Generalising the international

Review of International Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 451-472

  Edkins, Jenny ^a   Zehfuss, Maja ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 22144499257     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210505006583     Document Type: Review

References (128)

1. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 308.
2. It could be argued, however, that by the act of specifying that there are 'unknown unknowns' as this thinking does, it attempts to assume knowledge of and hence control over what 'we don't know we don't know' as well as over what 'we know we don't know'. Donald Rumsfeld, NATO Press Conference, 6 June 2002;
3. Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in United States Department of Defense, Testimony of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld before the House Armed Services Committee regarding Iraq (Transcript), 18 September 2002.
4. George W. Bush, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, 20 September 2001.
5. George W. Bush, Letter to 'My fellow Americans', 16 July 2002 (accompanies Office of Homeland Security, National Strategy for Homeland Security, July 2002).
6. Office of Homeland Security, National Strategy for Homeland Security, July 2002, p. 7.
7. National Strategy for Homeland Security, p. 7.
8. Ibid., p. 29.
9. In addition, as Jean Baudrillard points out, 'all the means of death and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already turned his death into a counterstrike weapon'. The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002), p. 16.
10. Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003), p. 64.
11. Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror, p. 71.
12. Bush, Letter, pp. 1-2.
13. See, for example, David Cole, 'Enemy Aliens and American Freedoms', The Nation, 23 September 2002, pp. 20-6.
14. Scholars have of course been debating the value of the search for security in a necessarily insecure world for some time. Barry Buzan, Jaap de Wilde, and Ole Wæver, The New Security Studies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997);
15. Michael Dillon, The Politics of Security (London: Routledge, 1996);
16. Jenny Edkins, 'After the Subject of International Security', in Alan Finlayson and Jeremy Valentine (eds.), Politics and Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 87-110;
17. K. M. Fierke, 'Meaning, Method and Practice: Assessing the Changing Security Agenda', in Stephanie Lawson (ed.), The New Agenda for International Politics: From Polarization to Globalization in World Politics (London: Polity, 2001), pp. 128-44;
18. Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds.), Critical Security Studies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996).
19. Jenny Edkins, 'The Rush to Memory and the Rhetoric of War', Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31:2 (2003), pp. 231-51
20. Maja Zehfuss, 'Forget September 11', Third World Quarterly: Journal of Emerging Areas, 24:3 (2003), pp. 513-28.
21. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. xi.
22. Butler, Precarious Life, p. xi.
23. Ibid., p. 30.
24. Mary Midgley, 'Counting the Cost of Revenge', The Guardian (London), Saturday Review, p. 5, June 2004.
25. Midgley, 'Counting the Cost'.
26. Steve Smith, 'Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11th', International Studies Quarterly, 48:3 (2004), pp. 499-515.
27. We are certainly not the first critical IR scholars to point this out. It has been a feature of critical thinking for at least the last decade, and many people have engaged this problem in different ways. It has perhaps been most directly tackled in the work of Richard K. Ashley, Richard Falk and R. B. J. Walker. See, for example Richard K. Ashley, 'Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism and War', in James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations (New York: Lexington Books, 1989), pp. 259-321;
28. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
29. Richard Falk, Lester Edwin J. Ruiz and R. B. J. Walker (eds.), Reframing the International (New York: Routledge, 2002). Although these various interventions and the many we have not listed have had considerable impact, the argument has by no means been won. It seems to us that there is room for a further intervention, one that takes a different approach, especially when an altered interpretation of the world is in the process of becoming entrenched in public discourse.
30. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. xiii.
31. Ibid., p. 3. It is interesting of course that Bull does not question in what sense the objects to be ordered can be said to 'exist' or form part of a 'class' prior to their ordering. In other words, he does not examine the possibility of radical relationality: he does not consider, for example, whether an object might only become what we call 'a book' by virtue of its positioning on a shelf alongside other books.
32. Ibid., p. 4.
33. Ibid., p. 4.
34. Ibid., p. 3f (our emphasis).
35. Jacques Derrida, 'Signature Event Context', trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 17.
36. Derrida, 'Signature Event Context', p. 17.
37. Ibid., p. 18.
38. Ibid., p. 18.
39. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 3f.
40. Derrida, 'Signature Event Context', p. 19.
41. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 3.
42. Ibid., p. xv.
43. Ibid., p. xvi.
44. Ibid., p. xvi.
45. Ibid., p. xvi.
46. Bull does, of course, examine the pursuit of economic and social justice in Part III of Anarchical Society.
47. Ibid., p. xvi.
48. Dillon, The Politics of Security, p. 18.
49. James Der Derian, 'The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard', in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 24-45.
50. Homeland Security, p. 7 (emphasis added).
51. Bush, Letter, p. 1.
52. Homeland Security, p. 7.
53. Ibid., p. 8.
54. Bush, Letter, p. 1.
55. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. xvi.
56. Ibid., p. 83.
57. Ibid., p. 74.
58. Ibid., p. 84.
59. Ibid., p. 83.
60. Ibid., p. 85.
61. Ibid., p. 93.
62. Ibid., p. 75.
63. Ibid., p. 74.
64. Ibid., p. 75.
65. Jacques Derrida, 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority" ', in David Gray Carlson, Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (Routledge: London, 1992), p. 20.
66. Derrida, 'Force of Law', p. 21.
67. Ibid., p. 24.
68. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, eds. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001), p. 63.
69. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press 1992), p. 41.
70. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 54.
71. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 4.
72. Ibid., p. 8.
73. Ibid., p. xv.
74. Ibid., 16-19.
75. Richard Ashley traces the domestication of global life in some detail as a practice of modernist discourse and productive of the heroic figure of sovereign man: Richard Ashley, 'The Powers of Anarchy: Theory, Sovereignty, and the Domestication of Global Life', in James Der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 94-128.
76. Hedley Bull, 'Society and Anarchy in International Relations', in H. Butterfield and M. Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 35-60.
77. reprinted in James Der Derian (ed), International Theory: Critical Investigations (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 75-93 at 75. Note that this step is only possible because of the way the picture works: there is only absence of rule in the international because the international and the domestic are regarded as distinct realms. We return to this later.
78. Bull, 'Society and Anarchy', p. 75. The domestic analogy is 'the argument from the experience of individual men in domestic society to the experience of states, according to which the need of individual men to stand in awe of a common power in order to live in peace is grounds for holding that states must do the same'.
79. Bull, 'Society and Anarchy', p. 75.
80. Bull, 'Society and Anarchy', p. 79.
81. Ibid., pp. 92-3.
82. In other words, despite what Ashley calls 'Bull's lament', Bull's work nevertheless domesticates the international. Ashley, 'The Powers of Anarchy', p. 98.
83. Derrida, 'Signature Event Context', p. 5.
84. Ibid., p. 5.
85. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 30.
86. Ibid., p. 30.
87. Ibid., p. 33.
88. Ibid., p. 35.
89. Quoted in Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 41.
90. Ibid., p. 43.
91. Ibid., p. 46.
92. Ibid., p. 44.
93. On the significance of the displacement in deconstruction, see Jacques Derrida, Positions, translated and annotated by Alan Bass (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), pp. 41-2.
94. See Bull, Anarchical Society, p. xvi.
95. Bull, of course, regards war as one of the institutions of the society of states in the sense that it is a 'settled pattern of behaviour shaped towards the promotion of common goals'. Anarchical Society, p. 178; see also p. 88.
96. This is something Bull does not say but seems to imply.
97. For an earlier discussion of the deferred questions which would be brought into view by such a move, see Ashley, 'The powers of anarchy'.
98. See also David Campbell's discussion of 'radical interdependence', in Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993).
99. These are questions that have been addressed in sociology, and in international relations under the label 'historical sociology', but that are often seen as marginal to international politics. Examples of classic works here are Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985);
100. Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966);
101. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944);
102. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Study of France, Russia and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
103. Views of the social order as based on consensus are derived from a Durkheimian approach, particularly that found in the work of American sociologist Talcott Parsons. This is challenged by more recent sociology, including that drawing on Marxist and Weberian analyses of the social, which sees it as comprising groups with different interests and based more on conflict than on consensus. See, for example, the discussion in Dennis H. Wrong, 'The Oversocialised Conception of Man in Modern Sociology', American Sociological Review, 26:2 (1961), pp. 183-93
104. (reprinted in Robert Bocock et al. (eds.), An Introduction to Sociology (London: Fontana, 1980), pp. 23-51).
105. Again, these questions have been addressed in postcolonial politics, in the work for example of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and by a number of critical scholars in IR. See, for example, Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994);
106. David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
107. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997);
108. Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
109. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986);
110. Stuart Hall, 'The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity', in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat (eds.), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 173-87;
111. Kathryn A. Manzo, Creating Boundaries: The Politics of Race and Nation (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996);
112. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993);
113. Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker (eds.), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
114. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1999).
115. Homeland Security, p. 7.
116. Ibid., p. vii.
117. Ibid., p. 29.
118. Jacques Derrida, 'Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides', in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 124.
119. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994).
120. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).
121. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 85.
122. Ibid., p. 89.
123. Ibid., p. 86.
124. Derrida, 'Autoimmunity', p. 130.
125. Ibid., p. 130.
126. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 308.
127. Ibid., p. 308.
128. Ibid., p. 308.