Making Things International 2 (original) (raw)
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Critical Studies on Security, 2020
Rituals are customarily muted into predictable routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected and disruptive elements are downplayed.Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. We engage a series of ‘world pictures’ to show the worlding and disruptive work enacted in rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war, here colonial treatymaking, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts, algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. Rituals can generate dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than only impose a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals.
Making International Things: Designing World Politics Differently
Global Studies Quarterly, 2023
Can we make international things—maps, algorithms, museums, visualizations, computer games, virtual reality tools? Objects that criss-cross global space, exert political influence, and produce novel forms of knowledge? This article, and the special issue it introduces, suggests that scholars of international relations can and should engage in the task of making concrete material, aesthetic, and technological objects that exceed the epistemic, logocentric, or textual. It joins a growing conversation focused on the potential of expanding the praxis of the social sciences into multimodal formats of design, craft, and making. In this article, we explore the intellectual, social, and political stakes of beginning to make international things, unpack the disciplinary reticence to engage in this task, and the potential dangers it entails. Most importantly, we suggest five central benefits moving in this direction holds: (i) generating a future-oriented social science; (ii) cultivating an “atmospheric” social science faithful to new materialist, feminist, and practice theories; (ii) embracing a radical collaborationist ethos more-suited to the demands of the day; (iv) investing us in sociopolitically committed scientific praxis; and (v) inaugurating a radically new disciplinary architecture of scholarly praxis.
IReflect – Student Journal of International Relations
2017
Maps represent and make governable the social relations that underlie their production. This reinforcement of existing power structures poses challenges to groups at the margins of representation (politically and visually). Refugees on their migratory routes are usually represented as simplified arrows crossing nation state borders. This article asks if refugees can “map back” against the excluding hegemony of maps to publicly (re)claim spatial representation. Especially the vehicle of the “Balkan Route Corridor” in its materialisation and its consequences is a laboratory for inquiring into these possibilities for claim making. The aim of this research has been to explore some ways in which refugees themselves could counter cartographic representations. Collaborative “countermappings” from the route can visualise the state's essential impact on the experience of refugees, as well as offer individual responses and resistance to it. The article elaborates on how the refugee resear...
Material Practices of Power – Part I: Passports and Passporting
Design Philosophy Papers, 2015
In this paper, passports are investigated as socio-technical artifacts with the capacity of interrogating the relation between design and politics. While they might appear as ‘trivial’ objects for some, passports tend to speak to the current political regime of mobility and more importantly immobility that produces refugee populations and undocumented migrants waiting in camps, transit zones or precarious clandestinity for several months and years. This inquiry in two parts aims to interrogate the artifacts of passport and its artifactual relations and practices – which I call passporting – in relation to the ways in which mobilities and immobilities are organized, controlled, regulated and shaped. Part I presents three interrelated ways of looking at passports: first, the historicity of passports and the ways in which technologies and material practices merge with the political, social and economic interests of specific times and spaces; second, the ways passports function and perform in a network of relations and ecologies which produce continuity as well as uncertainty with different effects, forms and scales in different environments; third, how passports and bodies change their positions constantly in the world in which the difficulties and uncertainties to locate either and/or become desirable space and time for manipulating and exercising power over undesired groups and individuals in local sites through a global rationale.
International Relations Seminar on Race, Violence, and Global Politics (Graduate, Fall 2016)
This course will explore key themes and issue areas in international relations theory and international politics through a series of critical engagements with these topics. The beginning of the course will focus on how colonialism and race-making have shaped global stratifications of power through the creation of the international system, and in the development of International Relations as a provincial discipline in the US academy. We’ll trace the legacies of racism and anti-colonial struggles over labor, economic inequality, and land dispossession in several historical and geographic contexts including Brazil, Israel/Palestine, and Australia. We then turn to the body as central to regimes of international order, using feminist theories of IR and studies in visual culture to consider issues of confinement, suicide bombing, drone warfare, torture, and counterinsurgency. In the final weeks of the course, we’ll consider the relationship between security, leisure, and terrorism by looking at how contemporary logics and practices of securitization are transforming the infrastructures of global travel and tourism. Lastly, we’ll examine how multi-scalar regimes of computation, algorithms, robots, and cloud computing are shifting the architectures of global governance in profound ways.
Politics & International Relations supplement (October 2014)
War and conflicts have always played a significant role in defining national identities, often with reference to events that happened centuries ago. The role of passing on collective memories of these types of events has become even more complex in a globalising world, where new configurations of cosmopolitan memories challenge more locally and nationally based memories. The many aspects of societies' remembering and forgetting call for interdisciplinary studies.
2016 International relations in the prison of Political Science
2016
In recent decades, the discipline of International Relations (IR) has experienced both dramatic institutional growth and unprecedented intellectual enrichment. And yet, unlike neighbouring disciplines such as Geography, Sociology, History and Comparative Literature, it has still not generated any 'big ideas' that have impacted across the human sciences. Why is this? And what can be done about it? This article provides an answer in three steps. First, it traces the problem to IR's enduring definition as a subfield of Political Science. Second, it argues that IR should be regrounded in its own disciplinary problematique: the consequences of (societal) multiplicity. And finally, it shows how this re-grounding unlocks the transdisciplinary potential of IR. Specifically, 'uneven and combined development' provides an example of an IR 'big idea' that could travel to other disciplines: for by operationalizing the consequences of multiplicity, it reveals the causal and constitutive significance of 'the international' for the social world as a whole.