critical thinking in international relations

Introducing Critical Theory in International Relations

This is an excerpt from International Relations Theory – an E-IR Foundations beginner’s textbook. Download your free copy here.

Critical theory incorporates a wide range of approaches all focused on the idea of freeing people from the modern state and economic system – a concept known to critical theorists as emancipation. The idea originates from the work of authors such as Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, advanced different revolutionary ideas of how the world could be reordered and transformed. Both Kant and Marx held a strong attachment to the Enlightenment theme of universalism – the view that there are social and political principles that are apparent to all people, everywhere. In the modern era, both authors became foundational figures for theorists seeking to replace the modern state system by promoting more just global political arrangements such as a federation of free states living in perpetual peace (Kant) or communism as a global social and economic system to replace the unequal capitalist order (Marx). Critical theory sets out to critique repressive social practices and institutions in today’s world and advance emancipation by supporting ideas and practices that meet the universalist principles of justice. This kind of critique has a transformative dimension in the sense that it aims at changing national societies, international relations and the emerging global society, starting from alternative ideas and practices lingering in the background of the historical process.

The basics of critical theory

Although critical theory reworks and, in some ways, supersedes Kantian and Marxian themes, both authors remain at the base of the theory’s lineage. Through critical philosophy, Kant discussed the conditions in which we make claims about the world and asserted that the increasing interconnectedness of his time opened the door for more cosmopolitan (i.e. supranational) political communities. Marx’s critical mode of inquiry was grounded on the will to understand social developments in industrialised societies, including the contradictions inherent in capitalism that would lead to its collapse, the suppression of labour exploitation and the setting up of a more just system of global social relations. This way, the writings of Kant and Marx converge to demonstrate that what happens at the level of international relations is crucial to the achievement of human emancipation and global freedom. Consequently, the tracing of tangible social and political possibilities or change (those stemming from within existing practices and institutions) became a defining feature of the strand of critical thought entering IR via authors reworking Marxian and Kantian themes during the twentieth century.

Of course, neither Marx nor Kant were IR theorists in the contemporary sense. Both were philosophers. We must therefore identify two more recent sources for how critical theory developed within the modern discipline of IR. The first is Antonio Gramsci and his influence over Robert Cox and the paradigm of production (economic patterns involved in the production of goods and the social and political relationships they entail). The second is the Frankfurt school – Jürgen Habermas in particular – and the influence of Habermas over Andrew Linklater and the paradigm of communication (patterns of rationality involved in human communication and the ethical principles they entail). There are two themes uniting these approaches that show the connective glue within the critical theorist family. First, they both use emancipation as a principle to critique, or assess, society and the global political order. Second, they both detect the potential for emancipation developing within the historical process, but consider that it may not be inevitable. The paradigms of redistribution and recognition relate to what Nancy Fraser (1995) has called the two main axes of contemporary political struggle. While redistribution struggles refer directly to the Marxist themes of class struggles and social emancipation, recognition struggles have to do with aspirations to freedom and justice connected to gender, sexuality, race and national recognition. Therefore, while Cox focuses on contemporary redistribution struggles, Linklater turns to questions of identity and community as more significant than economic relations in today’s quest for emancipation.

Cox sets out to challenge realism’s assumptions, namely the study of interstate relations in isolation from other social forces. He stresses the need to see global politics as a collective construction evolving through the complex interplay of state, sub-state and trans-state forces in economic, cultural and ideological spheres. His purpose is to pay attention to the whole range of spheres where change is needed in contemporary global politics. For example, when realism focuses only on great powers and strategic stability, it ends up reinforcing a set of unjust global relations stemming from power and coercion. For this reason, Cox challenges the idea that ‘truth’ is absolute – as in realism’s assertion that there is a timeless logic to international relations, or liberalism’s assertion that the pursuit of global capitalism is positive. Instead, he asserts that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’ (Cox 1981, 128). Drawing on Gramsci, Cox comes up with a picture of the world political system brought into being by the hegemony and hierarchies of power manufactured in the economic arena. Therefore, power is understood in the context of a set of globalised relations of production demanding the transformation of the nation-state, and depends on the combination of material elements and ideas for acquiring legitimacy (Cox and Jacobsen 1977). Cox explores the economic contradictions spurring change in power relations and guiding transitions towards a fairer world order, even if acknowledging that emancipation is not inevitable.

As Hutchings (2001) points out, the critical project connecting Linklater to Cox sets out to uncover all sorts of hegemonic interests feeding the world order as a first step to overcome global systems of exclusion and inequality. Linklater’s critical project aims at reconstructing cosmopolitanism, drawing not from some abstract or utopian moral principle but from non-instrumental action and ideal speech (open and non-coercive communication) assumptions developed by Habermas. Ideal speech is the critical tool used in the reconstruction of political communities (from local to global levels) through open dialogue and non-coercive communication, a process whereby all affected by political decisions put forward their claims and justify them on the basis of rational and universally accepted principles of validity. This method poses questions of the ‘good life’ (what a society ought to be like) and questions of justice (fairness in the way members of a society choose what their society ought to be like).

Thus, emancipation is conceived not with reference to an abstract universal idea but based on a process of open discussion about who can be excluded legitimately from specific political arrangements and what kinds of particularities (gender, race, language) entitle people to special sets of rights. For Linklater, the historical development of citizenship attests to both the potential and the limitations of such a process of open discussion about rights – who is entitled to what in the context of the state system. Citizenship has been the critical concept and set of practices permitting the enjoyment of universal rights inside a community (freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, freedom of association), but also the protection of vulnerable minorities by granting them particular rights in order to avoid or mitigate the effects of discrimination. On the other hand, however, citizenship has divided humanity into national groupings and has therefore been a barrier to the universal fulfilment of human freedom.

According to Linklater then, emancipation demands global interactions guided by open, inclusive and non-coercive dialogue about the ties that bind communities together. This also extends to our obligations to strangers and how fair it is to restrict outsiders from the enjoyment of rights granted to insiders. For Linklater, the answer lies in the potential for a more universal concept of citizenship, refashioned through open dialogue among those affected by the global processes that are changing the world. These processes are issues like non-state forms of violence (such as sexual violence and terrorism), forced migration, climate change and resource depletion. Therefore, critical theory can be seen as an instrument of the powerless to advance more equitable types of global relations. More importantly for us, within IR theory it combats the traditional approaches, mainly liberalism and realism, and shines a light on how they feed the imbalances of an unjust global order by failing to question (or critique) their foundational claims. Linklater’s work is marked by the awareness that modernity is an unfinished project in its potential for accomplishing human freedom, namely through the transformation of the competitive system of separate states into a global community.

By admitting that immediate security needs press humans to set up bounded communities and to act according to national loyalties, Linklater recognises the limits to cosmopolitan politics. At the same time however, he underlines that there is a growing awareness that global interconnectedness and vulnerabilities impose their consequences on how communities define themselves and live side by side with others. Proximity with strangers prompts, for instance, a heightened sense of sharing a finite planet and finite resources and leads individuals to question exclusive obligations to the state in favour of a degree of cosmopolitan responsibility towards those who do not belong to one’s national community.

Accordingly, Linklater explores the moral tensions emerging between humanity and citizenship (‘humans’ and ‘citizens’) in order to devise practical possibilities for creating more inclusive communities, with a civilising effect upon the conduct of international relations. Linklater does not underestimate the historical movement towards the creation of bounded moral communities (nation-states) but also sees potential within the historical process to enhance the expansion of rights and duties beyond the state. The fact that it has been possible for states in the modern international system to agree upon the protection of human rights and the political relevance of avoiding human wrongs is a sign of the relevance of these ideas.

What unites critical theorists like Cox, Linklater and others, then, is a political inquiry with an explicit emancipatory purpose. It aims at uncovering the potential for a fairer system of global relations resulting from already existing principles, practices and communities that expands human rights and prevents harm to strangers.

Critical theory and the European migrant ‘crisis’

Haman stares at the long night behind him when I surprise his absent gaze on the deck of the Blue Star ferry carrying us to the Greek port of Piraeus. Departing from Rhodes, the ferry had made its first stop at the island of Kos where dozens of refugees from the Syrian war lined up patiently for hours and eventually got a place on board. Haman was one of them. After talking for hours about the war and his expectations for the future, it was clear to me that ferry on the Aegean Sea was a metaphor of a global community plagued with obstacles to human freedom but holding the resources for its fulfilment. After Kos though, I could not really tell anymore who was a tourist and who was a refugee, who was Greek or Athenian and who was neither – and it occurred to me why these categories had to matter at all. The common human condition aboard the ferry would stand for the night, but the following morning tourists would continue their tranquil journey home while refugees would have to improvise their way across Europe, begging for hospitality. At the port of Piraeus, on that early morning of August 2015, I said goodbye to Haman and wished him luck for the journey. It is Friday and he knows he must reach the Hungarian border before Tuesday or risk being trapped by the fence erected hastily in the previous days to block migrants on the Serbian side. ‘It’ll be cold’ he says, in a premonition of what lay ahead for those like him seeking refuge in Europe. That was the last I heard from Haman. I stayed there for a while, looking at him blending into the crowd conveyed throughout Europe as a crisis of refugees and illegal migrants.

This brief encounter with Haman and his story is a trigger for recalling how in recent years increasing numbers of people escaping persecution, war and famine have tried to reach safe havens like Europe. While this has been approached mostly as a ‘crisis’ affecting Europe and the national communities composing it, some voices have underlined how the history of humanity has always been a history of migration, peaceful or otherwise, and that today more people than at any time since the Second World War are being displaced from their homes. A critical perspective assumes that the security claims of refugees fleeing war-torn countries constitute a cosmopolitan responsibility for the whole of humankind, especially for those with the resources to address them. It proceeds by critiquing security arrangements pleading exclusive loyalty to a bounded community and refusing refugees a number of cosmopolitan rights (hospitality and refuge). The point is not simply to understand how the world is constituted by moral tensions opposing nationals to strangers, but to contribute to more equitable political solutions to the current refugee ‘crisis’ by taking to the negotiating table the most vulnerable and their legitimate security concerns. Contrary to more traditional theories, critical theory does not see refugees as apart from the violence and inequality that produce them. In fact, it sets out to locate current waves of forced migration in the context of deeper economic and geopolitical structures producing harm and exclusion in a globalising world. Along the Cox/Linklater axis, current migration must be seen as forced upon individuals and the by-product of the current world order. The state of these relations excludes the potential for human understanding and mutual recognition, as it has come about through the harmful globalisation of production and connected dynamics of nation-building, war and environmental degradation. Therefore, a critical perspective inquires deeper into how global economic forces, and related hierarchies of power, become complicit in creating the chaos and insecurity forcing people to leave their homes in different parts of the world. This entails looking in particular to how the dynamics of global capitalism are producing failed states throughout Africa and the Middle East, not just as an unintended misfortune but as part of how power itself works.

The main challenge for critical theory then is to connect theory to practice, to be able to set up a theoretical lens that results in a real-world transformative outcome. It is not enough to understand and trace the origins of harm and displacement in the world; it is crucial to use that understanding to reach fairer security arrangements that do not neglect refugees’ claims to basic rights. Someone wanting to pursue a critical line of inquiry about the refugee ‘crisis’ might want to start with Haman and his journey from Syria to Europe as a mirror image of the current plight of so many people in the Global South. For critical theory today, politics, knowledge and global orders are for people like Haman and should serve the purpose of freeing them from unnecessary harm and unfair or unbalanced globalised interactions. Institutions like the state must be assessed in terms of how they fare in overcoming various types of exclusion vis-à-vis insiders and outsiders. Critical theory, more than other approaches, promises to go deeper in understanding why refugees have to leave their homes. This entails producing knowledge about direct reasons (war in Syria or elsewhere) but also about global structures of power and harm as well as the agents complicit in it (broader geopolitical interests, the workings of the global economy, climate change and its effects over the lives of communities). Moreover, critical theory examines the moral consequences (what must be done) of Haman’s journey and what kind of responsibility others might bear for Haman’s plight.

Cosmopolitan in character, critical theory refuses to see states as bounded moral communities by nature and instead finds in them the potential to protect strangers in need and include them in a broader notion of national interest. In the context of the current refugee ‘crisis’, critique is directed to the different norms and practices approved by states vis-à-vis incoming refugees. A basic move is to distinguish which ones are and which are not compatible with cosmopolitan duties already enshrined in international law and upheld by many people and organisations in different societies. A second move is to promote civic initiatives capable of consolidating fairer and more balanced relations (solutions to the ‘crisis’) between those who seek refuge from harm and those who are in a position to guarantee protection from harm. Solutions must be sought in open dialogue, resorting to rational arguments that take into consideration everyone’s concerns and interests. Leaving solutions to national governments alone is not an option due to their rather strict position on national interests. On the contrary, a more balanced position would result from the active involvement of civil society, local authorities, European authorities and refugees themselves. After all, Europe is a pertinent case here as it is the home of the European Union – a project that united the bulk of European states in a supranational, and relatively open-bordered, union in which all citizens are legally free to work and live wherever they please within the Union. Clearly, there is an existing framework within European politics to work with to reach a more just solution to the migration ‘crisis’ than the one advanced by those nations who closed their borders. The reward for someone following a critical line of inquiry is therefore to understand to the full that theory is always implicated in practice and that the way we conceive the refugee ‘crisis’ shapes the kind of solution we envisage for it. From a critical perspective, then, there is only a true solution to this ‘crisis’ when political actors embrace cosmopolitan criteria that balance the whole range of interests and respect the rights of everyone involved.

Recognising that there are very different strands of thought within critical theory, this chapter has narrowed its approach to introduce critical theory as a specific line of inquiry seeking to advance emancipation, or human freedom, in the conduct of global affairs. A relevant critique seeks to trace forms of exclusion that instigate both redistribution and recognition struggles and then identify the potential for progressive change inspired by immanent ideas, norms and practices. From a critical perspective, then, people – not states – must be put at the centre of politics, global or otherwise. Additionally, political arrangements should be judged, or critiqued, according to their capacity to advance emancipation and the broadening of moral boundaries. Critical theory assumes an active role in the betterment of human affairs according to the potential for freedom inherent in modernity and the identification of political alternatives at hand in the globalising society and the historical process bringing it into being.

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Critical thinking: Key to success in an MA International Relations

Critical thinking is a crucial skill for students pursuing an MA in International Relations. This blog post explores why it's important and how to develop it.

Introduction

When it comes to pursuing a Master of Arts in International Relations , academic excellence and a passion for the subject matter are undoubtedly essential. However, there is another vital skillset that is often overlooked: critical thinking.

Critical thinking is the ability to analyse information objectively, assess its credibility and reliability, and evaluate it based on its relevance to the topic at hand. In the context of international relations, this skillset is essential for interpreting complex issues, examining different perspectives, and ultimately formulating informed opinions and strategies.

In this blog post, we'll explore the importance of critical thinking in international relations, how to develop these skills, and why they are so crucial to your success.

Why critical thinking is crucial for an MA in International Relations

Interpreting complex issues .

International relations is a complex and ever-evolving field, with myriad factors at play. Critical thinking skills are crucial for students to navigate and interpret the vast amount of information and perspectives presented to them. Without the ability to think critically, students risk missing key insights, drawing incorrect conclusions, and failing to fully understand the complexities of the issues they are studying.

Examining different perspectives

International relations is a field that is influenced by diverse cultural, political, and economic perspectives . Critical thinking skills are essential for students to evaluate these perspectives and understand their impact on the issues at hand. Without the ability to think critically, students risk overlooking important viewpoints, making incorrect assumptions, and failing to appreciate the nuances of the issues they are studying.

Formulating informed opinions and strategies

In the field of international relations , the ability to formulate informed opinions and strategies is crucial. Critical thinking skills enable students to evaluate information objectively, identify key factors and potential outcomes, and develop well-reasoned positions and strategies. Without the ability to think critically, students risk forming opinions and strategies based on incomplete or biased information, which can lead to ineffective or even harmful outcomes.

Soft skills are also crucial for international relations students, but what do they include?

How to develop critical thinking skills

Question everything .

To develop critical thinking skills, it's essential to start by questioning everything. Don't take information at face value, but instead, ask yourself what the source is, how credible it is, and what biases might be present. By questioning everything, you'll develop a more objective and nuanced perspective that will enable you to evaluate information more effectively.

Seek out diverse perspectives

To develop critical thinking skills, it's important to seek out diverse perspectives . This might involve reading articles or books written from different cultural, political, or economic viewpoints, attending lectures or seminars that feature speakers with differing opinions, or engaging in conversations with people who have different backgrounds or beliefs. By seeking out diverse perspectives, you'll develop a broader understanding of the issues you are studying and be better equipped to evaluate information objectively.

Practice active listening

To develop critical thinking skills, it's important to practice active listening. This means listening to others with an open mind, asking questions to clarify their perspective, and avoiding making assumptions or jumping to conclusions. By practicing active listening, you'll develop a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the issues you are studying and be better equipped to evaluate information effectively.

Conclusion

In conclusion, critical thinking skills are a crucial component of success in an MA in International Relations . As the world becomes increasingly complex, the ability to analyse and interpret information is more important than ever before.

Developing these skills takes time and practice, but the payoff is immense. Graduates with strong critical thinking abilities will have a competitive edge in the job market and be better equipped to tackle global issues.

By learning to read between the lines, students can deepen their understanding of the world and make a positive impact on society. So, if you're considering pursuing an MA in International Relations, remember to prioritise the development of your critical thinking skills.

Want to know about other international relations skills that can help you succeed?

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Critical Theory of International Relations by Steven C. Roach LAST REVIEWED: 29 May 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 29 May 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0095

Max Horkheimer, one of the founders of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research established in 1923, coined the term critical theory in 1937. While the school failed to produce what could be called a systematic theory, it drew on, and interweaved, various philosophical strands and prominent themes of political and social thought, including historical materialism (Marxism/Western Marxism), Freudian analysis, cultural disenchantment, Hegelian dialectics, and totality. Yet by the 1940s, many of the first-generation Frankfurt school thinkers sought to counter the emasculation of critical reason, dialectics, and self-conscious theory with a focus on the negativity of dialectics. Later critics would claim that they had abandoned the progressive platform of the Enlightenment, or the project of emancipation from social and political oppression. In the 1980s, Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action theory would provide a so-called critical turn in Frankfurt school critical theory by resituating reason and social action in linguistics. It was during this time that international relations (IR) theorists would draw on Habermas’s theory and that of other critical theorists to critique the limits of realism, the dominant structural paradigm of international relations at the time. The first stages of this critical theory intervention in international relations included the seminal works of Robert Cox, Richard Ashley, Mark Hoffman, and Andrew Linklater. Linklater, perhaps more than any other critical IR theorist, was instrumental in repositioning the emancipatory project in IR theory, interweaving various social and normative strands of critical thought. As such, two seemingly divergent critical IR theory approaches emerged: one that would emphasize the role of universal principles, dialogue, and difference; the other focusing predominantly on the revolutionary transformation of social relations and the state in international political economy (historical materialism). Together, these critical interventions reflected an important “third debate” (or “fourth,” if one counts the earlier inter-paradigm debate) in IR concerning the opposition between epistemology (representation and interpretation) and ontology (science and immutable structures). Perhaps more importantly, they stressed the need to take stock of the growing pluralism in the field and what this meant for understanding and interpreting the growing complexity of global politics (i.e., the rising influence of technology, human rights and democracy, and nonstate actors). The increasing emphasis on promoting a “rigorous pluralism,” then, would encompass an array of critical investigations into the transformation of social relations, norms, and identities in international relations. These now include, most notably, critical globalization studies, critical security studies, feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.

General Overview

Beginning in the 1990s, several prominent international relations (IR) texts and journals have been published. Many of these now contain a range of essays on the intervention of particular critical theory perspectives, such as Marxism, Frankfurt school critical theory, post-structuralism, and feminism. Others, however, focus exclusively on critical theory and/or its principal critical theorists in order to take full(er) stock of the increasing influence and changes in this approach to IR. The same applies to journals, which adopt either an omnibus or a pluralist attitude, or a more context-specific one, by publishing only articles with a critical theory focus.

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Challenging hegemonic paradigms and practices: critical thinking and active learning strategies for international relations.

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2007

I argue in this paper that one possible way of addressing the critical issue of preparing students for their future role as citizens in a global society is to integrate active learning exercises such as case studies and problem-based learning scenarios that focus on international issues and events and significant global conditions. These provide an opportunity for students to practice the skills that are essential for participation in modern democratic societies. In this brief discussion paper, I present two very practical strategies for introducing students to global realities and exposing them to different cultural and ideological ways of “seeing the world.” Both strategies emphasize skills that are essential for analysis, evaluation and, eventually, problem-solving.

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Volume 40, Issue 1
Steven L. Lamy (a1)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096507250279

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Linklater and Critical International Relations Theory

First Online: 01 February 2023

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Davide Schmid 4

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in International Relations ((PSIR))

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This chapter centres on Andrew Linklater’s scholarship on international politics, arguably the highest achievement of the Critical IR Theory literature. It argues that, although it is in many ways distinctive and does not solely rely on Frankfurt School theory, Linklater’s work on international politics is fundamentally shaped by the encounter with the Habermasian project and largely operates within the bounds of its paradigm of critique. In assessing Linklater’s writings over more than three decades, the chapter finds that his normative theory of cosmopolitanism as well as his later sociology of global morals and civilising processes follow the general parameters of Habermas’s framework of critique and, as a result, display many of the same failings of the latter’s interventions in IR. Linklater’s case, therefore, shows that the impact of the binary meta-theoretical architecture of system and lifeworld extends further than Habermas’s own work and is directly implicated in the crisis of critique of Critical Theory in IR.

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Linklater ( 2009b , p. 487) argues in the same text that the point of critical sociological inquiry is to examine ‘how changes in social and political structures were accompanied by the reconfiguration of personality systems’. Linklater’s own binary methodology is based on Norbert Elias’s distinction between ‘sociogenetic’ and ‘psychogenetic’ processes (Linklater & Mannell, 2010 ). Even though Elias does not explicitly adopt a systems-theoretic terminology, his definition of sociogenetic processes as changes in the levels of ‘human integration, increased differentiation of social functions… and the formation of ever-larger units of integration’ (Elias, quoted in Linklater & Mannell, 2010 , pp. 401–402) is remarkably similar to Habermas’s functionalist definition of the ‘system’ as guided by a logic of ‘rising complexity’.

In some passages of his 2016 book, Linklater goes as far as to suggest that it is the material process towards greater interconnectedness, and not the ‘normative shifts’ in moral attitudes that constitutes the driving force of the historical process. For instance, he notes that: ‘Moral concerns about how “civilized” societies should conduct their foreign policy are an outgrowth of the processes that forced peoples together and confronted them with the challenge of learning how to coexist peacefully in longer chains that came to include the dangerous interconnections of the era of “total warfare”’ (Linklater, 2016 , p. 451; [emphasis added]). Elsewhere, he comments that ‘the global interdependencies that distinguished the modern era required a revolution in moral and political thinking as well as parallel changes in the relative power of national, international and cosmopolitan legal and moral responsibilities’ (Linklater, 2016 , p. 296 [emphasis added]). The absence of any sustained discussion of what exactly characterises the ‘advance in interconnectedness’ and what its inner dynamics are is all the more striking for it.

Linklater’s ( 2021 , pp. 19–23) assurances, in this regard, that his sociological account of the European civilising process and comparison of different social formations is to be read as strictly ‘detached’ and ‘non-evaluative’—that is, as value-neutral—are again unconvincing. Statements such as that the ‘rise of liberal conceptions of progress’ was accompanied by ‘more benign forms of colonial administration’—and indeed the very notion of a civilising process—cannot but include a normative dimension, whether the author intends to or not (Linklater, 2021 , p. 149).

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Schmid, D. (2023). Linklater and Critical International Relations Theory. In: The Poverty of Critical Theory in International Relations. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22587-1_6

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Article contents

Poststructuralism and postmodernism in international relations.

Aslı Çalkıvik Aslı Çalkıvik Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Istanbul Technical University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.102
Published online: 20 November 2017
This version: 31 March 2020
Previous version

Poststructural/postmodern international relations (IR) is a mode of critical thinking and analysis that joined disciplinary conversations during the 1980s and, despite the dismissive reception it has initially faced, it is a vibrant and expanding area of research within the field today. Providing a radical critique of politics in modernity, it is less a new paradigm or theory. Instead, it is better described as “a critical attitude” that focuses on the question of representation and explores the ways in which dominant framings of world politics produce and reproduce relations of power: how they legitimate certain forms of action while marginalizing other ways of being, thinking, and acting. To elaborate the insights of poststructuralism/postmodernism, the article starts off by situating the emergence of these critical perspectives within the disciplinary context and visits the debates and controversies it has elicited. This discussion is followed by an elaboration of the major themes and concepts of poststructural/postmodern thought such as subjectivity, language, text, and power. The convergences and divergences between poststructuralism and its precursor—structuralism—is an underlying theme that is noted in this article. The third and fourth sections make central the epistemological and ontological challenges that poststructuralism/postmodernism poses to disciplinary knowledge production on world politics. While the former focuses on how central categories of IR such as state and sovereignty, violence, and war were problematized and reconceptualized, the latter attends to the poststructuralist/postmodern attempts to articulate a different political imaginary and develop an alternative conceptual language to think the international beyond the confines of the paradigm of sovereignty and the modern subject. The article concludes with a brief look at the future directions for poststructural/postmodern investigations.

poststructuralism
postmodernism
power relations
structuralism
world politics
critical perspectives

Updated in this version

Updates to sections “Disciplinary Context of the Poststructural/Postmodern Turn” and “Poststructural/Postmodern Approaches in IR”; new section “On Value and Development,” references, and links to digital materials.

Introduction

Poststructuralism/postmodernism is a mode of critical thinking and analysis that joined disciplinary conversations during the 1980s—an era commonly referred to as the period of the Third Debate. It is an approach that draws on a wide range of thinkers associated with poststructural/postmodern thought such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paul Virilio, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Ranciére, and Judith Butler among others. Less a new paradigm or theory, poststructural/postmodern international relations (IR) is better described as “a critical attitude” (Campbell, 2007 ) or “an ethos of critique” (Jabri, 2007 ) that probes the limits imposed by politics in modernity and explores the possibilities that exist beyond it. As a critical discourse on disciplinary knowledge production, it problematizes taken-for-granted assumptions and claims about world politics. It calls for forms of thought that begin from “new and rather uncomfortable or counterintuitive assumptions about ‘life, the universe, and everything’” (Edkins, 2007 , p. 89).

In philosophy, social, and political theory, poststructural/postmodern thought has a long genealogy whose path has been laid down by prominent critiques of modernity and modern political thought—figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Jacques Lacan (Dillon, 2000 ; Peters, 2001 ). Additionally, poststructuralism/postmodernism builds upon and challenges the insights of structuralism as found in the works of social theorists such Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In contrast, poststructural/postmodern approaches in IR are a relatively new participant in the disciplinary conversations. Despite the dismissive and even hostile reception it has initially faced, poststructural/postmodern IR is a vibrant and expanding area of research within the field today.

Poststructuralism/postmodernism focuses on the question of representation and explores the ways in which dominant framings of world politics produce and reproduce relations of power: how they legitimate certain forms of action while marginalizing other ways of being. Scholars working from this perspective shift the focus away from pre-given subjects of international politics—such as states, individuals, and classes—toward the political problem of the production of modern subjects as sovereign subjects of action and knowledge. More than the question of “what,” they share a general concern about the question of “how”: How are we, as political subjects, produced to accept certain forms of action and not others, to ask certain questions and not others? How do certain mechanisms of power—political technologies of inclusion/exclusion—become normalized and legitimized? (Gregory, 1989 ; Newman, 2010 ). In the words of Donna Gregory (Gregory, 1989 ), “[p]ost-structural practices … investigate how the subject—in the dual senses of the subject-matter and the subject-actor—of international relations is constituted in and through discourses of world politics.”

Highlighting the inextricable link between thinking about the world and acting in it, between analysis and action, and theory and practice, poststructural/postmodern IR seeks to elucidate how the interrelation between these two terms is mediated through different forms of representational practices. Denying the possibility of making value-neutral, objective claims independent of subjectivity, they bring into focus the politics of writing and the ethics of scholarship (Zehfuss, 2013 ).

Disciplinary Context of the Poststructural/Postmodern Turn

The entry of poststructural/postmodern approaches to the study of world politics is part of a wider critical turn in IR dating back to the late 1980s (Rengger & Thirkell-White, 2007 ; Zehfuss, 2013 ). Like other critical approaches—from feminism to Frankfurt-school inspired Critical Theory to Gramscian IR and postcolonialism—the development of poststructural/postmodern IR was prompted by a general dissatisfaction with orthodox theories both politically and analytically. Among the factors that flamed this dissatisfaction were the collective failure of the discipline to foresee the ending of the Cold War; the complexities and uncertainties arising in the aftermath of the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc; and the emergence of new issues and concerns in the wake of globalization, which exposed the limits of traditional militaristic solutions, traditional notions of sovereignty, and order (George, 1994 ).

At an analytical level, the critique of positivism within the social sciences was another factor influencing the critical turn. The post-positivist agenda uniting newly emerging critical voices denounced the epistemological principles definitive of traditional IR and its claims to value-neutrality and objectivity. In tandem with other forms of critical scholarship that challenge orthodox problematics of knowledge production on global politics, poststructural/postmodern approaches sought to expose the intimate links between hegemonic forms of knowledge production and the reproduction of power relations. They attended to the silences, omissions, and erasures affected by orthodox ways of writing world politics. In this regard, they played a significant role in what is termed “the third debate” within the disciplinary history (Hamati-Ataya, 2013 ; Lapid, 1989 ).

Given the deep challenges they posed to the orthodox disciplinary agenda, poststructural/postmodern approaches were met with resistance, derision, even hostility. Labeled as “a discourse that prizes epistemological and ontological logomachy above clarity,” they were accused for “taking the discipline down an ideologically destructive road” (Jarvis, 2000 , pp. x–xii). Paradoxically upheld to the standards of science that they problematized, they were regarded as being less valid forms of knowledge and called upon to prove themselves as worthy of academic recognition by developing a research program and demonstrating themselves as capable of shedding light on important issues in world politics (Keohane, 1988 ). Treated as a “seduction,” they were charged with producing “mostly criticism and not much theory” (Walt, 1991 , p. 223). “Dressed in Parisian post-structuralist vocabulary,” it is argued that “postmodern theories of knowledge and of reality—their epistemology and their ‘ontology’, a favorite word—are hidden in foggy formulations” (Østerud, 1996 , pp. 385, 387).

Mainstream IR was not alone in its distaste for poststructural/postmodern approaches. As the initial lines of solidarity gave way to serious disagreements and schisms among critical scholars, poststructural/postmodern perspectives were charged with advocating conservativism and irrationalism, promoting relativism and nihilism by constructivists and proponents of Critical Theory (theories that situate themselves within the Marxist heritage, drawing from the works of Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School) (Brown, 1994 ; Cochran, 1995 ; Wyn Jones, 2001 ). In the words of a critic, “the relentless critical tendency” (Price, 2008 , pp. 38–40) of these perspectives make it impossible to argue for progressive change and account for the role of ethics in world politics, consequently, rendering them complicit in the reproduction of the system they vehemently criticized. The call for providing “clearer normative positions and commitments” is complemented by assertions by more sympathetic critics that these perspectives need to engage more closely with methodology and causal analysis so as to demonstrate that they can explain events and help make policy (Burke, 2008 ; also Hansen, 2006 ).

According to postcolonial IR scholars, the problem with poststructural/postmodern accounts stems less from their inadequacy to live up to the disciplinary protocols about rationality, science, or their divergence from Enlightenment accounts of progress and emancipation. Rather, it is their alleged silence about the colonial roots of modernity and neocolonial forms of rule that render poststructuralism/postmodernism amenable to “replicate the many hierarchies and silences” they criticize and become politically disabling for the marginalized and the oppressed (Chowdhry & Nair, 2002 ; Krishna, 1993 , p. 388; Sajed, 2012 ).

The choice of terms and labels used to describe and categorize these critical perspectives are indicative of the “highly controversial” (Bleiker, 2008 , p. 91) nature of debates surrounding poststructural/postmodern engagements. While some IR textbooks prefer the label “postmodernism,” others use the term poststructuralism to describe the same set of approaches (Campbell, 2007 ; Edkins, 2007 ; Steans, Pettiford, Diez, & El-Anis, 2005 ). The different senses in which each of these terms are deployed by scholars who associate themselves with this strand of critical thinking can be a further source of confusion. Opting for the term postmodernism, for instance, Bleiker ( 2008 ) differentiates between “the postmodern as both a changing attitude and a fundamentally novel historical condition” (p. 87). Resonating with this stance, Burke ( 2008 , p. 359) distinguishes “‘postmodernism’ (a set of theories) from ‘postmodernity’” (a historical period) and defines “postmodernism” as “a theoretical orientation and set of concerns about global politics.” Making a clear distinction between postmodernism and poststructuralism, Steans et al. ( 2005 , p. 130) argue that “postmodernism is centrally concerned with the nature and consequences of modernity and develops a thorough critique of the Enlightenment project” and “poststructuralism is more concerned with the nature, role and function or dysfunction of language.” Whereas Campbell ( 2007 , p. 212) formulates “postmodernity” as “the cultural, economic, social, and political formation within modernity that results from changes in time-space relations” and suggests that the term poststructuralism—defined as an “interpretative analytics” that is affected by transformations in modernity—is more apt to depict this strand of critical investigation.

Highlighting the politically charged nature of labeling these approaches as “postmodern” by its critics in the discipline, Campbell ( 2007 ) suggests that at the root of the politics of naming lies a deep-rooted uneasiness stemming from the radical critique of modernity offered by these analyses. On this reading, poststructuralism is misunderstood as postmodernism because of an underlying anxiety on the part of its critics that stem from a conception of the critique of modernity as an outright rejection of its principles (Campbell, 2007 , p. 211).

Even scholars, who do not share the agenda of this line of critical thinking, also note the disciplinary politics of naming. For instance, Patomäki ( 1997 ) highlights the deployment of “postmodernism” as a “rhetorical strategy” to dismiss and delegitimize such strands of thinking and research as a move that has important effects of power. He registers the difference between the two terms and suggests that “many followers of Derrida and Foucault would prefer to refer to their research program as ‘“post-structuralism’ rather than ‘postmodernism’” (Patomäki, 1997 , p. 326).

Major Themes and Concepts of Poststructural/Postmodern Thought

While it would hardly do justice to subsume the multiplicity of positions within poststructural/postmodern thought, it is nevertheless possible to point out some common assumptions and themes that characterize their agenda. Foremost among them are the radical questioning of ontological essentialism and epistemological foundationalism in social and political thought and analysis (Torfing, 1999 ). Rejecting the notion that the nature of things are defined by universal, atemporal qualities, poststructuralism/postmodernism asserts the impossibility of a pre-given, self-determining essence. It contests the possibility of providing universal grounds and absolute justifications for the truth of claims made about knowledge and value. Abandoning the Enlightenment optimism about the possibility of achieving objective knowledge of phenomena through the use of reason, poststructural/postmodern approaches claim that knowledge constructs its own object of study. They foreground language not only as a distinguishing feature of human beings, but also as the constitutive dimension of human relationships. Emphasizing the contingent, undetermined nature of reality, they exhibit a general aversion to metanarratives (total explanations) of social reality. Contra modernist interpretations, they argue that history is not a linear, progressive, uniform process of the unfolding of a single essence (human reason). Instead, they emphasize the contingency, openness of time, and variety of historical trajectories.

Subject and Subjectivity

Poststructural/postmodern thought has close affinity with structuralism elaborated in the works of thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss. One of the common themes that link the former to the latter is the critique of the modern subject as the sovereign subject of reason (autonomous, fully present, and transparent individual) (Sarup, 1993 ). At issue is what White ( 1997 , p. 503) describes as, the “teflon subject … the assertive, disengaged self who generates distance from its background (tradition and embodiment) and foreground (external nature, other subjects) in the name of an accelerating mastery over them.”

Problematization of this notion of an abstract, unitary subject/author as an originating consciousness and authority for meaning and truth was already underway in structuralist thought. According to Lévi-Strauss, for instance, the “ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve him” (Sarup, 1993 , p. 1). Asserting the illusionary nature of a unified self, poststructural/postmodern approaches radicalize this critique by dissolving the subject altogether and abandoning “any residual notion of subjectivity” (Edkins, 2007 , p. 90). The humanist belief that there is a universal essence of “man”—a timeless attribute of all human beings—is replaced with a view of the subject as produced through acts of power, molded by the political techniques and knowledges applied to it. A preconstituted, self-transparent subject (the subject of cogito, a conscious self that possesses a positive essence, which exists prior to or apart from its context) gives way to a de-centered or split subject (Žižek, 1999 ). Rather than taking the subject as the point of departure, poststructural/postmodern approaches transform the subject itself into a question and attend to the ways in which human beings are produced as particular political subjects through power relations.

Dismantling the Cartesian subject as the authoritative voice of truth is bound up with the reconceptualization of language and the affirmation of its power as constitutive of subjectivity. In this regard, Saussure’s disruption of the view of language as an ahistorical, transparent medium for communicating meaning has great influence on poststructural/postmodern thinkers (Sarup, 1993 ). Saussure conceived language as a system of differences where each term—lacking any essence, positivity—gained its identity through its differential relation to other terms. He argued that meaning is not generated through the relation between a word/name and an object/concept as the referential theory of meaning would suggest: that it is produced through the interrelation between the linguistic terms themselves. Put differently, according to Saussure, there is no necessary relation between a name and the concept that it names. Rather, their association comes about by convention, common usage. It is through the process of naming that an object is constituted as distinct from other objects, enabling speakers to see “it” (Edkins, 2007 ). By positing the autonomous status of the linguistic structure, Saussure was dismantling “the myth of the given,” which posits that the reality is given to the subject, that consciousness has direct access to it (Callinicos, 1985 , p. 89).

Poststructuralism/Postmodernism embraces structuralist perspective on language as a system of differences. Language is “not as an asset employed by a preexisting subject or as a constraint imposed on the subject, but [as] the medium through which the social identity of the subject is made possible” (George & Campbell, 1990 , p. 285). Yet, they reject structuralism’s scientific pretensions and its concomitant tendency to reduce heterogeneity and difference to the effects of an invariant structure (Storper, 2001 ). They repudiate structuralist “claims of totality and universality and the presumption of binary structural oppositions implicitly operate to quell the insistent ambiguity and openness of linguistic and cultural signification” (Butler, 1990 , p. 54). Instead, they suggest that social structures cannot be external to, independent of the discursive realm and social context. Privileging ambiguity and openness, poststructuralism/postmodernism brings forth the moment of difference and probe into “the operative and limitless différance of language” (Butler, 1990 , p. 54).

Text, Representation

The notion of text is a central concept for poststructural/postmodern investigations into world politics. The text does not merely refer to the written world, literature, but purveys the idea that the world is constituted like a text, in that access to “reality” is always mediated—it can only be apprehended through interpretative practices. Textuality of world politics registers the unbridgeable, inevitable gap between the represented and its representation. Bleiker ( 2009 ) elaborates this point through the distinction between mimetic versus aesthetic forms of representation in world politics. Subscribing to a view of representation as mimesis, dominant understandings of theory in International Relations “seek to represent politics as realistically and authentically as possible” (p. 14). Whereas an aesthetic approach “assumes that there is always a gap between a form of representation and what is represented therewith” (p. 19). Following on this, poststructural/postmodern approaches inquire into forms of mediation, historically produced styles of inscription that constitute the “pre-text” of international politics—“various reality-making scripts one inherits or acquires from one’s surrounding cultural/linguistic condition” (Shapiro, 1989 , p. 11). Treating the world as a complex, multilayered, interconnected text, they examine practices of representation, of mediation in uncommon places such as museums, travelogues, airports, poems, drama, and photography (Campbell, 2002 ; Debrix & Weber, 2003 ; Lisle, 2012 ; Sylvester, 2009 ).

Deconstruction

Critique of logocentric nature of thought characterizing Western philosophy is a theme that weaves poststructural/postmodern attempts to conceptualize difference. Logocentricism is a way of reasoning that operates through the production of dichotomies such as “meaning/form, soul/body, intuition/expression, literal/metaphorical, nature/culture, intelligible/sensible, positive/negative, transcendental/empirical, serious/nonserious, [where] the superior term belongs to the logos and is a higher presence; the inferior term marks a fall” (Culler, 1985 , p. 92). According to Jacques Derrida, logocentric thought not only produces binary oppositions, but also sets up a hierarchical relation between the two terms. It “assumes the priority of the first term and conceives the second in relation to it, as a complication, a negation, a manifestation, a disruption of the first” (Culler, 1985 , p. 92). Logocentric thinking, with its endless search for an uncontaminated, self-identical state, difference is something to be subsumed and negated.

Logocentricism is intimately linked with phonocentricism—privileging of speech over writing and presupposing the former as having unmediated, immediate access to “an order of meaning—thought, truth, reason, logic, the Word” (Culler, 1985 , p. 92). Such a desire for and constant seeking after presence, a definitive answer to the question “what is ?” entails authorizing a sovereign voice as the source of “truth.” It puts in place “a sovereign voice, a voice beyond politics and beyond doubt … from which truth and power are thought to emanate as one” (Ashley & Walker, 1990a , 1990b , p. 368).

According to Derrida, however, logocentricism deconstructs itself in that both the dichotomies and hierarchical structures they authorize are unfounded and therefore carry an inbuilt tendency to dismantle (Edkins, 2007 ). Although privileged, the first term is parasitic on and is contaminated by the second term. Since “each term is structurally related to, and already harbours the other, totalities, whether conceptual or social, are never fully present and properly established” (Devetak, 2005 , p. 169). Deconstruction as a form of thinking seizes these binaries and seeks to expose their inherent instability, untenability.

Like Derrida, Michel Foucault’s work has immense influence on poststructural/postmodern approaches in International Relations. His is also a thought of difference and grapples with this task by writing counter-histories, which challenge the basic presuppositions of Enlightenment thought about temporal unfolding—the idea of a unified history with an origin and an end. Referred to as “new historicisim,” Focauldian genealogy maps discontinuities and difference that are silenced, “buried, covered, or excluded from view” (Devetak, 2005 , p. 163) through dominant interpretations of the past.

Discourse, or “discursive formation,” is a central concept to Foucault’s genealogical investigations. Discourse is defined as “a group of statements which provide a language for talking about—i.e. a way of representing—a particular kind of knowledge about a topic” (Hall, 1992 , p. 291). These statements working together construct the topic in a specific way and circumscribe the limits to how it can be thought. Taking Nietzsche’s observation that only which has no history can be defined, genealogy aims at “the continuous disruption of the structures of intelligibility that provide both individual and collective identities for persons and peoples” (Shapiro, 1992 , p. 2). It seeks to recover the epistemic, historical discontinuities, reversals in central concepts of political life such as sovereignty and war (Bartelson, 1996 , 2018 ).

Foucault’s work has been especially influential in thinking about and analyzing power. His appeal to “cut off the head of the king” in political thought and analysis is a reaction to the well-established paradigms of political power, which take legal or institutional models as their basis for analysis: either problematizing “power” along the axis of law and repression or analyzing power relations vis-à-vis institutional structures of the state (Foucault, 1997 ). In these accounts of the nature of power relations, power is regarded as a possession that enhances the capacity of those exercising it and impinges on those over whom it is exercised. Furthermore, the implicit assumption underlying such analyses of power is the view that the subjects who are caught in relations of power are autonomous, moral agents (Hindess, 1996 ). Consequently, questions about the exercise of power become entangled with questions of legitimacy and consent.

Moving away from juridico-political models of power and questions about sovereignty and legitimacy, Foucault ( 1997 ) distinguishes relations of power from other types of force relations such as exploitation and domination. Foucault suggests that power is not something that is possessed by preexisting entities such as an individual, a state, or a social class, but designates a social relation, which is characterized less by a confrontation between two adversaries or their mutual engagement than an interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. Power exists only when exercised within this relation. Furthermore, power is productive in the sense that it does not block, repress, say “no” like the law; it “operates on the field of possibilities” (Foucault, 1997 , p. 341). Rather than obstructing, power produces by structuring the possible fields of action. Such a conceptualization of power requires attending to the micro-physics of power (technologies designed to observe, monitor, shape, control the behavior of individuals) operating in a multiplicity of institutional settings. In Foucault’s account, relations of power should not be conceived in repressive terms, but something that is positive, productive of subjectivity and social capacities for action. This aspect of power relations provides the basis for differentiating them from other types of force relations, which are characterized by an asymmetrical relation within which the subordinated has little room for maneuver. In the case of such subordination, Foucault argues, what is stake is not power, but violence.

In his analysis, Foucault identifies different practices of power. Sovereign power is the power over death. It concerns “a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” to suppress it (Foucault, 1990 , p. 136). In modernity, sovereign power gets supplanted with other relations of power—disciplinary power and biopower. These relations of power operate by “generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (Foucault, 1990 , p. 136). Disciplinary practices, which are found in the barracks, prisons, schools, center on the “body as a machine” and aim to optimize its capabilities, increase its usefulness, its productive forces (Foucault, 1995 ). Unlike disciplinary power, biopower is “directed not at ‘man-as-body’ but at ‘man-as-species’” and is concerned with the health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, and race characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population (Foucault, 2003 , p. 243). While disciplines form the individualizing moment in the exercise of power, biopower is totalizing in that it takes as its object the mass of coexisting beings. The emergence of biopower constitutes a shift in the mechanisms of sovereign power. From being a “means of deduction,” a power that impedes and destroys, it transforms into something that enables and generates through the administration of bodies, the management and promotion of life.

Poststructural/Postmodern Approaches in IR

Poststructural/postmodern investigations make practices of representation, discourse, and interpretation central to the analyses of world politics. Foregrounding the relations between language, politics, and social structure, they are informed by a “shared acknowledgement of the ‘constitutive nature of language’ and an antipathy toward ‘closed system of knowledge” (George & Campbell, 1990 ). They challenge disciplinary boundaries by taking to task the discursive limits of the discipline constructed in the language of modern social sciences, which presumes a unity between natural and social sciences and the possibility to distinguish between facts and values (Smith, 1996 , p. 16). They draw on the distinction between politics—that sphere of social life that comprises institutionalized processes, activities, subjects assumed to be the premises of political life (elections, political parties, policymaking, international treaties, diplomacy, etc.) and the political—“the frame of reference within which actions, events and other phenomena acquire political status in the first place” (Edkins, 1999 , p. 2). With this move, they bring the political back in as they challenge “[e]xclusive epistemological claims or unreflective ontological assumptions about what constitutes a legitimate object of scholarly investigation” (Paipais, 2017 , p. 105).

Challenging the established protocols of academic knowledge production on world politics, poststructural/postmodern perspectives reject the view of a subject of knowledge (a universal voice of “truth”) unperturbed by the biases that stem from power relations and the influence of historical, political, cultural, social contexts it is situated in (Campbell, 2007 ). They deny a strict separation between the subject who knows from the object that is known and problematizes the assumption that there can be a universal scientific language that allows the external world to be described in a detached manner (Campbell, 2007 ). Challenging the distinctions between the subjective and the objective, fact and value, they suggest that our conceptions of facticity are “culturally constructed” and not given in nature (Gregory, 1989 , p. x).

One of the key contributions of poststructural/postmodern approaches to world politics is their insight on how “many of the problems and issues studied in International Relations are not matters of epistemology and ontology, but of power and authority ; they are struggles to impose authoritative interpretations of international relations” (Devetak, 2005 , p. 167). According to Richard Ashley, the positivist epistemology dominant in the discipline is a particular interpretive method that is expressive of a desire for a “securely bound territory of truth and transparent meaning beyond doubt” (Ashley, 1996 , p. 252). For poststructuralism/postmodernism, the inextricable link between knowledge and power renders production of knowledge not simply “a cognitive … but a normative and political matter” (Devetak, 2005 , p. 162). Instead of taking the social world as given and proceeding with analyses, they “investigate the interrelationship of power and representational practices that elevate one truth over another, that legitimate and subject one identity against another, that make, in short, one discourse matter more than the next” (Der Derian, 2009 , p. 194).

Emphasizing the intimate “relationship between social power and questions of what, and how, we study international relations” (Smith, 2004 , p. 499), poststructural/postmodern perspectives reject the binary division between theory and practice. Instead, they see “theory as practice” (George & Campbell, 1990 , p. 287). Abandoning the view of the modern subject of knowledge that transcends its historicity, contextuality, they start from the assumption that “all observations and all theoretical systems … are part of the world they seek to describe and account for, and have an effect in that world” (Edkins, 2007 , p. 88).

International Relations theory is regarded as a specific, privileged site that contributes to the production and reproduction of dominant interpretations of the world, hence, as constitutive of particular understandings of global life (in terms of the binary logic of sovereignty and anarchy, inside and outside) at the expense of others. In his seminal work, for instance, R. B. J. Walker ( 1995 , p. 5) argues that theories of IR “are less interesting for the substantive explanations they offer than as expressions of the limits of contemporary political imagination” and to that extent can be read “as expressions of an historically specific understanding of the character and location of political life in general.” According to Walker, the concept of sovereignty lies at the heart of this historically specific understanding of organizing political life and, to the extent that IR theories take it as a natural given, they reproduce and reaffirm the limits of modern political imagination.

State and Sovereignty

Ontological inquiries into the constitutive categories of political thought and practice in modernity constitute one of the key themes pursued by poststructural/postmodern theories of international politics. Elaborating the importance of the “turn to ontology,” Michael Dillon writes: “For one cannot say anything about anything that is , without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought … always already carries an ontology sequestered with it” (Dillon, 1999 , p. 97). Consequently, poststructural/postmodern approaches demonstrate a “radical interest in thinking the basic categories of the international system instead of taking them as mechanical givens” (Wæver, 1996 , pp. 169–170). In these inquiries into the “core ontological givens” of IR, the modern state and sovereignty take center stage.

Sovereignty from a poststructural/postmodern perspective refers to three different, yet, interrelated phenomena: as presence in the Derridean sense (standing in for notions such as essence, origin, identity, foundation); as autonomy in the liberal political sense (encapsulated in the free individual will); and as state sovereignty, which is understood “in the context of both an essentialist philosophical perspective and a liberal political position that stresses individual autonomy” (Polat, 1998 , pp. 453–454). In his deconstructive reading of—what he terms as—the paradigm of sovereignty, Ashley ( 1989 ) elaborates on how these three phenomena fuse into each other for both historical and epistemological reasons in modernity. Modernity is understood as a regime of power in the Foucauldian sense as “a multifaceted regime of highly mobile knowledgeable practices—interpretive attitudes and practical dispositions … there to discipline interpretation and conduct” (pp. 260–261). Paradigm of sovereignty refers to “a specific, historically fabricated, widely circulated, and practically effective interpretation of man as sovereign being” (p. 269). Man as a sovereign entity, Ashley argues, has been conceivable on the premise of the metaphysics of presence and logocentric discourse, which posits “an origin, an identical voice … as the sovereign source of truth and meaning” (p. 261). Conception of sovereignty of the reasoning man acts as the ground for the sovereign state’s claim to sovereignty. Situated within the broader discursive and political agenda of modernity, sovereignty becomes the nodal point where reasoning, autonomous Man, who is invested with the capacity and the will to emancipate humankind, fuses with the sovereign political community (the modern state) as the locus of political life. This narrative proscribes a political life amid an anarchical world of Otherness where the discourses of danger work toward domesticating political life by policing the limits, the boundaries of identity, of political possibility and ethical responsibility as it demarcates the self, secure inside, from the other, the dangerous outside (Ashley, 1987 ; Walker, 1995 ).

Following Foucault, poststructural/postmodern theorizing challenges the view of the state standing in opposition to society—treating it as something that is externally imposed—and the understanding of state power as something negative, repressive. They deny the state functional unity or priority over other relations of power (Kalyvas, 2002 ). Refusing to explain state and state power in terms of its inherent, pre-given properties, they see the state as “the contingent outcome of specific practices and the outcome of strategic interplays between diverse social forces within and beyond the state” (Jessop, 2001 , p. 156). Put differently, rather than treating the state as an a priori, ontological given, they investigate how the sovereign state is produced as a cohesive, purposive actor through the ongoing dynamic processes of statecraft. Timothy Mitchell’s ( 2002 ) study of the production of the modern state in Egypt provides an excellent example for Foucauldian approaches to the state. Analyzing a myriad of social practices—from disease prevention to methods of measurement, circulation, and exchange—Mitchell shows the way in which the boundaries between state and society—rather than being externally given, objectively determined—are “internally” produced through “modern techniques of power that make the state appear to be a separate entity that somehow stands outside society” (Mitchell, 1991 , p. 91). State becomes a “structural effect,” a discursive construct with “no coherence, unity and autonomy of its own” (Mitchell, 1991 , pp. 85, 94).

Poststructural/postmodern approaches focus on textual strategies of “writing” the state and thereby “simulating sovereignty” (Weber, 1994 ) through modes of representation (the use of words, signifiers, symbols, and images) which imbue the state with presence, a concrete identity and agency. They explore the ways in which the enactment of various domestic and foreign policies produce particular understandings of the state and constitutes the identity of the self. In his Writing Security , for instance, David Campbell ( 1998 ) draws on the Derridean account of language and Judith Butler’s notion of identity as performative to examine “the way in which the identity of “(the United States of) America” has been written and rewritten through foreign policies operating in its name” (p. x). Starting from the premise that the state has “no ontological status apart from the various acts that constitute its reality,” he examines the way in which “constitution of identity is achieved through the inscription of boundaries that serve to demarcate” an “inside” from an “outside,” a “self” from an “other,” a “domestic” from a “foreign” (p. 9). Always a work in progress and never a finished product, the state is thus constituted through practices that code and discipline boundaries and produce identity.

While the relation between identity and foreign policy constitutes an important area of investigation, there is no uniform understanding of the representation of difference, of the other, the outside in the constitution of the self, the identity, the inside. For instance, for scholars like Campbell, discourses of danger are central to securing state identity and legitimizing state power. On this reading, modern statecraft comprises political practices that seek to subdue resistance and eliminate all that is foreign/different/dangerous. In contrast, other scholars argue that representations of the other does not necessarily translate into construction of difference as danger and argue that difference between self and other can take different forms (Hansen, 2006 ; Wæver, 2002 ). Shifting the focus away from geopolitical forms of othering between the inside and the outside, yet others focus on the temporal forms of othering in the constitution of the self (Diez, 2004 ).

Violence, War

Poststructuralism/postmodernism problematize the relations between violence and politics, force and law that are found in hegemonic accounts of world politics. While Realist accounts project violence to the anarchical realm outside and figure it as a strategical instrument deployed to advance state interest in an arena constantly prone to violence, Liberal international theory commits itself to the possibility of eliminating violence from political life through the development of liberal institutions and practices globally (Frazer & Hutchings, 2011 ). In contrast, poststructural/postmodern approaches suggest that being less an antidote to violence as it is generally supposed, modern political reason is itself implicated in the violence it is expected to cure (Campbell & Dillon, 1993 ). Making central the idea that violence is constitutive of modern subjectivity and modern political freedom is a lethal affair (Dillon, 2013 ), they examine strategic and security discourses to expose the ways in which the modern state constitutes political life as militarized life (Campbell, 1998 ; Chaloupka, 1992 ; Klein, 1994 ).

Informing these analyses is the idea that politics in modernity derives from an ontology of violence occasioned by a certain understanding of political subjectivity. Campbell and Dillon ( 1993 ) suggest that modernity’s political subject—sovereign man, sovereign state—is a violent subject by constitution. On the one hand, taking violence as the ultimo ratio of politics, the basic subject of modern political thought is posited as the subject of violence. On the other hand, the subject of modern politics—the autonomous reasoning subject—is a violent political subject whose features, according to modern political thought, bring him into conflict with other men. Given that the political subject of violence is a reasoning subject, the complicity of reason in the violence of the political subject cannot be elided. What this diagnosis implies is that modern political reason not only cannot provide adequate tools to understand and address political violence, but that as a rationality of rule it is not immune to it. This paradoxical character of modernity acts as the premise for poststructural/postmodern engagements with two traditional problems in the discipline such as security and war.

An important strand of investigation has been developed by scholars, who draw on Foucault and rearticulate the problem of achieving peace and security not merely as a political project to overcome insecurity, but as a political method to govern life (Burke, 2007 ; Dillon, 1996 ; Dillon & Neal, 2008 ). Rather than being an objective condition to be addressed and remedied through state action in order to safeguard its subjects, security is revealed as a form of political subjection, as a political technology of rule. In her analysis of food crisis and the problem of hunger, Jenny Edkins elaborates the ways in politics in modernity devoted to securing life is tantamount to the technologization and hence de-politicization of politics (Edkins, 2000 ). Her analysis reveals the ways in which the framing of famine through discourses of modernity de-politicizes hunger and how it should be combated by prioritizing technical solutions through abstract analysis and the formulation of general principles. Such an approach merely reinstates and reproduces the form of politics that has produced the famine in the first place. Mark Duffield’s ( 2007 ) study on the intersection between contemporary politics of development and security resonates with Edkins’s conclusion as it suggests that the modern faith in development and progress becomes part of the problem itself.

Poststructural/postmodern investigations also take up the problem of war and use of force in IR, as they examine contemporary forms of warfare (Der Derian, 1990 , 2009 ; Glezos, 2012 ). Drawing on Paul Virilio, for instance, James Der Derian ( 1990 ) places new technologies of simulation, surveillance, and speed at the center of his analysis and investigates the way in which these new forces and the discursive practices surrounding them transform the nature of international relation and it central practice—war. According to Der Derian, new technological practices give way to novel forms of mediation between states through the discursive power of chronopolitics and technostrategy. Chronopolitics is used to capture the displacement of geography/spatial determination by chronology (overtaking of space by pace) whereas technostrategy refers to the ways in which transformations in technology configure the way wars are fought and the stakes entailed in war-making. The postmodern practices of war, Der Derian argues, transform from being spatial to being temporal and perceptual phenomena.

Rather than focusing on the ways in which technological innovations transform warfare, Julian Reid ( 2006 ) draws on Foucault to develop a biopolitical critique of the contemporary War on Terror. According to Reid, the modern liberal project of solving the problem of war entails exercising power over life directly. Liberal regimes root out war internally by pacifying their subjects through disciplinary practices and “making the life of their societies into … logistical life,” which he defines as “a life lived under the duress of the command to be efficient” (p. 13). Through biopower, they mobilize populations to wage war in the name of life defined as such, as in the case of The War on Terror. The liberal desire for peace, he argues, “is a polemological and ultimately terrorising project which can only proceed on the basis of most resentful violence against life” (p. 124).

On Value and Development

In addition to central themes and concepts of IR such as state, sovereignty, and war, poststructural/postmodern insights and discourse analysis are used in studies on international political economy (IPE) as well. At the center of poststructural/postmodern criticism of mainstream IPE is the latter’s presupposition of “a prediscursive economic materiality”—an economy conceived as a realm that is constituted outside of practices of representation, culture, ideas, and identities (De Goede, 2003 , p. 80). Challenging such a separation between the “real” and the “ideal,” such criticism makes politics of representation, performativity, and dissent central to analyses of socioeconomic relations in modern capitalism. While these studies focus on traditional themes, problematics, objects, and subjects of IPE (such as production, finance, exchange, firms, states, socioeconomic classes), by challenging rationalist IPE (Amin & Palan, 2001 ) they also extend the analytical field of IPE as they bring into critical purview the intersections between politics of security and economic practices (Amoore, 2013 ; Amoore & De Goede, 2008 ; Cooper, 2008 ; De Goede, 2004 ). These studies have encouraged the development of cultural political economy as a new field of study.

Scholars working within the framework of poststructural/postmodern approaches to IPE highlight three themes that weave this scholarship together (De Goede, 2006 ). One of those themes is the politicization of what is otherwise represented as technical knowledge. Undergirding this theme is a concern with the way in which “power operate[s] … within specific contexts to stabilize—with a tendency to normalize and depoliticize—particular discourses and their effects?” (Peterson, 2006 ). A second theme is the problematization of interest and agency by de-centering the sovereign, rational actor as the subject of IPE (De Goede, 2006 ). In their analysis of “libidinal political economy,” for instance, Gammon and Palan ( 2006 ) use Freudian insights to offer a fragmented subject driven by conflictual internal dynamics. Finally, politics of dissent and resistance constitute a third theme in poststructural/postmodern approaches to political economy. They displace a totalizing understanding of capital with a conception that sees the latter as “a performative practice in need of constant articulation and reiteration” (De Goede, 2006 ). Contesting the discursive coherence of capital and focusing on how it is produced and reproduced in everyday life, they suggest that the constant need for its re-enunciation opens up possibilities for resistance and subversion (Davies, 2006 ; Gibson-Graham, 2006 ).

In a related field, poststructural/postmodern approaches have also challenged predominant conceptions of the idea of development and the ontological, epistemological assumptions informing theories of modernization and capitalist development (Crush, 1995 ). Influenced by poststructural/postmodern understandings of the power/knowledge nexus, critique of the Cartesian subject, and the problematization of metanarratives, they conceptualize “development as a discourse … as a modernist regime of knowledge and disciplinary power” (Crush, 1995 , p. xiii). They offer a “post-development” agenda that attends to imagining “a new domain which … leaves behind the imaginary of development, and transcends development’s dependence on Western modernity and historicity” (Escobar, 1992 , p. 21). More recently, scholars have explored the entanglement of the question of climate change with the desire for capitalist development in Third World countries and global inequities (Chakrabarty, 2018 ).

Thinking at the Limits

Poststructuralist/postmodern approaches attempt to articulate a different political imaginary and develop an alternative conceptual language to think the International beyond the confines of the paradigm of sovereignty, the modern subject and a politics devoted to securing that subject—a politics that is premised on a desire for identity, order, unity. Through these alternative conceptions, they challenge both state-centric, communitarian visions, and cosmopolitan arguments (Lawler, 2008 ).

Community, Resistance, Democracy

Suggesting that contemporary “spatiotemporal processes that are radically at odds with the resolution expressed by the principle of state sovereignty” (Walker, 1995 , p. 155) some scholars highlight the need to rethink the questions of democracy and political community beyond the paradigm of sovereignty. In the context of “centrifugal forces” of globalization, for Connolly ( 1991 ), the territorial state’s “tight grip over public definitions of democratic accountability, danger, and security” renders it “a potential carrier of virulent nationalism” (p. 463). Drawing on Nietzsche and moving beyond foundational conceptions of ethico-political life, he calls for the cultivation of a different political ethos. Ethos refers to the “relational dispositions of people,” to the customs, priorities, habits, and norms that animate political institutions, organizations, and practices (Connolly, 2005 , p. 135). Connolly argues for a different “democratic imaginary” that takes as its premise an “ethos of pluralization” that exceeds the territorial boundaries of the state.

Rearticulating the contemporary political impasse less as a problem stemming from territorial definitions of liberal democracy and more as a problem ensuing from the globalization of liberal regimes, other scholars raise the question of “how we might rethink and pursue a politics of life” (Reid, 2006 , p. 63) beyond liberal biopolitics. Affirming that “there is more to life than … ongoing survival,” Evans and Reid ( 2014 ) note that changing the given order of things means the death of what exists so as to make way to what is to come. As they explain, “we cannot even conceive of different worlds if we cannot come to terms with the death and extinction of this one” (p. 170). Reid ( 2014 ) elaborates such a politics by contextualizing it in relation to two interrelated issues (climate change and migration) high on the global political agenda, perceived as major threats to political stability and security. The study exposes the way in which fears of climate-induced migration are encouraging and contributing to the implementation of methods of population control, including sterilization of the illiterate poor. Ultimately, what informs these regimes of security to govern migration is the “fear of rupture that portends in the new,” the fear that the migrant signals the end of the existing constitution of society (Reid, 2014 , p. 204). Instead, Reid (p. 205) elaborates a different political imaginary that draws on “a celebration of the beauty that emerges through the monstrous mixing of life across the climatic boundaries” and offers a way to imagine the emergence of new life forms, of new ways of being, of worlds that would otherwise be blocked by securitizing, de-politicizing, catastrophic imaginaries.

Politics of Ethics

An important strand of inquiry pursued by poststructuralist/postmodern approaches concerns the question ethics in world politics and how the ethical may be conceptualized beyond a moral singularity. Working with nonfoundationalist, immanent framework—without “resort[ing] to external authorities or transcendental values” (Der Derian, 2009 , p. 193), they register the way in which the ethical is always already bound up with the political. In the words of Zehfuss ( 2009 , p. 98), “[i]t is impossible to understand ethics—what we should do what is right—as separate from questions of politics, not least the question of how we come to believe that particular responses to these questions are more valid than others.” The traditional understanding of ethics (the notion that ethics concerns generating abstract moral codes or universal rules of conduct to mediate relations among autonomous, preconstituted moral agents) is replaced with the investigation of political ethos—forms of life, subjectivity, and identity—called forth by particular conceptions of the political. “The ethics of post-structuralism,” Der Derian ( 2009 , p. 194) notes, “is located in and through the construction of subjectivity.” They reconceptualize ethics, politics, and the international by unsettling the notion of a secure self—the sovereign reasoning subject—and formulate ethics in terms of an inescapable relation between self and the Other. Recovery of the ethical is intimately and inescapably bound up with the recovery of the political. Politics does not concern applying predefined rules, a question of arithmetic, of techno-politics. The political, it is argued, is not a question of the “singular what” but a question of “a plural ‘how’” (Dillon, 1996 , p. 65). Put differently, the political is conceptualized as a way of being in the world where the life/being human is cast as a verb—a way of being, as a “person as such” (Edkins, 2011 ) rather than a noun—an entity that can be enumerated, categorized.

At the center of poststructuralism/postmodernism’s critique of the dominant conception of ethics is the modern subject (the individual in the domestic realm, the state in the international realm), which the latter take as the ethical agent. The limit of the modern rational subject—sovereign entities of politics—mark the boundaries of identity from difference, inside from the outside, order from anarchy. When the subject of ethics is understood as a complete, fully constituted self, coexistence is conceptualized and articulated through “a logic of composition” (Odysseos, 2007 ). This logic reduces coexistence to the copresence of previously self-sufficient, nonrelational, autonomous entities (sovereign states, individuals, substate groups). “The decisive effect of the logic of composition is thus the restriction of relationality to mere co-presence of pre-constituted entities” (p. xxvii). Positing subjects as simultaneously being present and not coexisting, the logic of copresence incorporates coexistence as “an after-thought,” as “extrinsic to the subject,” effacing the constitutive role of Otherness. Effacement of heteronomy—the role of the Other in the formation of the self—puts in place a particular ethos of relating to the other: an ethos of survival through which the other is encountered in narratives of a pre-socially dangerous Hobbesian world. Within this schema, responsibility gets cast as something pertaining merely to the survival of the self.

Rather than taking boundaries that mark the limit of sovereign community and identity as given, poststructuralist scholars focus on the limit—the “inter,” in-between, relationality—and examine how it operates as marker of difference. The limit is rearticulated as a site that exposes what is effaced by modern subjectivity: a sense of selfhood that is always already relational, a self that is constituted by Otherness. Erasing the conceptual distinction between self and Other brings into view the radical interdependence of being (Campbell & Dillon, 1993 ; Zehfuss, 2007 ). The premise for such a move is the conception of ontological difference as the defining feature of being human. It is a difference that renders human existence, not just a multiplicity of human subjects (subjects such as the nation, class, race, religion, etc.), but a plurality “[i]nstalled within the being of every human being” (Dillon, 1999 , p. 114). Such accounts displace the question of difference and the limit from the realm of inter—that is, difference between sovereign subjects (individuals or states)—to an account of difference that is intra—that is, pertaining to the self as such. The Other, which inhabits the self, it is argued, can never be folded into the self and thereby prevents the human from ever being at home with itself. In short, the question of the limit is reconfigured from being a question merely about the limit, the boundary between self and other, and their interrelation into the very operation of the relationality itself. What is at stake, poststructural/postmodern interrogations suggest, is not merely the difference between identities and their indebtedness to each other in their constitution, but an unassimilable Otherness—a difference that prevents any identity from ever becoming fully stabilized. Being “inevitably implicated and indeed exposed” (Zehfuss, 2009 , p. 104) renders the form of responding to the other as an inevitable consequence of being-with and therefore constitutes existence as responsibility. Building on these premises, scholars seek to develop a poststructural/postmodern political ethics that is premised on the notion of de-territorialization of responsibility, asserting not only the obligation to respond to conflicts, to suffering to the other, but, more importantly, the urgent need to reflect upon what it means to respond (Campbell, 1994 ; Dauphinée, 2007 ; Jabri, 1998 ). They develop a notion of the “ethic of the encounter” that “evokes radical hospitality and a welcoming of the other despite the risks to the security of the self and the self’s identity” (Lawler, 2008 ).

Critical Aesthetics

Rather than taking for granted the relationship between the represented and its representation as in most IR scholarship, poststructural/postmodern approaches assert the unbridgeable gap between the two and locate the political in that very gap (Bleiker, 2008 ). Shifting the focus away from mimetic to aesthetic forms of representation, they make images, narratives, sounds, literature, visual art, cinema, performative arts central to their investigations (Bleiker, 2008 ; Edkins & Kear, 2013 ; Opondo & Shapiro, 2011 ; Shapiro, 2009 , 2010 ). Inquiries in this regard range from forms of visualization at work in contemporary security practices” (Amoore, 2009 ) to the “musical modulations” of political thought (Whitehall, 2006 ).

Poststructural/postmodern concern with representation in world politics is very much entangled with questions of scholarly responsibility: How does one relate to those one writes about and makes present? What kind of knowledge one produces about those one represents? (Zehfuss, 2013 ). For instance, rather than treating war as a matter of allegedly value-neutral analyses, poststructural/postmodern writings make the question of how one narrates war central to their investigations. They grapple with the relation between writing on war, responsibility, accountability (Jabri, 2007 ; Steele, 2013 ) and experiment with different forms of writing war—such as storytelling—and push the boundaries of what a scholarly engagement with war and security—beyond a pretense to scientific objectivity—might mean (Dauphinée, 2007 ; Hozic, 2015 ).

The critical impulse in these investigations into aesthetics is succinctly captured by Michael Shapiro ( 2013 ) who elaborates on the meaning of critical thinking. Following Jacques Ranciére’s conception of “critical artistic practices,” these interventions seek to disrupt the established relations between the sayable and the visible. Through “juxtapositions that unbind what are ordinarily presumed to belong together” critical aesthetics seeks not only “to challenge institutionalized ways of reproducing and understanding phenomena,” but also “to create the conditions of possibility for imagining alternative worlds” (p. xv).

Future Directions

Almost two and a half decades after “dissident voices” made their first collective intervention into disciplinary debates with the special issue of the International Studies Quarterly , poststructural/postmodern investigations entertain a degree of reception today than what could have possibly been foreseen at the time. New and cutting edge research are being published in prominent journals of the field such as International Political Sociology , Society and Space , Security Dialogue , and Review of International Studies while the number of panels at major conferences, the number of graduate students versed in the poststructural/postmodern perspectives increase by the day. Proving the falsity of alleged irrelevance of poststructural/postmodern IR to empirical analyses and policy questions, there is a constantly growing literature that examine a wide range of topics and issues pertaining to world politics both at conceptual and empirical levels: ranging from questions of time and temporality to the meaning and effects of bordering practices, from contemporary global security technologies to humanitarian interventions and international finance (DeGoede, 2005 ; Lobo-Guerrero, 2011 ; Lundborg, 2012 ; Steele, 2013 ; Vaughan-Williams, 2009 ).

Opening new avenues of research for poststructural/postmodern IR, the new materialism debates within critical social theory and political philosophy has sparked new and fruitful conversations, which carry important implications for future directions. Rather than treating matter as passive, raw, inert, brute stuff, new materialism asserts the philosophical and political need to take seriously the “vitality of non-human bodies” (Bennett, 2010 ). De-centering the human, attending to the agency of non-human objects, focusing on human/non-human interactions has important implications about issues that are immediate policy concern—such as the global ecological crisis, uncertainties, and anxieties affected by the Anthropocene, globally circulating viruses, and health epidemics. The impact of these conversations reach beyond policy issues however, as they raise questions that carry the potential to recast an anthropocentric discipline such as IR. What would an IR beyond the human look like? How would it a post-human perspective recast the structure–agency problem? How would it alter our conceptions of security or war? What would it mean to speak of cosmopolitanism, democracy, and resistance? These and other questions are increasingly being taken up by poststructural/postmodern scholars (Connolly, 2013 ; Cudworth & Hobden, 2011 , 2015 ; Mitchell, 2014 ) In addition to opening up new avenues of research by reframing central questions of world politics, new materialism debates also carry important implications for poststructural/postmodern IR to the extent that it paves the way to develop more robust understanding of discourse and text by dismantling the language and matter binary altogether (Lundborg & Vaughan-Williams, 2015 ).

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Critical international relations is both firmly established and rapidly expanding, and this Handbook offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary research. It affords insights into exciting developments, more challenging issues and less prominent topics, examining debates around questions of imperialism, race, gender, ethics and aesthetics, and offering both an overview of the existing state of critical international politics and an agenda-setting collection that highlights emerging areas and fosters future research. Sections cover: critique and the discipline; relations beyond humanity; art and narrative; war, religion and security; otherness and diplomacy; spaces and times; resistance; and embodiment and intimacy. An international group of expert scholars, whose contributions are commissioned for the volume, provide chapters that facilitate teaching at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level, inspire new generations of researchers in the field and promote collaboration, cross-fertilisation and inspiration across sub-fields often treated separately, such as feminism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism. The volume sees these strands as complementary not contradictory, and emphasises their shared political goals, shared theoretical resources and complementary empirical practices. Each chapter offers specific, focused, in-depth analysis that complements and exemplifies the broader coverage, making this Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations essential reading for all students and scholars of international relations.

Jenny Edkins is Professor of Politics at The University of Manchester. She taught previously at Aberystwyth University and the Open University. Her monographs include Face Politics (2015), Missing: Persons and Politics (2011), Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003) and Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (2000). Her most recent book, Change and the Politics of Certainty, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. In addition to her academic writing, she explores fiction, autobiography and other literary forms. She is engaged in several collaborative ventures, including the Gregynog Ideas Lab and the highly-regarded Routledge book series Interventions.

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Thinking International Relations Differently

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A host of voices has risen to challenge Western core dominance of the field of International Relations (IR), and yet, intellectual production about world politics continues to be highly skewed. This book is the second volume in a trilogy of titles that tries to put the "international" back into IR by showing how knowledge is actually produced around the world.

The book examines how concepts that are central to the analysis of international relations are conceived in diverse parts of the world, both within the disciplinary boundaries of IR and beyond them. Adopting a thematic structure, scholars from around the world issues that include security, the state, authority and sovereignty, globalization, secularism and religion, and the "international" - an idea that is central to discourses about world politics but which, in given geocultural locations, does not necessarily look the same.

By mapping global variation in the concepts used by scholars to think about international relations, the work brings to light important differences in non-Western approaches and the potential implications of such differences for the IR discipline and the study of world politics in general. This is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about the history, development and future of International Relations.

Chapter 1 | 24 pages, introduction, part a | 90 pages, chapter 2 | 21 pages, security in the arab world and turkey, chapter 3 | 24 pages, aberystwyth, paris, copenhagen, chapter 4 | 20 pages, security theorizing in china, chapter 5 | 23 pages, no place for theory, part b | 66 pages, state, sovereignty and authority, chapter 6 | 22 pages, the state of the african state and politics, chapter 7 | 22 pages, contextualizing rule in south asia 1, chapter 8 | 20 pages, the latin american nation-state and the international, part c | 69 pages, globalization, chapter 9 | 22 pages, reading the global in the absence of africa, chapter 10 | 23 pages, chapter 11 | 22 pages, arab scholars' take on globalization, part d | 48 pages, secularism and religion, chapter 12 | 22 pages, religion, secularism and the state in southeast asia, chapter 13 | 24 pages, western secularisms, part e | 43 pages, the international, chapter 14 | 21 pages, contrived boundaries, kinship and ubuntu, chapter 15 | 20 pages, social science research and engagement in pakistan.

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Essential Skills for a Career in International Relations

Communication

A lucrative career in international relations requires a core set of fundamental skills that can help an individual to nurture positive relationships in order to advance overarching organizational goals. The breadth of the international relations profession exposes individuals to working with foreign nations across cultural and political divides, so professionals working in the field must possess these critical skills in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Careers in international relations usually involve extensive interaction with government officials, organization leaders, staff members and the public. To make sure that messages are conveyed correctly to all involved parties, international relations professionals must maintain excellent communication skills. This competency includes face-to-face conversational skills like body language, proper listening, and assertive expression as well as ensuring that messages are delivered clearly and concisely through measured and astute speech. Communication is done through other mediums, like video conference, text, or phone conversation must exhibit similar competencies, commanding respect and conveying thoughts clearly and confidently. Practicing international relations professionals agree that proper communication is a crucial aspect of their work, as they regularly rely on conversation and other forms of communication to develop agreeable solutions to international issues.

Cross-Cultural Management

Managing relationships across cultures can be challenging for inexperienced international relations professionals. A nation’s cultural perspectives and attributes—ranging from social values to preferred forms of communication—can have a profound influence on how that nation’s diplomats and politicians create and shape its international policies. So, when different nations come together to pursue an international effort or discussion, cultural differences like opposing political values, cognitive structures and even historical or cultural expectations can inhibit the success of cross-cultural communication. Professionals in international relations must develop an understanding of cultural differences in the areas they work and how individuals in these cultures might respond to certain actions or communication efforts in order to facilitate successful negotiations.

There are several factors to consider with cross-cultural negotiations, particularly the physical environment of each nation, their history, religious practices and common family structures. For example, the environment in which someone was raised may demand additional empathy, as it may dictate what a person believes to be an acceptable method of handling certain issues, like women’s rights or military spending. Likewise, showing respect toward a person’s religious background is highly important for international relations leaders, as people often allow their faith to influence the decisions they make in both their personal and professional lives. As these different cultural factors can create expectations that will define what a colleague, team member or authority figure deems acceptable behavior, international relations professionals need to develop cross-cultural management skills to help achieve cooperation and collaboration between people from many different cultures and nationalities.

Flexibility

As an international relations career often requires professionals to make hard decisions both privately and professionally, flexibility is a crucial skill needed for success in the field. Professional concerns that are most likely to require flexibility are collaborative efforts that demand a compromise between different communities, organizations or governments because agreements made without proper consideration risk damaging relationships. For example, foreign policy cannot be written to accommodate every individual need of the involved parties, so international relations professionals must be open-minded and flexible when negotiating such policies in order to secure the most desirable outcome.

Being an international relations professional also demands flexibility on decisions made in an individual’s private life. Some people struggle with uprooting their lives to relocate abroad for an international relations assignment, even more so if their family is included in the transition. While not every international relations position requires relocation, individuals pursuing this industry should remain flexible and be prepared to make significant life changes when the need arises.

Much like communication, teamwork is a necessity in an international relations career. There are often many parties involved in decisions being made at an international level, including government officials, organization leaders, diplomats and other relevant international relations professionals. In the case of international trade agreements, international relations professionals among governments must collaborate with foreign policymakers to identify the most reasonable regulations to place upon a particular area of international trade. Emphasizing teamwork as a core professional skill can allow those working in international relations to function as a conduit, transferring ideas smoothly and ensuring that their team can achieve their government’s or organization’s goals.

Analytical skills improve an international relations professional’s ability to solve problems, make informed decisions and process information. These skills aren’t only developed in the workplace; people can increase their analytical skills by identifying patterns in everyday life, making observations about their surroundings, investigating new information, and interpreting specific data. As governmental and global corporate decisions take into account all relevant data, strengthening one’s analytical skills can fast-track an international relations professional’s career, as an employee who is highly analytical can solve problems quickly and efficiently accomplish objectives. Areas of analysis that can most benefit someone working in an international relations capacity is creativity, data analysis, and critical thinking.

Creativity allows the analytical mind to come up with innovative solutions to complex problems. Creative international relations professionals can lead their teams to unorthodox strategies that can accomplish organizational goals.
Thorough data analysis skills are a requirement, as all acting parties, including international relations professionals themselves, will benefit from having access to comparative data that may be essential to making a well-informed diplomatic decision.
Critical thinking is used to evaluate information thoroughly and leverage the insight gained in order to make an informed decision. Decisions that will impact multiple nations should be made with as much consideration as possible, making critical thinking an invaluable component of an international relations professional’s analytical skill set.

Negotiation

Skills in negotiation are also essential in the international relations profession and require a balance between holding an organization’s stance and shifting to accommodate the needs of other parties. The ability to understand what is most important to other negotiating parties and leverage this knowledge can assist professionals with negotiating outcomes that benefit multiple parties. This requires the fortitude to take the lead in negotiations when appropriate and to listen and analyze details when others lead negotiations. Compromise is a key element of successful negotiations, and international relations professionals must often compromise on certain points of contention in order to come to an agreement. This requires the ability to strategize based on a list of priorities, separating potential points of compromise from issues that are less comparable for an employer’s interests.

Experienced negotiators in international relations should also possess critical thinking ability to discern when an agreement is not feasible. At times, the process of international negotiations may not result in an agreement beneficial to two or more parties. Professionals must understand when walking away from an agreement will provide a better outcome.

A master’s degree in international relations could lead to many different areas of employment, particularly in diplomatic roles, international business positions and media correspondence. The nature of these careers all demands that an individual be able to quickly make choices without needing constant direct supervision. For instance, an international relations professional that is tasked with managing an organization’s international business relationships may be relied on to leverage their diplomatic skills to find and develop international partnerships without extensive executive support. Having a reasonable sense of autonomy can inspire professionals to improve their decision-making and stimulate creativity, making autonomy a core skill that professionals within the field should develop and strengthen, especially as they may find themselves in situations where they need to act independently to solve issues abroad.

In the highly dynamic field of international relations, it is vital to enhance and develop a specialized skill set through a combination of classroom learning and real-life work experiences. Today’s international relations professionals must constantly adapt to change and be willing to refine their skill set in order to achieve their professional goals.

As the nation’s oldest private military college, Norwich University has been a leader in innovative education since 1819. Through its online programs, Norwich delivers relevant and applicable curricula that allow its students to make a positive impact on their places of work and their communities.

Our online Master of Arts in International Relations program offers a curriculum that evolves with current events to help you face the future of international affairs. Norwich University’s master’s degree in international relations covers many subjects to give you a look at the internal workings of international players, examine the role of state and non-state actors on the global stage, and explore different schools of thought. You can further strengthen your knowledge by choosing one of five concentrations in International Security, National Security, International Development, Cyber Diplomacy, or Regions of the World.

No. 5 Best Master’s Degree For Jobs: International Relations , Forbes

Monitoring and Evaluation: an insiders guide to the skills you’ll need , The Guardian

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Critical Theory: International Relations' Engagement With the Frankfurt
Critical International Relations theory (CIRT) is not only an academic approach but also an emancipatory project committed to the formation of a more equal and just world. ... Structural critical theory is the other well-known line of critical thinking in IR that provides a more materialist and social-structural understanding of critical theory ...
Introducing Critical Theory in International Relations
Critical theory assumes an active role in the betterment of human affairs according to the potential for freedom inherent in modernity and the identification of political alternatives at hand in the globalising society and the historical process bringing it into being. Find out more about this, and many other, International Relations theories ...
Critical thinking: Key to success in an MA International Relations
Why critical thinking is crucial for an MA in International Relations Interpreting complex issues . International relations is a complex and ever-evolving field, with myriad factors at play. Critical thinking skills are crucial for students to navigate and interpret the vast amount of information and perspectives presented to them.
Critical Theory of International Relations
In the 1980s, Jürgen Habermas's communicative action theory would provide a so-called critical turn in Frankfurt school critical theory by resituating reason and social action in linguistics. It was during this time that international relations (IR) theorists would draw on Habermas's theory and that of other critical theorists to critique ...
From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and
From its inception, Critical international theory has almost by definition taken up the mantle of progressive politics. 1 Inspired by Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, early "critical" thinking distinguished itself from conservative realist approaches that failed to countenance the possibility of progressive change. Similarly, Habermasian ...
Critical Theory
Specifically, a critical theory of international relations examines "the problem of community," understood as how the members of bounded communities (states) determine the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in the international system (Linklater 1992). This project has three components, a normative inquiry into the meaning of emancipation ...
Challenging Hegemonic Paradigms and Practices: Critical Thinking and
I argue in this paper that one possible way of addressing the critical issue of preparing students for their future role as citizens in a global society is to integrate active learning exercises such as case studies and problem-based learning scenarios that focus on international issues and events and significant global conditions.
Crisis and Critique: Critical International Theory Today
The chapter then elaborates the various ways critical international theorists have conceived emancipation and political transformation. The normative, sociological, and praxeological dimensions of critical international theory are considered in relation to the emancipatory rethinking and restructuring of international relations.
Science for Critique? Doing Critical International Relations in a
What is "critical" international relations (IR)? In a world where long-standing political struggles (e.g., on militarization, gender, race, and class) intersect with previously underestimated issues and actors (e.g., climate change and migration, viruses, and new technologies), it is difficult to locate a homogeneous political agenda within critical scholarship.
Facing human interconnections: thinking International Relations into
In this Special Issue, we take up the challenge of thinking into the future of IR. However, our aim is not to predict the future of the international order or the issues that will define the nature and practices of international politics.Rather, we ask how we might 'hold things together' conceptually and empirically as we face an emerging and complex array of national, international ...
Critical Imaginations in International Relations
This exciting new text brings together in one volume an overview of the many reflections on how we might address the problems and limitations of a state-centred approach in the discipline of International Relations (IR). The book is structured into chapters on key concepts, with each providing an introduction to the concept for those new to the ...
Linklater and Critical International Relations Theory
Linklater has remained an important presence in the critical study of international politics ever since. His work, which spans across more than three decades, constitutes the most extensive and cogent attempt to articulate a Critical IR Theory (CIRT) that is inspired by the emancipatory principles of the Frankfurt School (Brincat, 2013 ).
Emancipatory International Relations
This book provides an in-depth critical study of this genre of theorizing that he names 'Emancipatory International Relations'. Spegele develops a framework to help the reader understand both the differences and commonalities in modernist and postmodernist emancipatory thinking in International Relations.
Poststructuralism and Postmodernism in International Relations
Instead, it is better described as "a critical attitude" that focuses on the question of representation and explores the ways in which dominant framings of world politics produce and reproduce relations of power: how they legitimate certain forms of action while marginalizing other ways of being, thinking, and acting.
Critical Theory in International Relations and Security Studies
This book provides 'first-hand' interviews with some of the pioneers of Critical Theory in the fields of International Relations Theory and Security Studies. The interviews are combined innovatively with reflective essays to create an engaging and accessible discussion of the legacy and challenges of critical thinking.
Emancipatory International Relations: Critical Thinking in
This book provides an in-depth critical study of this genre of theorizing that he names 'Emancipatory International Relations'. Spegele develops a framework to help the reader understand both the differences and commonalities in modernist and postmodernist emancipatory thinking in International Relations. He critically analyzes modernist ...
Critical Imaginations in International Relations
Drawing together some of the key thinkers in the field of critical International Relations and including both established and emerging academics located in Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, this book is a key resource for students and scholars alike. ... 'Here is a good place to start digging into today's fresh, innovative thinking ...
Critical international relations theory
Critical international relations theory is a diverse set of schools of thought in international relations (IR) that have criticized the theoretical, meta-theoretical and/or political status quo, both in IR theory and in international politics more broadly - from positivist as well as postpositivist positions. Positivist critiques include Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches and certain ...
Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations
Critical international relations is both firmly established and rapidly expanding, and this Handbook offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary research. It affords insights into exciting developments, more challenging issues and less prominent topics, examining debates around questions of imperialism, race, gender, ethics and aesthetics, and offering both an overview of the existing state ...
Bridging critical thinking and transformative learning: The role of
In recent decades, approaches to critical thinking have generally taken a practical turn, pivoting away from more abstract accounts - such as emphasizing the logical relations that hold between statements (Ennis, 1964) - and moving toward an emphasis on belief and action.According to the definition that Robert Ennis (2018) has been advocating for the last few decades, critical thinking is ...
Thinking International Relations Differently
The book examines how concepts that are central to the analysis of international relations are conceived in diverse parts of the world, both within the disciplinary boundaries of IR and beyond them. Adopting a thematic structure, scholars from around the world issues that include security, the state, authority and sovereignty, globalization ...
Essential Skills for a Career in International Relations
Critical thinking is used to evaluate information thoroughly and leverage the insight gained in order to make an informed decision. Decisions that will impact multiple nations should be made with as much consideration as possible, making critical thinking an invaluable component of an international relations professional's analytical skill set.
The Importance Of Critical Thinking In International Relations
Ultimately, Critical thinking and worldviews are vital in IR because it allows policy makers to identify issues and apply key international relations concepts to a given situation, thus producing a solution. International relations is a complex field that requires strong critical thinking skills.

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Critical thinking: Key to success in an MA International Relations

Introduction

Why critical thinking is crucial for an MA in International Relations

Examining different perspectives

Formulating informed opinions and strategies

How to develop critical thinking skills

Seek out diverse perspectives

Practice active listening

Conclusion

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Critical Theory of International Relations by Steven C. Roach LAST REVIEWED: 29 May 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 29 May 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0095

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Linklater and Critical International Relations Theory

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Introduction

Disciplinary Context of the Poststructural/Postmodern Turn

Major Themes and Concepts of Poststructural/Postmodern Thought

Subject and Subjectivity

Text, Representation

Deconstruction

Poststructural/Postmodern Approaches in IR

State and Sovereignty

Violence, War

On Value and Development

Thinking at the Limits

Community, Resistance, Democracy

Politics of Ethics

Critical Aesthetics

Future Directions

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Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations

Description

Table of Contents

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Essential Skills for a Career in International Relations

Communication

Cross-Cultural Management

Flexibility

Negotiation

Explore Norwich University

Future Leader Camp

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