feminists have sought to subvert some of the most basic elements of the classical paradigm: the assumption of the state as a given; conceptions of power and ‘international security’; and the model of a rational human individual standing apart from the realm of lived experience, manipulating it to maximize his own self-interest. Denouncing standard epistemological assumptions and theoretical approaches as inherently ‘masculinist’, feminists, particularly those from the radical band of the spectrum, have advanced an alternative vision of international relations: one that redefines power as ‘mutual enablement’ rather than domination, and offers normative values of cooperation, care giving, and compromise in place of patriarchal norms of competition, exploitation, and self-aggrandizement.

4. Liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-136
Author(s):  
Georg Sørensen ◽  
Jørgen Møller ◽  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
International Cooperation ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Dark Side ◽  
Positive View ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Liberal Thought

This chapter examines the liberal tradition in international relations (IR). It first considers the basic liberal assumptions, including a positive view of human nature and the belief that IR can be cooperative rather than conflictual. In their conceptions of international cooperation, liberal theorists emphasize different features of world politics. The chapter explores the ideas associated with four strands of liberal thought, namely: sociological liberalism, interdependence liberalism, institutional liberalism, and republican liberalism. It also discusses the debate between proponents of liberalism and neorealism, and it identifies a general distinction between weak liberal theories that are close to neorealism and strong liberal theories that challenge neorealism. Finally, it reviews the liberal view of world order and the notion that there is a ‘dark’ side of democracy.

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