Discursive Dislocation: Toward a Poststructuralist Theory of Crisis in Global Politics (original) (raw)
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Crisis and Critique in International Relations Theory
The dissertation investigates the narratives of crisis and critique expressed at significant moments in the history of international relations theory in order to explain how recent debates on the “end” or “crisis” of international relations theory expose the paradoxical limits of critique in this field. The dissertation is structured by two organizing movements. The first movement, Chapters 2-4, examines the recent debates about a crisis of theorizing, placing them in their historical and conceptual context, and highlighting their axiological and political stakes. The second movement, Chapters 5-7, explores the contemporary theoretical status of claims to critique, the tendency for critical analysis to relapse into dogma, and the possibility of resisting the dogmatic potential of narratives of crisis in international relations. The overall analysis presents crisis and critique as two different possibilities of framing modern politics, predicated on diverging assumptions about (i) temporality, (ii) sovereignty, and (iii) knowledge. As a consequence, the dissertation argues that the points at which claims about crisis and international politics become most vulnerable to dogmatic tendencies occur in relation to the limits of the subject of knowledge and the sovereign politics of friends and enemies. A more effectively critical approach to politics in this context must work through a different framing in which the aesthetic subject may pursue claims to universality that rest on much stronger affirmations of difference and plurality and a much greater awareness of the limits of established and even progressive accounts of a sovereign subject of knowledge. Thus international relations theory must consider what it means to go beyond itself.
Crises, Hegemony and Change in the International System: A Conceptual Framework
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The paper tries to shed light on the conceptual link between international crises like the one following September 11, 2001, the Asian financial crisis of 1997/1998, the end of the Cold War or major international conflicts, and processes of change in the international system. It argues that cultural structures rest on their continuous instantiation through social practices, thereby making them coterminous with process. Process is constituted by meaningful acts of social agents, and can thus only be grasped by analysing meaning. Meaning is transmitted by language. Meaningful language is never reducible to individual speakers; it is a social act. In the paper, I call this process discourse. Linking Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with the theory of hegemony developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I will finally be able to show how hegemonic discourses serve as the nexus between crises and cultural structures and how they make cultural change possible.
Political Crisis: Conflict Between The Types Of Dimensions Of The Political
In recent years, political crisis has aggravated especially in post-Soviet countries. One of the most important tasks in curbing this situation is by finding the appropriate tools for describing and explaining it. The main aim of this paper is to provide an approach to the political crisis in the light of the coexistence of different types of dimensions of the political. The methodological base of research in this context is the post-marxist theory of rupture (S. Zizek, A.Badiou A., J. Ahambnen), hegemony (A. Gramsci) and ahonizm (C. Mouffe), sociology of everyday life and frame analysis, discourse analysis, and the theory of linguistic determinism. In general, this analysis focuses on anthropological dimension (near the spatial and temporal). This is especially based on the the political subjectification, which forms three basic types of correlation of the political. Every type of correlation forms the symbolic and semantic field simultaneously. Thus, such an approach expands the model of interpretation of the political crisis. In addition, it also expands the political phenomenon particularly. It can be interpreted as a multivariance in the context of three types of dimensions of the political.
The twenty-first century heralds the unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple, interconnected global crises – climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity, and economic instability. While the structure of global economic activity is driving the unsustainable depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural resources, this is simultaneously escalating greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global warming. Both global warming and energy shocks are impacting detrimentally on global industrial food production, as well as on global financial and economic instability. Conventional policy responses toward the intensification of these crises have been decidedly inadequate, because scholars and practitioners largely view them as separate processes. Yet increasing evidence shows they are deeply interwoven manifestations of a global political economy that has breached the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which it is embedded. In this context, orthodox IR’s flawed diagnoses of global crises lead inexorably to their ‘securitisation’, reifying the militarisation of policy responses, and naturalising the proliferation of violent conflicts. Global ecological, energy and economic crises are thus directly linked to the ‘Otherisation’ of social groups and problematisation of strategic regions considered pivotal for the global political economy. But this relationship between global crises and conflict is not necessary or essential, but a function of a wider epistemological failure to holistically interrogate their structural and systemic causes.
Crisis in a Transboundary Context
2017
As international crises increasingly dominate the news headlines, it is imperative to examine how crises are communicated and perceived from a viewpoint that is often ignored in most crisis literature-the nonwestern perspective. This book, Culture and Crisis Communication: Transboundary Cases from Nonwestern Perspectives, attempts to fill that gap by examining the role that culture plays in crisis communication in nonwestern settings. Considering the emergence of new spheres of power in the form of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and other emerging economic powers that are not western countries, this book is timely. Also, the responses to major crises that have rocked different parts of the world in the last few years-including the disappearance of Malaysia Airline (MH370), the Boko Haram kidnapping of nearly 300 school girls in Nigeria, the mass migration of refugees from the ongoing Syrian war and others, by both western and nonwestern societies-illustrate the importance of examining crisis communication Culture and Crisis Communication: Transboundary Cases from Nonwestern Perspectives, First Edition. Edited by Amiso M. George and Kwamena Kwansah-Aidoo.
On Crisis, Critique and Social Change, in contemporary times
The goal of this essay is threefold: to provide an outline for crisis theory (1), to clarify the concept of critique, and especially of social critique(2) and to reflect on the mutual relation of these concepts and on their significance for the problem of deliberative social change (3). This is part of the theoretical foundation of a bigger work titled: On the crisis of the liberal world. Most of the problems and themes are handled abstractly here and are further elaborated and applied in the main text. Although the text itself is a fragment, and furthermore it may be viewed as excessively fragmented, I still hope that it has unity, consistency, and value.
Introduction: From Crisis to Critique
2020
Taking the recent omnipresence of crisis rhetoric around the Mediterranean as a starting point, the introduction lays out the main terms of this collection—crisis and critique—in their interrelation, as it emerges through the matrix of various declared crises in the Mediterranean. If today’s crisis rhetoric often works to restrict political choices and the imagination of alternative futures, can the concept crisis still do the work of critique or produce alternative modes of representation that can voice marginalized subjectivities and liminal experiences? Can crisis become part of contrarian or transformative languages by scholars, activists, and artists or should we forge different grammars to understand present realities in the region? Boletsi, Houwen, and Minnaard unpack the concept crisis and its operations alongside the concept of critique in our professed “postcritical times.” Underscoring the diagnostic rigor of critique in approaches to crisis-frameworks, they plead for cri...
Crisis and the structural transformation of the state: interrogating the process of change
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 1999
'Crisis' is one of the most underdeveloped concepts in state theory and, indeed, in social and political theory more generally. In this article I suggest one way in which this persistent oversight might be rectified, making a distinctive case for rethinking the process of social and political change in terms of the transformation of the state, and for rethinking state crisis in this 'restating of social and political change' (see also Hay 1996a). I return to the etymology of the term and (re-)conceptualise 'crisis' as a moment of decisive intervention and not merely a moment of fragmentation, dislocation or destruction. This reformulation suggests the need to give far greater emphasis to the essential narrativity of crisis, and the relationship between discourses of crisis and the contradictions that they narrate. The result is an analysis of crisis as a moment of transformation-a moment in which it is recognised that a decisive intervention can, and indeed must, be made. It is argued that during such moments of crisis a new trajectory is imposed upon the state. The intense and condensed temporality of crisis thus emerges as a strategic moment in the structural transformation of the state. Within this theoretical account crises are thus revealed as 'epoch-making' moments marking the transition between phases of historical-political time. They are thus suggestive of a periodisation of the development of the state. These are the times that try men's souls (Thomas Paine, 1776). The concept of 'crisis' is ubiquitous within eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century social and political thought. Despite, or perhaps because, of this pervasiveness, it remains one of the most illusive, imprecise