Dangerous ontologies: the ethos of survival and ethical theorising in international relations

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the ‘agenda’ of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the ‘agenda of IR’ and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy ‘ethics and IR’ and towards ‘an ethical International Relations’. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the ‘dangerous ontology’ of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an ‘ethos of survival’ has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR

Stolen life’s poetic revolt

Joining the discussion of revolution and resistance in world politics, this article puts forward the idea of poetic revolt as a necessary companion to these terms, one which centres attention on the ongoing reverberations of transatlantic slavery – what have been called its ‘afterlives’ (Saidiya Hartman, Édouard Glissant). Engaging with contributions to poetics, black studies and black feminist thought, it first develops a theoretical orientation of the ongoingness of slavery as a ‘grammar of captivity’ (Hortense Spillers) that ‘wake work’, a term proposed by Christina Sharpe, aims to disrupt. The article calls for methodological attention to the fugitive and wayward arts and acts of living, that is, what Sylvia Wynter and Fred Moten call the ‘sociopoetic’ practices of enslaved and legally-emancipated populations to illuminate the simultaneity and entanglement of structuring violence and poetic revolt. Second, drawing on Spillers’ scholarship on homiletics – the study of and participation in sermons – in particular United States contexts, it identifies and discusses three aspects of poetic revolt: ‘fabulation’, world-making otherwise and resignification, through which such communities developed a critical and insurgent posture aimed at rupturing this grammar of captivity and at forging critical, futurally-oriented sociabilities. Third, in conclusion, it discusses the links of poetic revolt, in its specificity in Atlantic slavery, to wider systemic critique. Pluralising our thinking on revolution and resistance, poetic revolt, it argues, is best seen as a critical meditation on futurity

Human rights, self-formation and resistance in struggles against disposability: grounding Foucault’s ‘theorizing practice’ of counter-conduct in Bhopal

Theorising how human rights function as a liberal governing technology has undoubtedly been an important contribution of “governmentality studies”. Such theorisation, however, has largely eschewed concerted examination of the mobilisation and impact of human rights in historically specific struggles. This has tended to divorce the theoretical concerns of critical rights scholarship from the specificity of political struggles, reifying rights and obscuring the agency of “the governed” in struggles against socio-economic disposability. Calling for greater attention to human rights' potential destabilisations of conduct, the article examines Foucault's work into forms of resistance to “power that conducts”—“counter-conduct”—which is increasingly inspiring wide-ranging analyses of resistances to conducting power. Bringing together the “theorising practice” of counter-conduct and the enduring campaigns for justice by survivors and activists of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, the article examines how human rights enable forms of self-formation that interrupt the subjectification of those constructed as disposable subjects. Illuminating survivors' intervention in their ethical self-transfiguration mitigates against the occlusion of the agency of the governed. Moreover, the article argues, the thinking of counter-conduct recalibrates Foucault's own methodological orientations away from an overwhelming focus on mechanisms of governmental power, towards the study of the counter-conductive practices of co-governing subjects

Humanité, hostilité et ouverture de l’ordre politique dans la pensée internationale de Carl Schmitt

Nous examinons ici la critique de l’éthique universelle que Carl Schmitt aborde en tant qu’aspect politique de l’ordre planétaire. L’article porte sur les mutations du discours humanitariste, dans un contexte de gouvernementalité globale. Il ne s’agit pas d’adopter une perspective éthique différente, mais de reconnaître que l’éthique universelle alimente des discours et des pratiques politiques qui génèrent un monde politique (ou plus exactement biopolitique) unipolaire. Nous appuyant sur les « iconographies » de l’ennemi propres à Schmitt et sur la pensée de Foucault, nous esquissons un concept de devoir politique planétaire qui se pose à la fois envers l’Autre et à l’égard de l’ouverture du monde politique.This article examines Carl Schmitt’s critique of universal ethics made in his indictment of the discourse of humanity and addressed as a political concern of world order. It extends this critique further to include the ways in which the discourse of humanity transforms itself in the era of global governmentality. This kind of interrogation requires an almost ‘anti-ethical’ awareness that universal ethics fuels political discourses and practices that instantiate a political, indeed a biopolitical, universe. Schmitt’s discussion offers, it is argued, two iconographies of enmity, significant for mapping the contemporary world order. Together with Foucault, Schmitt helps articulate a notion of world-political obligation which is both for the other and for the openness of the political as a pluriverse

Interrogating Michel Foucault’s counter-conduct: theorising the subjects and practices of resistance in global politics

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise: visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty ad economic exploitation, such as protesting, agitating and occupying have received increased analytical attention in the past decade. This special issue provides much needed systematic attention to less visible practices of resistance or those not manifested in expressly political registers. It focuses on attempts to inventively modify, resist or escape the ways in which we are governed by interrogating critically the politics and ethics of resistance to ‘power that conducts’, expressed through Foucault’s notion of ‘counter- conduct.’ The contributions first, theoretically interrogate, develop, and refine the concept of ‘counter-conduct(s)’, offering a major statement its importance for both the study of resistance and also its place in Foucault’s work. Second, they provide inter/multi-disciplinary empirical investigations of counter-conduct in numerous thematic areas and spaces of global politics. Third, they explicitly reflect on variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power. Finally, the special issue concertedly considers issues of methodology and method emerging from the study of counter-conduct and how these also recalibrate the study of governing power itself

Exploring the ontological basis of coexistence in international relations: Subjectivism, heidegger, and the heteronomy of ethics and politics.

In the literature of International Relations the notion of coexistence is not understood as a question for world politics, despite the frequent irruption of issues of coexistence that constantly preoccupy international praxis. Rather, in theoretic terms coexistence is considered self-evidently as the composition of units, identified with co-presence in some spatial sense. This is evident, not from the explicit theorisation of coexistence as such, but from the ontological commitments of the discipline. The enquiry points toward the ontological centrality of the modern subject, whose key attributes are reason, self-mastery and control over others and itself, and which determines coexistence through 'a logic of composition.' The logic of composition reduces the multifarious relations of self and other to mere co-presence of already constituted subjects, that is, it occludes the constitutive role of the other in coexistence and for the 'subject' itself. Illustrating the interplay of subjectivity, composition and heteronomy in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the work of David Campbell, the thesis turns to the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger in order to gain access to the heteronomy of entities. In his account of Being-in-the-world, it is argued, can be found an 'optics of coexistence' which enables a factically adequate understanding of coexistence. Such an optics reveals the self, not as autonomous and masterful, but as other-determined in its everydayness, and as uniquely appropriating this heteronomy in its process of becoming-proper. Existential heteronomy 'unworks modern subjectivity'. In this way, it forms the basis for the self's ethical comportment, a self which is an opening to otherness, and enables the articulation of a 'politics of non-self-sufficiency,' as a point of departure away from the subjective politics of self-sufficiency. Moreover, the diclosure of heteronomy disturbs the determination of coexistence as composition and points to community constitution through critique. Through what is called 'critical mimesis' community comes into being through the deconstructive retrieve of past possibilities inherited from past generations in process which is inclusive and critical. This is an account of communal constitution which is productive also in an era of global transformations, concerned with the destabilising effects of'globalisation.'

The Cold Peace: Russo-Western Relations as a Mimetic Cold War

In 1989–1991 the geo-ideological contestation between two blocs was swept away, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Paradoxically, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one. The post-revolutionary era is thus one of a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. A cold peace is accompanied by a singular stress on notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others. The perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict, while the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order. The ‘universalism’ of the victors is now challenged by Russia's neo-revisionist policy, including not so much the defence of Westphalian notions of sovereignty but the espousal of an international system with room for multiple systems (the Schmittean pluriverse)

The question concerning human rights and human rightlessness: disposability and struggle in the Bhopal gas disaster

In the midst of concerns about diminishing political support for human rights, individuals and groups across the globe continue to invoke them in their diverse struggles against oppression and injustice. Yet both those concerned with the future of human rights and those who champion rights activism as essential to resistance, assume that human rights – as law, discourse and practices of rights claiming – can ameliorate rightlessness. In questioning this assumption, this article seeks also to reconceptualise rightlessness by engaging with contemporary discussions of disposability and social abandonment in an attempt to be attentive to forms of rightlessness co-emergent with the operations of global capital. Developing a heuristic analytics of rightlessness, it evaluates the relatively recent attempts to mobilise human rights as a frame for analysis and action in the campaigns for justice following the 3 December 1984 gas leak from Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Informed by the complex effects of human rights in the amelioration of rightlessness, the article calls for reconstituting human rights as an optics of rightlessness

Toward critical pedagogies of the international? Student resistance, other-regardedness and self-formation in the neoliberal university

Anxieties regarding colonial and neoliberal education have generated multiple calls for critical international pedagogies. Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose ethos and economic imperatives aim to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens. Such calls, this article argues, articulate a concern about other-regardedness, critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the cultivation of student values and relations toward politics, society, and others. How can we articulate a critical international pedagogy informed by, and enhancing, students’ and future citizens’ other-regardedness toward those “superfluous” and “disposable” others outside the classroom and the formal curriculum? To this end, we mobilize Michel Foucault’s thinking of “counter-conduct” to illuminate how students resist being conducted as self-interested and apolitical consumers. Such practices remain largely unexplored in examinations of recent student protests and occupations. Examining the 2005 student occupation of a French university against the local government’s abandonment of asylum-seekers, we discuss students’ own processes of social participation and self-formation, thus exploring the possibilities and tensions for advancing a critical and other-regarding pedagogy. Greater attention to students resisting the historically blind and market-driven rationalities and techniques of governing—inside and outside classrooms and curricula—marks an important point of departure for critical pedagogies of the international