Au-delà de la souveraineté biopolitique : Schmitt, Arendt, Foucault et les usages de la violence dans la politique internationale

Dans cet article, nous avançons que la souveraineté biopolitique et la théorie politique de l’état d’exception, souvent dérivées de la pensée de Carl Schmitt, ne constituent pas des indicateurs analytiques satisfaisants si nous voulons comprendre la politique de l’utilité globale des corps, du contrôle sur la vie ou le vivant et la violence des autorités abusives qui semblent aujourd’hui dominer les pratiques en relations internationales. Pour mieux apprécier la singularité du moment présent, nous suggérons qu’une approche théorique inspirée de la pensée politique de Hannah Arendt et correspondant aux politiques de violence absolue et totalitaire ainsi qu’à la terreur est nécessaire. En revisitant la pensée d’Arendt sur la violence et la politique agonale, nous reconceptualisons les pratiques souveraines en tant que « souveraineté agonale ».In this article, we argue that biopolitical sovereignty and the political theory about the state of exception, often derived from the thought of Carl Schmitt, are not sufficient analytical indicators if we seek to understand the politics of global utility of bodies, control over life or the living, and abusive authority and violence that appear to dominate International Relations practices today. To better capture the singularity of the international present, we suggest that an Arendtian political theoretical approach, more carefully tuned to the politics and policies of absolute or totalitarian violence and terror, is necessary. By revisiting Arendt’s thought about violence and political agony, we reconceptualize sovereign practices as matters of « agonal sovereignty »

Encountering violence: terrorism and horrorism in war and citizenship

This article introduces Adriana Cavarero's concept of “horrorism” into International Relations (IR) discussions of the relationship between war and citizenship. Horrorism refers to a violent violation of vulnerable humans who are defined by their simultaneous openness to the other's care and harm. With its motif of physical and ontological denigration, horrorism offends the human condition by making its victims gaze upon and/or experience repugnant violence and bodily disfiguration precisely when the vulnerable are most in need of care. The article argues that horrorism complicates disciplinary understandings of contemporary violence which tend to see terrorism, but not horrorism, in war and which generally neglect to theorize how violence—and particularly horrorism—is embedded in, and exchanged, through state/citizen relationships. To elaborate these arguments, the article analyses three pieces of war art: Jeremy Deller's “Baghdad, 5 March 2007,” Donald Gray's mural, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and a still image from Cynthia Weber's film, “Guadalupe Denogean: ‘I am an American.’” By taking the War on Terrorism as their subject, these pieces demonstrate how war makes visible the terror and horror in state/citizen relationships. The article concludes by reconsidering how encountering signs of horrorism might broaden our frames of war and further our empathic vision toward the precarious victims of horrorism or, alternatively, might confirm the patriotic allegiances of imperial citizens in ways that further bind their citizenship to state political and economic violence and narrow the scope for genuine empathy

A subaltern critical geopolitics of the war on terror: postcolonial security in Tanzania

Currently, hegemonic geographical imaginations are dominated by the affective geopolitics of the War on Terror, and related security practice is universalised into what has been called ‘‘globalized fear’’ (Pain, 2009). Critical approaches to geopolitics have been attentive to the Westerncentric nature of this imaginary, however, studies of non-Western perceptions of current geopolitics and the nature of fear will help to further displace dominant geopolitical imaginations. Africa, for example, is a continent that is often captured in Western geopolitics – as a site of failed states, the coming anarchy, passive recipient of aid, and so on – but geopolitical representations originating in Africa rarely make much of an impact on political theory. This paper aims to add to critical work on the so-called War on Terror from a perspective emerging from the margins of the dominant geopolitical imagination. It considers the geopolitical imagination of the War on Terror from a non-Western source, newspapers in Tanzania

Seeing like the international community: how peacebuilding failed (and survived) in Tajikistan

Post-print version. 18 month embargo by the publisher. Article will be released April 2010.The international community claims transformative power over post-conflict spaces via the concept of peacebuilding. International actors discursively make space for themselves in settings such as the Central Asian state of Tajikistan which endured a civil war during the 1990s and has only seen an end to widespread political violence in recent years. With the work of James C. Scott, this paper challenges the notion that post-conflict spaces are merely the objects of international intervention. It reveals how, even in cases of apparent stability such as that of Tajikistan, international actors fail to achieve their ostensible goals for that place yet make space for themselves in that place. International peacebuilders may provide essential resources for the re-emergence of local forms of order yet these symbolic and material resources are inevitably re-interpreted and re-appropriated by local actors to serve purposes which may be the opposite of their aims. However, despite this ‘failure’ of peacebuilding it nevertheless survives as a discursive construction through highly subjective processes of monitoring and evaluation. So maintained, peacebuilding is a constitutive element of world order where the necessity of intervention for humanitarian, democratic and statebuilding ends goes unchallenged. This raises the question of what or where – in spatial terms – is the locus of international intervention: the local recipients of peacebuilding programmes (who are the ostensible targets) or ‘the International Community’ itself (whose space is re-inscribed as that of an imperfect but necessary regulator of world order)

Foreign policy and political possibility

This article explores the relationship between foreign policy and political possibility in two parts. First, the relationship between foreign policy and political possibility is theorized around three analytical moments: political possibility is linked to the framing of conceivable, communicable and coercive foreign policy. Second, this framework is developed and demonstrated through a brief analysis of Coalition foreign policy in the War on Terror, considering American, British and Australian foreign policy between 2001 and 2003. This analysis dissects distinct and divergent Coalition foreign policies through a linked three-part conceptualization of political possibility. It enables an understanding of how the War on Terror was rendered possible through the construction of foreign policy in thinkable, resonant and ultimately dominant terms. The article concludes by looking to the wider analytical applicability of this particular theorization of the relationship between foreign policy and political possibility

How do professions globalize? Lessons from the Global South in US medical education

This article explores the professional construction of the space of Global Health. I argue that the growth of Global Health as a field of practice does not merely indicate an intensification of North-South intervention. It is also a professional project of reimporting lessons from the South to countries in the North. I focus on the emerging didactic regime for Global Health in US medical education and the deterritorialized "global" lessons that students are taught in poor countries. By rescaling these lessons to precarious settings at home, the space of Global Health is reterritorialized as a Global Medical South stretching into the United States, reinforcing the perception that health is not a right but a privilege. The analysis is based on a content analysis of university websites and didactic handbooks and a sample of sixty-four articles evaluating the education effects of study abroad experiences. It reveals an emerging canon of Global Health virtues and the construction of domestic scales for Global Health practices, which are based on ethnic and socioeconomic categories. This analysis of professional projects as spatial projects sheds new light on the geography of Global Health and of professional globalization more generally

Rituals of World Politics: On (Visual) Practices Disordering Things

Rituals are customarily muted into predictable and boring routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected, disruptive and disordered elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. The collective discussion recovers the disruptive work of a range of rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war. We do so through engaging a series of ‘world pictures' (Mitchell 2007). We show the worlding enacted in rituals such as colonial treaty-making, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts,algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. It emphasises the role of rituals in generating dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than in imposing a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals

Affect is what states make of it: articulating everyday experiences of 9/11

This article considers the politics of affect and official discourses of ‘9/11’. Drawing on the work of William Connolly and others, it is argued that to understand the resonance of dominant constructions of ‘9/11’ it is necessary to revisit their successful incorporation of prevalent American affective experiences of September 11th. To date, this relationship between affect, resonance, and discourse has been underexplored in International Relations. Its investigation offers important empirical insights on resonance, as well as theoretical innovation in connecting established work on narrative and discourse with emerging work on bioculture and affect. To this end, the article introduces a framework for the future analysis of affect, culture and discourse within International Relations. The article concludes, however, that, notwithstanding its importance to resonance, in ‘crisis’ situations such as ‘9/11’, affect is what states make of it