GLOBAL CIVIL WAR: MAPPING THE 'POST-WESTPHALIAN' ERA

(2007 onwards)

This project explores liberal cosmopolitan claims about the arrival and transformatory nature of a ‘post-Westphalian era’, resulting from not only economic, technological and cultural globalisation but also from the equally constitutive normative and political projects of globalisation. It asks, firstly, what claims are being made about the demise of ‘Westphalia’ and about the arrival of a post-Westphalian era. The project, secondly, examines specific legal-institutional, political, military and subjective manifestations of these ethical and political projects. It investigates how, in other words, such projects find institutional, political and military expression in contemporary world politics: what are the ‘instruments’, processes and activities, manifest in the current international system, which bring ‘ethical’ and ‘political’ globalisation into being? Human Rights, governmentalised activism, the production of order, as well as the military and legal practices of the global ‘War on Terror,’ are all interrogated as such expressions with specific and politically significant subjectivising and biopolitical effects. In particular the project interrogates the changes in the mutual production and management of order and enmity, as a result of such practices. Finally, the project explores both notions of resistance and dissent, as well as, the forms such resistance practices have tended to take in recent years.  The project  places  particular emphasis  on the international thought of Carl Schmitt and his contemporary and posthumous interlocutors, such as Walter Benjamin, Reinhart Koselleck, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, as well as on the productive affinities and differences of Schmitt's thought with thinkers such as Michel Foucault. The project will lead to a manuscript provisionally entitled Global Civil War: Order, Violence and Enmity in the Post-Westphalian Era.

ACTIVISM AND MEANING IN GLOBAL CIVIL SOCIETY

(2003 onwards)

This project theorises the relationship between local practices of dissent/resistance and ‘global civil society.’ Scholarship exploring such interaction tends to be polarized: on the one extreme, it is suggested that local activism emerges organically out of local issues and concerns, and then attempts to fashion alliances with globally active movements and organisations which cohere with its sentiment and understandings of politics. On the other extreme, some scholars suggest that ‘global civil society’ colonizes local activism by imposing its own, Western concepts and political worldviews onto their local concerns and self-understandings. This polarisation is immediately apparent when one looks at prominent case studies of the relationship between international NGOS and local activism and practices of resistance, such as the Bushmen in Southern Africa and their attempts to prevent their eviction by the state from their diamond-rich lands or the activism of the survivors of the Bhopal disaster in Madhyar Pradesh and their relationship to global NGOS. On the basis of such examples, the project examines the possibility of re-grounding the notion of ‘global civil society’ and, therefore, the relationship between the local and the global away from such polarisations. It proposes utilizing Martin Heidegger’s notions of ‘world’ as a complex and ever-evolving web of background meaning, as a referential totality which is never solely local and on the basis of which we orient our existence as beings in the world. Thus, the project aims first, to re-cast the question of the relationship between the local and the global, and second, to derive from it pertinent and nuanced questions about the local/global nexus that can direct empirical research into social movements and local activism. The project poses a number of these questions in light of cases such as Bhopali and Bushmen activism: how do activists or dissenters located within postcolonial/indigenous/local contexts uniquely appropriate global norms and meanings? How does the appropriation of meaning by local contexts and the ‘repetition’ of certain types of practices, themselves affect the web of meaning and the reconstitution of the world as ‘referential totality’? And, finally, how is agency to be understood within this web of meaning? The project will eventually lead to a monograph, tentatively entitled Global Activism, Dissent and Webs of Meaning: Rethinking Global Civil Society. 

THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THOUGHT OF CARL SCHMITT

(2003 to 2007 with Fabio Petito)

This project wishes to give further impetus to and expand the nascent debate on the relevance of Carl Schmitt’s legal and political thought for international relations. The recently published English translation of Schmitt’s seminal work Der Nomos der Erde (translated by G.L. Ulmen as The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum, Telos Press, 2003) provides a unique and timely opportunity both to revisit the earlier scholarship on Schmitt’s political theory initiated in the early 1990s by the efforts of Chantal Mouffe and others, as well as to advance the debate on Carl Schmitt as a theorist of International Relations. While previous political theoretic and international relations scholarship on Schmitt had focused on his statist thought and his critique of liberal political arrangements, this project seeks to utilize the broader focus of Der Nomos der Erde on the historical conditions that shape the construction of world order by law and politics, in order to contribute towards a reconsideration of his whole oeuvre. Its chief concern is the historical construction of legality and order which is especially relevant to current disciplinary preoccupations with world order in the age of US unilateralism. 

The project was made up of three phases. The first phase involved the organisation of a themed section made up of eight panels at the 5th Pan-European International Relations Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (Standing Group of International Relations) in The Hague, held in September 2004. The conference topic provided a fitting location for the section under the heading “Constructing World Orders”. Thirty two papers were presented from diverse disciplines such as International Relations, International Law, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Science, Theology, a number of which can be found online under section 11. The second phase of the project involved the exploration of the international theory of Carl Schmitt within the disciplinary parameters of International Law, which has resulted in a special focus on this theme in Leiden Journal of International Law Volume 19, No. 1 (January 2006). Finally, the third phase of the project has culminated in the publication of an edited volume entitled The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal War and the Crisis of Global Order (London: Routledge, 2007). The book contains multidisciplinary contributions which introduce the international political thought of Carl Schmitt to International Relations and critically evaluate it in light of his entire oeuvre. It revisits well-known themes of Schmitt’s work to highlight the connections that run through the various legal and political strands of Schmitt’s work such as international law, geopolitics, the aesthetics of sovereignty, the distinction between friend and foe, and the distinction between partisan and non-partisan, as well as the ‘theological’ roots of political concepts. The volume, moreover, primarily examines the recently translated Nomos of the Earth in the context of the present crises in the fundamental structures of international society and world ‘order’, as well as the emergence of new forms of political violence and subjectivity, such as global terrorism, the ‘Global War on Terror’ and ‘The Long War’.

COEXISTENCE IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY: HEIDEGGERIAN REFLECTIONS ON MODERN SUBJECTIVITY, ETHICS AND COMMUNITY

 (1997 to 2005)

In the literature of International Relations the notion of coexistence is not understood as a question for world politics, despite the frequent irruption of issues of coexistence that constantly preoccupy international praxis, such as ethnic cleansing, multiculturalism, collapse of peace agreements/processes etc. Rather, in theoretic terms coexistence is considered self-evidently as the composition of individual units, identified with co-presence in some spatial sense. This is evident, not from the explicit theorisation of coexistence as such, but from the ontological commitments of the discipline of International Relations. The project points toward the ontological centrality of the modern subject, whose key attributes are reason, self-mastery and control over others and itself. The project suggests that these features of modern subjectivity reduce coexistence to mere co-presence of like units: in other words, the ontological commitments of International Relations determine coexistence through what the project calls the ‘logic of composition.’ The logic of composition reduces the multifarious relations of self and other to mere co-presence of already constituted subjects, and therefore, it obscures the constitutive role of the other for the ‘subject’ itself. In order to deconstruct the current interplay of subjectivity, composition and otherness, the discipline of IR needs a method which will facilitate the access of the manifestations of the primacy of coexistence in the world. Thus, the project turns to the radical phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. In his account of Being-in-the-world, it argues, can be found an ‘optics of coexistence’ which enables a more concrete and adequate understanding of coexistence. Heidegger’s existential analytic brings to the fore the self’s immersion in the everyday world of others, and the constitutive role of the other which ‘unworks modern subjectivity’. This particular deconstruction of the modern subject forms the basis for the self’s ethical behaviour and attitude to others. Coexistence, and also community, can then be conceptualised away from liberal and conservative forms of contractarianism in a move that is more productive in an era of global transformations, concerned with the destabilising effects of ‘globalisation.’ The findings of the project have been published in the Borderlines Series as The Subject of Coexistence: Otherness in International Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

GENDERING THE INTERNATIONAL

(1997 to 2002 with Hakan Seckinelgin)

This project attempted to challenge the reduction of gender to 'women' in International Relations. Whilst earlier feminist critiques of international relations had provided a strong and strategically significant starting point for theoring the international as a gendered space, the project advanced an understanding of gender in International Relations that did not confine itself to ‘women’s issues and rights’. It therefore engaged with International Relations theory by analysing international relations as a set of varied gendered practices, reflecting on the multiplicity of gendered interactions in world politics and global political economy, frequently in a post-colonial environment. The project involved co-organising a two day conference (with Linda Etchart) under the auspices of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, in which a large number of distinguished scholars and public intellectuals authored and presented papers, amongst them Gayatri Spivak, Dennis Altman, Val Plumwood, and Terrell Carver. This project culminated in both a special issue on gender (Millennium 27, no.4, 1997), as well an edited book entitled Gendering the International (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).