Postmodernism & IR: How Do Postmodernists Analyse International Relations?

By Justin

 

Attempts to define the strand of postmodern theory in the field of contemporary international relations are often overwhelmed by the challenge of having ‘to make intelligible some of the different problematique, focii, and theoretical strategies’ [1]. As opposed to the analyses of traditional theoretical strands, which attempt to represent their approach as a coherent and unified theory, any analysis of the postmodern must be prepared to navigate what Lapid describes as a ‘confusing array of only remotely related philosophical articulations,’[2] which shelter beneath the ‘rather loosely patched-up umbrella’[3] of postmodernity. While there may be recursive images and characteristics, isolating ‘a clear definition of postmodernism that will meet with general agreement is’ – according to Devetak – ‘precisely what is not possible.’[4] Attempts to formulate a totalizing analysis of that which constitutes the postmodern are rendered impossible by postmodernity’s rejection of the very metanarratives that would be integral to such an analysis. Other than ‘an incredulity towards metanarratives’[5], and a preoccupation with ‘deconstructing and dis-trusting any account of human life that claims to have direct access to ‘the truth”[6], there is no real unifying thread underlying postmodern thought. As such, postmodern international theory lacks the navel-gazing and ongoing self-analysis which appears to be firmly embedded in the dominant discourses of other, more state-centric traditions.

Walker claims that postmodern international theory can be decoupled from its corresponding literary, philosophical, and visual manifestations. He believes that, unlike other disciplines, international relations is ‘explicitly concerned with the politics of boundaries … [seeking] to explain and offer advice about the security and transgression of borders between established forms of order and community inside and the realm of either danger (insecurity, war) or a more universalistically conceived humanity (peace, world politics) outside.’7 Der Derian agrees that international relations as a discipline is particularly conducive to postmodern approaches. It seems almost as though the international stage is a lens for those phenomena that best reveal the shortcomings of those theories the socio-political based in overarching metanarratives. In Der Derian’s opinion, ‘the complexity, ambivalence, and indeterminacy of human relations, magnified, mediated, and estranged in the international arena, make it all the more evident why a single … theory cannot explain the workings of international relations.’[8]

With no monolith of postmodern orthodoxy dominating the landscape, the means of pursuing post-modern analysis are incredibly varied; the result of a widespread appropriation of ideas and approaches from other disciplines. However, this diverse body of methodology is held together, to an extent, by the idea of deconstruction. In the context of international relations, Constantinou explains how postmodernists ’seek to deconstruct the traditional international relations framework by uncovering the assumptions and artificial construction of political identities’, resisting the tacit deference to ‘those who accredit the sovereign presences of these identities.’[9]

Der Derian believes that deconstruction is one of the only ways one can successfully analyse the international in the face of what he has heralded as a ‘crisis of modernity’; a situation in which

objective reality is displaced by textuality, modes of production and supplanted by modes of information, representation gives way to simulation, imperialism takes a back seat to the Empire of Signs; the legitimacy of tradition suffers on several counts, the unifying belief in progress fragments, and conventional wisdom becomes one of many competing rituals of power used to discipline (international) society. [10]

From Realism to Postmodernism and Beyond

By Steven E. Lobell

 

Book Review: Jennifer Sterling-Folker (eds.), Making Sense of International Relations Theory, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, 2005.

 

Source: International Studies Review, Volume 09, Issue 02, Pages 319-321

 

Jennifer Sterling-Folker’s edited volume, Making Sense of International Relations Theory, contains a masterful discussion and application of the major theoretical approaches in international relations. The book contributes to our understanding of the similarities and differences in the core assumptions of eleven key perspectives in international relations and their variations. By applying varying strands of these approaches to a single case (Kosovo), the book also leaves readers with a tangible understanding of the major debates in the field of international relations. A detailed reading should leave the student not only with a thorough knowledge of the field of international relations (IR) but with a deep appreciation for its breadth and diversity.

The central question in Making Sense of International Relations Theory is “how should we study the subject matter of international relations”? For the student, the book is both familiar and unique in comparison with other textbooks. On the one hand, like a typical course reader, the volume is arranged according to the various approaches (see also Der Derian 1995; Doyle and Ikenberry 1997; Betts 2005; Art and Jervis 2007). Yet, Making Sense of International Relations Theory is broader than many existing readers, and it includes approaches that disagree sharply with each other. It includes both positivist and postpositivist approaches. Moreover, the distinction between the two is outlined in Chapter One and reinforced in the nested nature of the book; it is further discussed in Chapter Six on “Postmodern and Critical Theory Approaches.” The approaches covered are realism, liberalism, game theory, constructivism, postmodernism, critical theory, historical materialism, world systems theory, feminism, biopolitics, and the English school-which makes this volume more inclusive than recent appraisals of the field (see, for example, Carlsnaes, Risse, and Simmons 2002; Elman and Elman 2003). Sterling-Folker ably distinguishes the underlying ontological, epistemological, and methodological differences among these approaches. She is particularly clear regarding the distinction between positivist and postpositivist research agendas.

In a manner that is also reminiscent of a textbook, Sterling-Folker has penned overview chapters for each of the eleven approaches covered in the volume. These comprehensive overviews note the theoretical roots, outline the interdisciplinary nature of IR theory, and highlight the core assumptions of each approach (for example, liberalism) and their variations (in the case of liberalism, neoliberal institutionalism and public goods analysis). The reader who wants to delve deeper into the agent-structure debate or the theory of offensive realism, for example, can select texts from the annotated bibliography in the list of “further readings” at the end of each section. This format allows Sterling-Folker to highlight the similarities and differences in the core assumptions across various approaches, to sort out some of the confusion concerning a particular approach, to highlight disputes, and to clarify fallacies and misconceptions about the approaches.

LEIBNIZ’S REVENGE: International Relations Between Realism & Idealism… again?

By Marcos Farias Ferreira

 

Introduction

How should we reflect upon the nature and substance of International Relations? Are there any foundations, Archimedean points, or anchorages, we can take hold of to guide us through that route? Are we sentenced to engage in it, recurrently, from the vantage point of a resolute and insurmountable crisis? In fact, ‘crisis’ seems to be the word most utilised by contemporary thinkers of matters international to represent the current state of affairs in the discipline. It is most revealing that in editing their book on International Relations in the period 1919-1999, Tim Dunne, Michael Cox and Ken Booth have given it the suggestive title: The Eighty Years’ Crisis. In the introduction, they explain the motives for drawing on the title of E. H. Carr’s best-known book and the sense in which the word ‘crisis’ is again helpful to locate us within International Relations. “Sixty years on”, they write, “another sense of crisis pervades the discipline.”[1] The parallel with Carr’s times was pushed even further to acknowledge the uncertainty of thinking about world politics which is alike and the location of uncertainty and crisis in a cognate process of intellectual transformation. The perspective endorsed here does not merely take into account that this sense of uncertainty comes from the difficulty of coping with a ‘turbulent world’; it brings also into discussion the increasing disposition of some intellectual quarters to question the epistemological foundations of a world (we thought) we used to know.

            Making his own trip back to E. H. Carr on this matter, Fred Halliday has peremptorily asserted: “[n]o crisis, no academic discipline.”[2] This he advanced on the conference held to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the department of International Politics in the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, stressing the direct relationship between the emergence of distinct academic disciplines and the sense of crisis in modern society. Therefore, looking at International Relations from the vantage point of an eighty years’ crisis seems to suggest that we take on a perspective of the discipline that associates ‘crisis’ with ‘uncertainty’ and further with ‘transformation’. A discipline pervaded with a deep sense of crisis is definitely a discipline on the brink of transformation.

There is something more though for which this sense of crisis permeating the discipline can be accountable. ‘No crisis, no academic discipline’, Fred Halliday asserted on that special occasion. Nevertheless, what the sense of crisis has also brought about to the academic discipline of International Relations was a renewed interest and enquiry into its very identity and trajectory. Trapped in, or inspired by, a fin-de-siècle malaise, some of those concerned with the discipline have outlined the necessity of engaging in archaeological and genealogical labours in order to investigate and recapitulate the themes that have structured what can be designated the discourse of International Relations. By using as his starting point Michel Foucault’s writings on the archaeology and genealogy of knowledge, Steve Smith has often focused his attention on the “stories international theory has told about itself.”[3] Consequently, his central concern turns to how international theory has been described and categorised and how specific descriptions and categories have become commonplace.

Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique

By Duncan S. Bell

 

From “ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political.  27.3 (July-Sept 2002): 327(24). Expanded Academic ASAP. Gale. Univ of California Santa Cruz. 30 Nov. 2007 

 

We are…in a world in which power figures and reconfigures; in which human artifice must struggle with human necessities; in which notions such as justice, freedom, compassion, and autonomy, authority, legitimacy, security and force animate, constrain, and enable human beings in each and every arena within which they engage one another.

Jean Bethke Elshtain

 

In our own times we can neither endure our thoughts nor the task of rethinking them. We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about how our thinking is framed.

William E. Gonnolly

 

Introduction

The role of language in the constitution of social and political life has long been overlooked in the academic study of international relations. The most influential theoretical approaches, those that dominate debate in U.S. political science, remain firmly wedded to a correspondence theory of truth and the “elusive quest” for a scientific understanding of the world. (1) Concerns about language and intersubjectivity are deemed irrelevant in the positivist mission to explain the pattern(s) of world politics. It is as if much of twentieth-century social theory and philosophy had never been written. Nevertheless, over the last few years, a plethora of critical voices have sought to challenge this pervasive attitude, and their work has made an “indelible impression” on the topography of the field, undermining its boundaries, questioning its questions and problematizing its practices. (2)

The starting point for many of these critical approaches–which include postmodernism(s)/poststructuralism(s), most forms of feminism, and some constructivists–has been work produced in the wake of the “linguistic turn” in social and political theory. (3) This turn has followed a number of diverse routes, encompassing the universal pragmatics propounded by Habermas and Apel, the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, the ordinary language analysis of Wittgenstein and Austin, and the hermeneutics of, among others, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, in social and political theory in general, and international-relations theory in particular, much of this intellectual terrain remains under-explored. One important project is that developed by what in this article I am calling the Cambridge School (CS) of historians–in particular, by Quentin Skinner. Kari Palonen, for example, has claimed that Skinner should be regarded as one of “the few dissidents in the contemporary academic world” who concentrat e on the role of conceptual-linguistic transformation in the unfolding of history; and Charles Taylor argues that Skinner has formulated an “interesting and challenging” political theory. (4) This article outlines the Skinnerian position in relation to IR, and as such it is a partial response to Ken Booth’s contention that it “is vital that students of IR give language more attention than hitherto, as words shape as well as reflect reality.” (5) The CS approach has much to offer the theorist of international politics, especially through its focus on the historicity of conceptual change and its understanding of how political legitimacy is embedded in and constrained by the set of political vocabularies available at any given time.

Why have the implications for political theory inherent in the CS project been largely overlooked? The CS authors, and Skinner in particular, are usually bracketed as historians, and aspects of their work that relate to political theory remain unnoticed or are assumed to refer primarily to the study of the history of ideas. (6) This characterization is a mistake, for within the arguments sketched by the CS authors can be discerned an important approach to understanding social and political life. By concentrating on conceptual change and the constitutive role played by language in shaping the normative architecture of (any given) society, we can reach a more sophisticated understanding of language in both the reproduction of social norms and conventions and consequently in the process(es) of change itself. Such an understanding helps to highlight both the limits to and potential for challenging the current construction of social being.