1st Edition

The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics Critical Investigations

Edited By Nevzat Soguk, Scott G Nelson Copyright 2016

    Deliberately eschewing disciplinary and temporal boundaries, this volume makes a major contribution to the de-traditionalization of political thinking within the discourses of international relations. Collecting the works of twenty-five theorists, this Ashgate Research Companion engages some of the most pressing aspects of political thinking in world politics today. The authors explore theoretical constitutions, critiques, and affirmations of uniquely modern forms of power, past and present. Among the themes and dynamics examined are textual appropriation and representation, materiality and capital formation, geopolitical dimensions of ecological crises, connections between representations of violence and securitization, subjectivity and genderization, counter-globalization politics, constructivism, biopolitics, post-colonial politics and theory, as well as the political prospects of emerging civic and cosmopolitan orders in a time of national, religious, and secular polarization. Radically different in their approaches, the authors critically assess the discourses of IR as interpretive frames that are indebted to the historical formation of concepts, and to particular negotiations of power that inform the main methodological practices usually granted primacy in the field. Students as well as seasoned scholars seeking to challenge accepted theoretical frameworks will find in these chapters fresh insights into contemporary world-political problems and new resources for their critical interrogation.

    1: Introduction: The Measure of Modern Theory in World Politics; I: Theoretical Interventions; 2: Ever Since the Days of Thucydides: On the Textual Origins of IR Theory; 3: Appropriating Adam Smith: Affirmation and Contestation in Discourses of Political Economy 1; 4: Marx and Materiality: “International Relations” as Embedded Efficiencies and Emergencies 1; 5: No International Theory, but What about Transformation? A Critical Reading of Martin Wight and Raya Dunayevskaya; 6: Hannah Arendt and the Geopolitics of Ecology; 7: Critical Spirits/Realist Specters: Some Hypotheses on the Spectro-Poetics of International Relations; II: Security, Representation, and Subjectivity; 8: The Centrality of Tabloid Geopolitics: Western Discourses of Terror and the Defacing of the Other; 9: Writing from the Edge; 10: The Presence of War: “Here and Elsewhere” 1; 11: Territorializing the Soul: The Geopolitics of Subjectivity 1; 12: Return of the Oppressed: Recognition, Violence, and the Mediation of Estrangement; 13: The Achievements of Feminism in IR; III: The Analytics of World Politics; 14: Between U.S. Imperialism and “Empire”: World Politics and the Globalization of Late Capitalist Subjectivity 1; 15: “Beyond” the International: The Immanence of the Global; 16: Interdisciplining Global Thinking; 17: The (Human) Subject of Security: Beyond the Biopolitics of Resilience; 18: Melancholia, Realism, and International Relations; 19: Beyond Dualism: Expanded Understandings of Religion and Global Justice 1; 20: The Paradox of Crisis and the Importance of Being Disinterested; 21: Constructivism, Archaeology, and Humanitarian Intervention: A Reflection on Method; IV: Virtual Communities; 22: What Would a Global Civic Order Look Like? A Perspective from Islamic History 1; 23: Cosmopolitan Theory and World Politics: An Argument for Cosmopolitan Realism; 24: The Last Frontier: Contemporary Peregrinations over the Borders of International Relations; 25: Nationalism, Violence, and Globalization: Reflections on Gandhi's Political Thought; Epilogue: Political Judgment in International Relations Theory

    Biography

    Scott G. Nelson is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Nevzat Soguk is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa and Adjunct Professor of Global Studies at RMIT University, Australia.

    ’This collection of essays deploys political theory as a tool of political interrogation, asking the important question of what rules of truth and truths of rule now govern the times in which we live. There is no more valuable or comprehensive pedagogical device than The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Theory, Modern Power, World Politics for exploring it.’ Michael Dillon, Lancaster University, UK ’A rich challenge to IR as usual. Read this. Think this through. Teach this.’ Cynthia Weber, University of Sussex, UK