1st Edition

Out of Line Essays on the Politics of Boundaries and the Limits of Modern Politics

By R.B.J. Walker Copyright 2016
    322 Pages
    by Routledge

    322 Pages
    by Routledge

    A collection of essays on the politics of boundaries, this book addresses a broad range of cases, some geographical, some legal, and some involving less tangible practices of inclusion and exclusion. The book begins by exploring the boundary between modern Western forms of international relations and their constitutive outsides. Beyond this, the author engages with relations between subjectivity and security, security and nature, social movements and a world politics, as well as the politics of spatiotemporal dislocation. Two chapters address the work of Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber as exemplary accounts of the relationship between boundaries and the constitution of modern forms of politics. Each chapter speaks not only to the politics of specific boundary practices, but also to the limits within which modern politics has been shaped in relation to claims about spatiality, temporality, sovereignty and subjectivity. In this way, the book draws attention to a pervasive account of a scalar order of higher and lower that has shaped more familiar distinctions between internality and externality.

    Offering an analysis of the relation between concepts of internationalism, imperialism and exceptionalism, as well as the implications of spatiotemporal dislocation for claims about democracy, the book links contemporary claims about the transformation of boundaries to various ways in which political life is said to be in crisis and in need of novel forms of critique. Brought up to date by a new and extensive introductory essay and an assessment of the status of political judgement after 9/11, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of politics, international relations, political theory and political sociology.

    1. Despite All Critique (2014) 2. World Politics and Western Reason (1980) 3. The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005) 4. The Subject of Security (1995) 5. The Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005) 6. Social Movements/World Politics (1994) 7. Europe is Not Where It is Supposed to Be (2000) 8. They Seek it Here, They Seek it There: Looking for Politics in Clayoquot Sound (2003) 9. Violence, Modernity, Silence: From Weber to International Relations (1993) 10. Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011) 11. War, Terror, Judgement (2002) 12. International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005) 13. Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013) 14. The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory: Interview With Raia Prokhovnik (2012)

    Biography

    R. B. J. Walker is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada, and Professor Associado, Instituto de Relações Internationais, Pontifica Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.