David Chandler | University of Westminster (original) (raw)

Books by David Chandler

Research paper thumbnail of Becoming Indigenous - Chapter 1 Introduction

Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, indi... more Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live?This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

Research paper thumbnail of My Amazon books page:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Chandler/e/B001HCXV7Y/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Papers by David Chandler

Research paper thumbnail of International Statebuilding and the Ideology of Resilience

Politics, 2013

This article seeks to draw out the ideological nature of discourses of resilience, and traces the... more This article seeks to draw out the ideological nature of discourses of resilience, and traces their rise in international statebuilding approaches. It suggests that this shift to resilience follows disillusionment with liberal internationalist understandings that Western or international actors could resolve problems of development, democracy and peace through the export of liberal institutions. Interventionist discourses have increasingly stressed the importance of local capacities, vulnerabilities and agencies and, in doing so, have facilitated the evasion of Western responsibility for the outcomes of statebuilding interventions through problematising local practices and understandings as productive of risks and threats and as barriers to liberal progress.

Research paper thumbnail of London: Polity, 2009. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-7456-4347-2 Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities

Research paper thumbnail of Contesting postliberalism: governmentality or emancipation?

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Debating (de)territorial governance

Research paper thumbnail of Introduction: Big Data Capitalism - Politics, Activism, and Theory

Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data, Jan 29, 2019

book29.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 CHAPTER 1 book and his editorial help. We are also grateful to... more book29.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 CHAPTER 1 book and his editorial help. We are also grateful to our colleagues from the Communication and Media Research Institute and the Centre for the Study of Democracy who have acted as chairs and respondents, as well as to the speakers, contributors, volunteers, interpreters, technicians and administrators whose work helped to make the conference a big success. Many claims have been made about the emergence of a 'digital turn' that is said to have radically transformed the possibilities for politics by undermining traditional modernist binaries of subject/object, state/society, politics/economics, public/ private, consumption/production, time/space, mind/body, labour/leisure, culture/ nature, human/posthuman. This turn has run through several phases, including cybernetics, automation technologies, mainframe computers, databases, artificial intelligence, personal computers, the World Wide Web, smart phones, geographical information systems, social media, targeted digital advertising, self-quantification, Big Data analytics, Cloud computing and the Internet of Things. This collected volume presents interdisciplinary assessments of the digital's impact on society. The contributions interrogate the claims of both digital optimism and digital pessimism. Digital optimists assert that digital technologies have radically transformed the world, promising new forms of community, alternative ways of knowing and sensing, creative innovation, participatory culture, networked activism and distributed democracy. Digital pessimists argue that digital technologies have not brought about positive change, but have rather deepened and extended domination through new forms of control. The pessimists speak of networked authoritarianism, digital dehumanisation, alienation 2.0, networked exploitation and the rise of the surveillance society. The chapters engage with questions of the digital in respect to activism, research and critique. They engage with the possibilities, potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, the digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication enable new research approaches or result in a digital positivism that threatens the independence of critical research and is likely to bring about about the death of the social sciences and humanities. The volume explores the futures, places and possibilities of critique in the age of digital subjects and digital objects. The main question this book asks is: what are the key implications of the digital for subjects, objects and society? This question is examined through three lenses: digital capitalism/Big Data capitalism, digital labour, and digital politics. These three perspectives form three sections in the book. Each section consists of six chapters: three presentations each followed by a comment or response. The first section focuses on society in its totality as digital capitalism. Digital capitalism exists wherever capitalist society is shaped by computer technologies. In recent years, Big Data has become an important aspect of digital capitalism, leading to the emergence of a new dimension of Big Data capitalism. The three contributions by David Chandler, Christian Fuchs and Paul Rekret, as well as the three comments (Christian Fuchs' comments on David Chandler, Chandler's on Fuchs, Robert Cowley's on Paul Rekret) focus on digital capitalism in general, as

Research paper thumbnail of An Empire in Denial: The Usa in Iraq

rccp-jid.org

Today the Western political elite is metaphorically lost. Without a plan, vision or ideology they... more Today the Western political elite is metaphorically lost. Without a plan, vision or ideology they argue for the implementation of apolitical, technical solutions to solve the problems of the world. As a result of this lack of ideology the traditions of empire have been inexorably ...

Research paper thumbnail of Hollow hegemony rethinking global politics, power and resistance

Research paper thumbnail of Anti-corruption strategies and democratization in Bosnia-Herzegovina

... as a component part of international programmes for democratization, let alone 'good gov... more ... as a component part of international programmes for democratization, let alone 'good governance' and anti ... networks of trust in civil society.12 Internationally-led anti-corruption initiatives have ... of social and economic development which enable a clear division between the public ...

Research paper thumbnail of The semantics of "crisis management": simulation and EU statebuilding in the Balkans

Research paper thumbnail of The Bureaucratic Gaze of International Human Rights Law: A Case Study of Bosnia

Research paper thumbnail of Radicalism and the demand for global politics

Research paper thumbnail of Critical perspectives on human security: discourses of emancipation and regimes of power

... Emancipation 2: 'We the Peoples': Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights... more ... Emancipation 2: 'We the Peoples': Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory and Practice, Tim Dunne and Nicholas J ... Biopoverty and the Possibility for Emancipation, David Roberts 6: Emancipatory Forms of Human Security and Liberal Peacebuilding, Oliver P ...

Research paper thumbnail of Book Review Essay: The Paradox of the 'Responsibility to Protect': David Chandler Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008. 348 pp. ISBN 978-0-8157-2504-6. Alex Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect: Th...

Cooperation and Conflict, Mar 1, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of R2P or Not R2P? More Statebuilding, Less Responsibility

Global Responsibility to Protect, Jan 31, 2010

This article is part of a forum on the report of the United Nations Secretary-General, 'I... more This article is part of a forum on the report of the United Nations Secretary-General, 'Implementing the Responsibility to Protect', which was released on 12 January 2009. The report was written as a response to 'one of the cardinal challenges of our time, as posed in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome: operationalizing the responsibility to protect'. The forum seeks to provide a range of perspectives on the report. It features contributions from Jennifer Welsh, Hugo Slim, David Chandler and Monica Serrano, and it concludes with a response from Special Advisor to the Secretary-General Edward Luck.

Research paper thumbnail of Introduction: beyond managing contradictions

Research paper thumbnail of Balkan statebuilding: governance but not government

Research paper thumbnail of Post-political ontologies and the problems of anti-anthropocentrism: reply to Tsouvalis

Research paper thumbnail of Becoming Indigenous - Chapter 1 Introduction

Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, indi... more Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live?This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

Research paper thumbnail of My Amazon books page:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/David-Chandler/e/B001HCXV7Y/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Research paper thumbnail of International Statebuilding and the Ideology of Resilience

Politics, 2013

This article seeks to draw out the ideological nature of discourses of resilience, and traces the... more This article seeks to draw out the ideological nature of discourses of resilience, and traces their rise in international statebuilding approaches. It suggests that this shift to resilience follows disillusionment with liberal internationalist understandings that Western or international actors could resolve problems of development, democracy and peace through the export of liberal institutions. Interventionist discourses have increasingly stressed the importance of local capacities, vulnerabilities and agencies and, in doing so, have facilitated the evasion of Western responsibility for the outcomes of statebuilding interventions through problematising local practices and understandings as productive of risks and threats and as barriers to liberal progress.

Research paper thumbnail of London: Polity, 2009. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-7456-4347-2 Responsibility to Protect: The Global Effort to End Mass Atrocities

Research paper thumbnail of Contesting postliberalism: governmentality or emancipation?

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Debating (de)territorial governance

Research paper thumbnail of Introduction: Big Data Capitalism - Politics, Activism, and Theory

Digital Objects, Digital Subjects: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data, Jan 29, 2019

book29.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 CHAPTER 1 book and his editorial help. We are also grateful to... more book29.a. License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 CHAPTER 1 book and his editorial help. We are also grateful to our colleagues from the Communication and Media Research Institute and the Centre for the Study of Democracy who have acted as chairs and respondents, as well as to the speakers, contributors, volunteers, interpreters, technicians and administrators whose work helped to make the conference a big success. Many claims have been made about the emergence of a 'digital turn' that is said to have radically transformed the possibilities for politics by undermining traditional modernist binaries of subject/object, state/society, politics/economics, public/ private, consumption/production, time/space, mind/body, labour/leisure, culture/ nature, human/posthuman. This turn has run through several phases, including cybernetics, automation technologies, mainframe computers, databases, artificial intelligence, personal computers, the World Wide Web, smart phones, geographical information systems, social media, targeted digital advertising, self-quantification, Big Data analytics, Cloud computing and the Internet of Things. This collected volume presents interdisciplinary assessments of the digital's impact on society. The contributions interrogate the claims of both digital optimism and digital pessimism. Digital optimists assert that digital technologies have radically transformed the world, promising new forms of community, alternative ways of knowing and sensing, creative innovation, participatory culture, networked activism and distributed democracy. Digital pessimists argue that digital technologies have not brought about positive change, but have rather deepened and extended domination through new forms of control. The pessimists speak of networked authoritarianism, digital dehumanisation, alienation 2.0, networked exploitation and the rise of the surveillance society. The chapters engage with questions of the digital in respect to activism, research and critique. They engage with the possibilities, potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, the digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication enable new research approaches or result in a digital positivism that threatens the independence of critical research and is likely to bring about about the death of the social sciences and humanities. The volume explores the futures, places and possibilities of critique in the age of digital subjects and digital objects. The main question this book asks is: what are the key implications of the digital for subjects, objects and society? This question is examined through three lenses: digital capitalism/Big Data capitalism, digital labour, and digital politics. These three perspectives form three sections in the book. Each section consists of six chapters: three presentations each followed by a comment or response. The first section focuses on society in its totality as digital capitalism. Digital capitalism exists wherever capitalist society is shaped by computer technologies. In recent years, Big Data has become an important aspect of digital capitalism, leading to the emergence of a new dimension of Big Data capitalism. The three contributions by David Chandler, Christian Fuchs and Paul Rekret, as well as the three comments (Christian Fuchs' comments on David Chandler, Chandler's on Fuchs, Robert Cowley's on Paul Rekret) focus on digital capitalism in general, as

Research paper thumbnail of An Empire in Denial: The Usa in Iraq

rccp-jid.org

Today the Western political elite is metaphorically lost. Without a plan, vision or ideology they... more Today the Western political elite is metaphorically lost. Without a plan, vision or ideology they argue for the implementation of apolitical, technical solutions to solve the problems of the world. As a result of this lack of ideology the traditions of empire have been inexorably ...

Research paper thumbnail of Hollow hegemony rethinking global politics, power and resistance

Research paper thumbnail of Anti-corruption strategies and democratization in Bosnia-Herzegovina

... as a component part of international programmes for democratization, let alone 'good gov... more ... as a component part of international programmes for democratization, let alone 'good governance' and anti ... networks of trust in civil society.12 Internationally-led anti-corruption initiatives have ... of social and economic development which enable a clear division between the public ...

Research paper thumbnail of The semantics of "crisis management": simulation and EU statebuilding in the Balkans

Research paper thumbnail of The Bureaucratic Gaze of International Human Rights Law: A Case Study of Bosnia

Research paper thumbnail of Radicalism and the demand for global politics

Research paper thumbnail of Critical perspectives on human security: discourses of emancipation and regimes of power

... Emancipation 2: 'We the Peoples': Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights... more ... Emancipation 2: 'We the Peoples': Contending Discourses of Security in Human Rights Theory and Practice, Tim Dunne and Nicholas J ... Biopoverty and the Possibility for Emancipation, David Roberts 6: Emancipatory Forms of Human Security and Liberal Peacebuilding, Oliver P ...

Research paper thumbnail of Book Review Essay: The Paradox of the 'Responsibility to Protect': David Chandler Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008. 348 pp. ISBN 978-0-8157-2504-6. Alex Bellamy, Responsibility to Protect: Th...

Cooperation and Conflict, Mar 1, 2010

Research paper thumbnail of R2P or Not R2P? More Statebuilding, Less Responsibility

Global Responsibility to Protect, Jan 31, 2010

This article is part of a forum on the report of the United Nations Secretary-General, 'I... more This article is part of a forum on the report of the United Nations Secretary-General, 'Implementing the Responsibility to Protect', which was released on 12 January 2009. The report was written as a response to 'one of the cardinal challenges of our time, as posed in paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome: operationalizing the responsibility to protect'. The forum seeks to provide a range of perspectives on the report. It features contributions from Jennifer Welsh, Hugo Slim, David Chandler and Monica Serrano, and it concludes with a response from Special Advisor to the Secretary-General Edward Luck.

Research paper thumbnail of Introduction: beyond managing contradictions

Research paper thumbnail of Balkan statebuilding: governance but not government

Research paper thumbnail of Post-political ontologies and the problems of anti-anthropocentrism: reply to Tsouvalis

Research paper thumbnail of Resilience and Critique

European Political Science, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies

Critical Studies on Security, 2013

Research paper thumbnail of Beyond neoliberalism: resilience, the new art of governing complexity

Resilience, 2014

Resilience, as a framework informing governance, relies on an ontology of emergent complexity. Th... more Resilience, as a framework informing governance, relies on an ontology of emergent complexity. This article analyses how complexity operates not only as a critique of liberal modes of ‘top-down’ governing but also to inform and instantiate resilience as a postmodern form of governance. In so doing, resilience approaches develop upon and transform neoliberal conceptions of complex life as a limit to liberal governance and directly critique the policy frameworks of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, which seeks to govern complexity ‘from below’. While actually existing neoliberalism focuses governmental regimes on the ‘knowledge gaps’ seen as the preconditions for successful policy outcomes, resilience asserts a flatter ontology of interactive emergence where the knowledge which needs to be acquired can only be gained through self-reflexive approaches. This distinction will be illustrated by drawing upon recent UK government policy practices and debates.

Research paper thumbnail of 'Being in Being': Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contempora... more This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the "ontological turn" in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and "world" in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology-of being differently: 'being in being' rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or "possessive" modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than "provincializing" dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.