Agonistic peace: A postmodern reading

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 473-491

  Shinko, Rosemary E ^a  

^a BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 50249181096     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298080360030501     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. James Der Derian, 'Introducing Philosophical Traditions in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 2 (1988): 191.
2. For example Hugo Grotius,The Rights of War and Peace, Including the Law of Nature and of Nations (New York: Dunne, 1901);
3. Kant, Perpetual Peace (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983;
4. Quincy Wright, The Study of War (University of Chicago Press, 1964);
5. E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1939);
6. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962);
7. A.C.F. Beales, The History of Peace: A Short Account of the Organized Movements for International Peace (London: Bell and Sons, 1931), which represent but a few of the classic studies of war and peace.
8. Richard Ashley, 'Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War', in International/Intertextual Relations, ed. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (New York: Lexington Books, 1989), 259-321;
9. R.B.J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggle for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988) and
10. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993);
11. William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (New York: Cornell University Press, 1991);
12. Ivor Neumann, 'Collective Identity formation: Self and Other in International Relations', European Journal of International Relations 2, no. 2 (1995): 139-74;
13. and for a focus on violence and/ or critical security studies see: David Campbell and Michael Dillon, The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993);
14. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992) and
15. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998);
16. Vivienne Jabri, Discourses on Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996);
17. Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005).
18. Richard Ashley, 'Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 2 (1988): 227-62;
19. Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
20. Michael Shapiro, 'Sovereignty and Exchange in the Orders of Modernity', Alternatives 16 (1991): 447-77;
21. R.B.J. Walker, 'Realism, Change, and International Political Theory', International Studies Quarterly 31 (1987): 65-86;
22. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
23. Richard Ashley and R.B.J. Walker, 'Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies', International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 259-68 and
24. 'Reading Dissidence/ Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies', International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 367-416.
25. Oliver Richmond, 'Critical Research Agendas for Peace: The Missing Link in the Study of International Relations', Alternatives 32, no. 2 (2007): 247-74.
26. Vivienne Jabri, 'Michel Foucault's Analytics of War: The Social, the International, and the Racial', International Political Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007): 67-81.
27. Richmond, 'Critical Research Agendas for Peace', 251.
28. Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).
29. Oliver Richmond, 'A Genealogy of Peacemaking: The Creation and Recreation of Order', Alternatives 26, no. 3 (2001): 317-49.
30. Two studies of agonism in international relations have focused more on the agonistic pluralism of Laclau and Mouffe; however, Doucet also incorporates Connolly's notion of deterritorialised democracry into his analysis. Ilan Kapoor, 'Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? The Relevance of the Habermas-Mouffe Debate for Third World Politics', Alternatives 27 (2002): 459-87, offers a comparative analysis of Habermas' deliberative democracy and Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. He concludes that both theories are complicit in their avoidance of a direct engagement with Third World politics and the consideration of the effects of western imperialism and colonialism. Marc Doucet, 'The Possibility of Deterritorializing Democracy: Agonistic Democratic Politics and the APEC NGO Forums', Alternatives 26 (2001): 283-316, applied the conceptual frame of agonistic democratic politics to the struggle over identity between APEC and various NGO people's summits in order to assess possibilities for deterritorialised democratic practices. The antagonisms that emerged from within these political sites, however, were not opened to agonistic struggle and compromise so patterns of democratic deterritorialisation failed to take hold.
31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The AntiChrist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),
32. Beyond Good and Evil (Harmonsdworth: Penguin, 1973),
33. Human All Too Human (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986,
34. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1989);
35. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979),
36. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1980),
37. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1971-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980),
38. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988);
39. William Connolly, 'Democracy and Territoriality', in Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, ed. Frederick Dolan and Thomas Dumm (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 'Tocqueville, Territory and Violence', Theory, Culture & Society 11 (1994): 19-40,
40. 'Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault', Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 365-89, Political Theory and Modernity (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993).
41. For example Bonnie Honnig, 'Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity', in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 215-35, argues for a feminist politics that is both agonistic and performative; Raymond Guess, 'Nietzsche and Genealogy', in Nietzsche, ed. J. Richardson and B. Leiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 322-40, analyses how new forms of valuation emerge, yet do not entirely manage to erase the meanings that proceeded them; both Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995) and Thomas Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996), analyse Foucauldian agonistic politics and its implications and significance for practices of liberty and freedom.
42. The work of Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 'Democracy, Power, and the Political', in Democracy and Difference Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 245-56, 'Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?', Social Research 66, no. 3 (1999): 745-58, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000), focuses on various aspects of agonistic pluralism as an antidote to the depoliticisation strategies found within modern democracies. Simona Goi argues in favour of a modified agonal approach to the politics of abortion as a way to encourage dialogue across divergent moral perspectives in 'Agonism, Deliberation, and the Politics of Abortion', Polity 37, no. 1 (2005): 54-81;
43. Robert Martin draws attention to the emergence of a public sphere in early America that represents a model between consensus and agonism in 'Between Consensus and Conflict: Habermas, Post-Modern Agonism, and the Early American Public Sphere', Polity 37, no. 3 (2005): 365-88;
44. and Deborah Tannen discusses the negative aspects of agonism in academic discourse and how such discourses marginalise other types of critical thinking in 'Agonism in Academic Discourse', Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002): 1651-99.
45. For an examination of agonistic democracy and reconciliation see Andrew Schaap, 'Agonism in Divided Societies', Philosophy & Social Criticism 32, no. 2 (2006): 255-77.
46. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 184.
47. John McGowan, Hannah Arendt an Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 73.
48. See Dana Villa, 'Postmodernism and the Public Sphere', American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (1992): 712-21, for his understanding of agonistic subjectivity and a politics that stresses 'plurality, difference, spontaneity, and initiation against the regularizing apparatus of consensus', and, as previously mentioned, Connolly and Mouffe whose work figures prominently in these discussions and debates. Connolly is important due to his theorisation of the relational facets of a democratic ethos based upon agonistic respect, generosity and the pathos of distance; and Mouffe's work is especially relevant due to her theoretical efforts in support of a radical democratic politics that could transform antagonistic relations between enemies into agonistic relations between adversaries.
49. Mark Wenman, 'Agonistic Pluralism and Three Archetypal Forms', Contemporary Political Theory 2 (2003): 165-86.
50. David Owen, 'Equality, Democracy, and Self-Respect: Reflections on Nietzsche's Agonal Perfectionism', Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (2002): 113-31, provides an interesting discussion of recognition respect as distinct from appraisive respect and that agonistic engagements are a way to cultivate characteristics worthy of appraisive respect.
51. Simona Goi, 'Agonism, Deliberation, and the Politics of Abortion', 60-2.
52. Connolly, Identity/Difference, 211.
53. Connolly, 'Tocqueville, Territory and Violence', 37.
54. Connolly, 'Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault', 381.
55. Chantal Mouffe, 'Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?'
56. Ibid., 753.
57. Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
58. For a summary overview of Mouffe's agonistic pluralism and Laclau and Mouffe's radical democratic politics, analysed from within the context of their theory of discourse, see Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).
59. Mouffe, 'Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?', 755.
60. Ibid., 757.
61. See Wenman, 'Agonistic Pluralism and Three Archetypal Forms', for this particular critique of Connolly; and Kapoor, 'Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism? The Relevance of the Habermas-Mouffe Debate for Third World Polities', for the critique of Mouffe.
62. William W. Sokoloff, 'Kant and the Paradox of Respect', American Journal of Political Science 45, no. 4 (2001): 768 fn 2.
63. Michael Doyle, 'Kant: Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs', Philosophy and Public Affairs 12, no. 3 (1983): 206.
64. Ibid., 206.
65. Ibid., 225.
66. Michael Doyle, 'Liberalism and World Politics', The American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1162.
67. John M. Owen, 'How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace', International Security 19, no. 2 (1994): 103.
68. Steve Chan, 'In Search of Democratic Peace', Mershon International Studies Review 41 (1997): 76.
69. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, "The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization', European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 4 (1999): 422.
70. Ibid., 423.
71. Oliver Richmond, 'A Genealogy of Peacemaking: The Creation and Recreation of Order', Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26, no. 3 (2001): 329.
72. Ibid., 336.
73. Julian Reid, 'War, Liberalism, and Modernity: The Biopolitical Provocations of 'Empire', Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2004): 63-79.
74. Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, 61.
75. Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), 123-4.
76. Connolly, 'Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault', 370-4.
77. Ibid., 372.
78. James Bernauer and Michael Mahon, 'The Ethics of Michel Foucault', in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 153, note that Foucault 'subverts any otherworldly ideal of contemplative self-possession and insists that one's relation to the self be defined in terms of its movement within history'. Thus they conclude that Foucault's ethics opens up the possibility to critique the context and circumstances of one's historical location and to experiment with transgressions. In the same passage, Bernauer and Mahon substantiate my claim by confirming, 'This breath of life manifests the human capacity to transcend any product of history that claims necessity.'
79. Leslie Paul Thiele, 'The Agonyof Politics: The Nietzschean Roots of Foucault's Thought', American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (1990): 907-25, points out that Foucault's aim is not to provide an organisational framework for the unfolding agonistic struggle, so much as it is to stimulate its creative power. She reiterates that Foucault doesn't envision this as a struggle to dominate, exploit or subjectify; rather he regards it as an opportunity for an adversary to push against the hold placed on him in order to open up new possibilities within that struggle. Nathan Widder, 'Foucault and Power Revisted', European Journal of Political Theory 3, no. 4 (2004): 411-32, suggests that the ethical excess is immanent in the practices of the self that are sustained by the positivity of power which resists de-individualisation while moving us towards relationality and multiplicity.
80. Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, 'Agonized Liberalism', Radical Philosophy 127 (2004): 10.
81. With reference to peace as governance see Oliver Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (London: Palgrave, 2005).
82. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 234, note 38.
83. Ibid., 235, note 40.
84. Vazquez-Arroyo, 'Agonized Liberalism', 10.
85. Connolly, 'Tocqueville, Territory and Violence', 37.
86. Vazquez-Arroyo, 'Agonized Liberalism', 15.
87. William Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 96.
88. Vazquez-Arroyo, 'Agonized Liberalism', 13.
89. Vazquez-Arroyo, 'Agonized Liberalism', 10, 11.
90. Michel Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', in Michel Foucault: Power, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 2000), 342.
91. Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 6.
92. Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', 330.
93. Ibid., 342.
94. Ibid., 342.
95. Foucault, 'Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations', in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 381.
96. Ibid., 381.
97. James Johnson, 'Communication, Criticism, and the Postmodern Consensus: An Unfashionable Interpretation of Michel Foucault', Political Theory 25, no. 4 (1997): 559-83, argues that Foucault privileges symmetrical and reciprocal communicative relations over and above power relations and in so doing reveals the normative commitments which would sustain his social and political criticism. I would conversely argue that Foucault's ethical commitments are revealed within his efforts to encourage and support the establishment of relations of power, which do in fact contain a dialogic component. But relations of power are crucial for Foucault because they open the spaces where 'intolerables' can be confronted and power relations altered. There can be no struggle for freedom absent the establishment of relations of power.
98. Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', 340.
99. Ibid., 340.
100. Ibid., 341.
101. Ibid., 331.
102. Michel Foucault, 'Maurice Florence', in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 317.
103. Ibid., 342.
104. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 168.
105. Jabri, 'Michel Foucault's Analytics of War', 71.
106. Michel Foucault, 'War in the Filigree of Peace', Oxford Literary Review 4, no. 2 (1980): 16.
107. Ibid., 16.
108. Ibid., 16.
109. Foucault as cited in Pasquale Pasquino, 'Political Theory of War and Peace: Foucault and the History of Modern Political Theory', Economy and Society 22, no. 1 (1993): 80.
110. See Michael Blain, 'Power, War, Melodrama in the Discourses of Political Movements', Theory and Society 23, no. 6 (1994): 805-37, who uses Foucault's battle metaphors as a way to analyse social movements and the discourses they deploy; and for a counter-argument see Mark Neocleous, 'Perpetual War, or "War and War Again": Schmitt, Foucault, Fascism', Philosophy and Social Criticism 22, no. 47 (1996): 47-66, who argues against turning political or social struggle into a perpetual war which can only lead to fascism or despair.
111. Foucault as cited in Julian Reid, 'Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the Relationship Between War and Power', Alternatives 28 (2003): 4.
112. Simons, Foucault and the Political, 114.
113. Ibid., 114.
114. James Faubion, Michel Foucault: Power (New York: The New Press, 1994), xxxvii.
115. Simons, Foucault and the Political, 87.
116. James Der Derian, 'The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed', International Studies Quarterly, 34, no. 3 (1990): 303.
117. See Benjamin Arditi, 'The Becoming-Other of Politics: A Post-Liberal Archipelago', Contemporary Political Theory, 2 (2003): 307-25, who envisions politics as a polyphonic archipelago.
118. Mahmood Mamdani, 'The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency' London Review of Books 29, no. 5 (2007): 5.
119. Ibid., 5.
120. Ibid., 5.