Decolonial thinking: A "new" perspective on International Relations Theory

En las últimas décadas las ciencias sociales se han visto deconstruidas por diferentes corrientes de pensamiento crítico que buscan analizar el sistema mundo actual, la política global y las relaciones sociales desde paradigmas y epistemologías otras que sirvan para interpretar las diferentes temporalidades y localidades del poder y del conocimiento. Una de las corrientes más novedosas es el llamado pensamiento decolonial. Esta propuesta surge dentro del debate crítico en las ciencias sociales, originalmente en las áreas de Sociología, Historia y Economía Política, y más recientemente en la disciplina de las Relaciones Internacionales. El pensamiento decolonial se plantea como crítico de las ya establecidas teorías poscoloniales. Es impulsado desde América Latina por el proyecto conocido como modernidad/colonialidad/decolonialidad, que nos invita a cuestionar la modernidad europea desde la reflexión de su antítesis, la colonialidad en América, y los efectos que la colonialidad del poder, del saber, y del ser, han tenido sobre el sujeto colonial global. En este artículo proponemos evaluar los aportes que el pensamiento decolonial puede hacer a la teoría de las Relaciones Internacionales y cómo, junto con otras conceptualizaciones hechas desde la teoría crítica, se podría contribuir al diálogo pluriversal que sus autores proponen.In recent decades the social sciences have been deconstructed by different strands of critical thought that strive to analyze the contemporary world system, global politics and social relations from alternative paradigms and epistemologies allowing us to understand the different temporalities and locations of power and knowledge. One of the most recent movements is what has been called Decolonial thinking. This proposal originates within critical debate in the social sciences, originally in Sociology, History and Political Economy and more recently in International Relations. Decolonial thinking takes a critical approach to established postcolonial studies. Driven by Latin American scholars forming part of the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality project, Decolonial thinking invites us to question European modernity considering its antithesis, colonialism in America, and the effects of Coloniality of power, knowledge and being, on the global colonial subject. In this article we evaluate the contributions Decolonial thinking may offer to International Relations theory, and at the same time, how it may add to other critical theories in order to contribute to the pluriversal dialogue that these authors propos

The slowly structured classroom:Narrative time, lived experience and the contemporary he classroom

The detrimental impact of a globalised, highly technological world within the academe is well documented. The combination of moral efficiency, the global proliferation of contemporary capitalism and the compressing of time and space all have a role to play in the professional practice of contemporary higher education. This article attends to the negative outcomes of time and professional practice. It suggests the narrative classroom as one means of demonstrating agency and disrupting the status quo design of the higher education establishment. It employs an autoethnographic methodology to preface individual voice cultivated through storytelling and reflexivity. It suggests that this transformative process entails the establishment of creative communities. These communities are, by their very nature, relational and affective – and a necessary component of individual transformation

The paradox of peace and power: Contamination or enablement?

In debates about peace most discussions of power implicitly revolve around four types: (1) the hegemonic exercise of direct power related to force; (2) relatedly, the existence and impact of structural power related to geopolitics or the global political economy; (3) the exercise of international governmentality, soft or normative power, by IOs; and (4) local agency, resistance, discursive or physical. Each of these types of power, while relational, may be exercised from different sites of legitimate authority: the international, the state, and the local, and their legitimacy is constructed via specific understandings of time and space. Each type of power and its related site of authority has implications for making peace. This paper examines in theoretical terms how types of power block, contaminate, or enable peace of various sorts

Transformative Immigration Lawyering

Movement actors have long sought expansive reforms in U.S. immigration law, but two deep-seated tendencies are obstructing those efforts: incrementalism and path dependence. This Essay recommends that law clinics counter these forces by setting ambitious goals for structural change and by equipping students with knowledge and skills needed for transformative lawyering

Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment

Only recently has imprisonment become a central feature of both t across every level of government and involving civil and criminal law enforcement tools. Examining the population as a whole provides crucial insights as to how we arrived at this state of mass immigration imprisonment. While political motivations — parallel to those that fueled the rapid expansion of criminal mass incarceration — may have started the trend, this Article demonstrates that key legal and policy choices explain how imprisonment has become an entrenched feature of immigration law enforcement. In fact, legislators and immigration officials have locked themselves into this choice, as there are now literally billions of dollars, tens of thousands of prison beds, and innumerable third parties invested in maintaining and expanding the use of immigration imprisonment. Using the literature on path dependence and legal legitimacy, this Article explains the phenomenon of immigration imprisonment as a single category that spans all levels of government. Rather than continue further along this path, the Article concludes by suggesting that policymakers should seek a future reflective of immigration law enforcement’s past when imprisonment was the exception rather than the norm

Zealous Administration: The Deportation Bureaucracy

An agency\u27s culture shapes its lawmaking. Under certain conditions, agency culture dominates decision-making so strongly that it mutes the influence of those factors that administrative law scholars have traditionally focused on including presidential will, judicial oversight, internal resistance, and public opinion. We call this undertheorized phenomenon zealous administration. The immigration enforcement bureaucracy has vast discretion to remove unauthorized immigrants from the United States. Current immigration policies-such as indiscriminate deportation, family separation, and harsh detention-represent the most prominent example of zealous administration in the federal government. This Article focuses on that bureaucracy to plumb the causes and effects of zealous administration and to explore ways to limit it. Zealous administration manifests in three principal ways. First, the agency engages in hyper-regulation-the exercise of authority in indiscriminate, pervasive, and performative modes. Second, the agency is politically resilient-it is uniquely impervious to influence from the President, pressure from other government entities, public disapproval, and internal dissent. Third, zealous administration-once it has taken root in an agency and absent some powerful intervention-will grow over time and coopt for its mission other agencies sharing the same regulatory space. The immigration enforcement bureaucracy\u27s zealous administration complements President Trump\u27s aggressive agenda, but it is not merely a product of it. Zealous administration in that bureaucracy has deep structural roots long predating the current administration. Neither the reigning presidential-control view of administrative lawmaking, nor the alternative deliberative-democratic view can fully account for it. This Article fills the gap by drawing on classic public choice theory to construct a model of immigration enforcement as regulation. It concludes that taming zealous administration requires policymakers to focus on redirecting bureaucratic incentives, redesigning institutions, and expanding judicial review

Immigration E-Carceration: A Faustian Bargain

A new wave of federal court litigation has required immigration judges to consider alternatives to immigration detention in bond hearings. Although alternatives to detention can take many forms, the most common is electronic monitoring. Immigration detainees and their advocates now find themselves asking to trade the physical walls of jail for virtual walls, begging for a different type of punishment and control. Electronic monitoring imposes pain, shame, arbitrary rules, and limitation of freedom on persons, causing many to experience it as punitive. Its use also facilitates replacing a regime of over-detention with one of over-supervision and becomes the means by which immigration enforcement authorities surveil immigrant communities. It has become a Faustian bargain—should a detainee remain in jail or request these virtual walls? The Supreme Court’s immigration detention doctrine has set up this tradeoff by succumbing to the plenary power’s defenders who believe that noncitizens in removal proceedings have no right to freedom. Instead of outright freedom, the Court has offered release under restrictive supervision policies utilized by the immigration authorities. Supervision through electronic monitoring has come to reside doctrinally in the middle ground between absolute freedom and incarceration. Yet as we have learned from electronic monitoring’s use in the criminal legal system, this “middle ground” ceded too much ground. This Article explains, for the first time, how the Court’s immigration detention doctrine and perverse pull of the plenary power has carved out a doctrinal space where electronic monitoring now resides. The Article is also the first to expose a trend in the immigration context, in which the diminished rights that come with the status of a final order of removal have negatively impacted the rights of those who are pretrial. These trends indicate that electronic monitoring will likely continue, unchecked by the judiciary, in the immigration context. It is thus necessary for the executive branch to not repeat the mistakes of the criminal legal system by substituting virtual walls for real ones

Les études de sécurité : du constructivisme dominant au constructivisme critique

L’arrivée du constructivisme vers la fin des années 1980 semblait apporter une véritable approche de rechange aux théories néoréalistes et néolibérales qui dominaient le débat en Relations Internationales. Cependant, après les premiers élans d’enthousiasme il fallut se rendre à l’évidence que, malgré ses promesses, le constructivisme dominant qui était en train de s’imposer, surtout en Amérique du Nord, constituait un courant très large, qui pouvait s’accommoder facilement avec les approches positivistes. Dans le domaine des études de sécurité, ce constructivisme dominant a produit quelques travaux intéressants, mais qui reflètent une prudence profondément ancrée. Il n’est donc pas étonnant de voir émerger une tendance constructiviste critique, beaucoup plus postposiviste, et qui ne refuse pas le dialogue avec le postmodernisme et la Théorie Critique. Cette approche ne se confond pas avec les « études critiques de la sécurité » et se distingue en particulier par ses appréciations critiques des travaux de l’école de Copenhague.The arrival of constructivism towards the end of the 1980s appeared to herald a truly alternative approach to the neorealist and neoliberal theories which dominated the debate in International Relations. However, after the first surge of enthusiasm, it became clear that, despite its promises, the mainstream constructivism which was beginning to take hold, especially in North America, was a very broad current that could easily fit in with positivist approaches. In the field of security studies, this mainstream constructivism has produced some interesting work, but which reflects a deeply ingrained cautiousness. So there is no surprise to see a critical constructivist trend emerge, which is much more postpositivist, and which does not refuse to dialogue with postmodernism and Critical Theory. This approach is not to be confused with “critical security studies” and is dintinguished in particular by its critical assessment of the work done by the Copenhagen School

The Discursive Construction of Japanese Identity and its Haunting Others

This dissertation examined the formation of Japanese identity politics after World War II. Since World War II, Japan has had to deal with a contradictory image of its national self. On the one hand, as a nation responsible for colonizing fellow Asian countries in the 1930s and 1940s, Japan has struggled with an image/identity as a regional aggressor. On the other hand, having faced the harsh realities of defeat after the war, Japan has seen itself depicted as a victim. By employing the technique of discourse analysis as a way to study identity formation through official foreign policy documents and news media narratives, this study reconceptualized Japanese foreign policy as a set of discursive practices that attempt to produce renewed images of Japan’s national self. The dissertation employed case studies to analyze two key sites of Japanese postwar identity formation: (1) the case of Okinawa, an island/territory integral to postwar relations between Japan and the United States and marked by a series of US military rapes of native Okinawan girls; and (2) the case of comfort women in Japan and East Asia, which has led to Japan being blamed for its wartime sexual enslavement of Asian women. These case studies found that it was through coping with the haunting ghost of its wartime past that Japan sought to produce “postwar Japan” as an identity distinct from “wartime imperial Japan” or from “defeated, emasculated Japan” and, thus, hoped to emerge as a “reborn” moral and pacifist nation. The research showed that Japan struggled to invent a new self in a way that mobilized gendered dichotomies and, furthermore, created “others” who were not just spatially located (the United States, Asian neighboring nations) but also temporally marked (“old Japan”). The dissertation concluded that Japanese foreign policy is an ongoing struggle to define the Japanese national self vis-à-vis both spatial and historical “others,” and that, consequently, postwar Japan has always been haunted by its past self, no matter how much Japan’s foreign policy discourses were trying to make this past self into a distant or forgotten other

Learning, technologies, and time in the age of global neoliberal capitalism

Though diverse in nature, the articles in this collection discuss both socio-cultural and temporal transformations linked to technology and learning and can be classified into three broad themes. The first theme is interested in temporal experiences within time and learning; the second theme is about practical implementations of these concerns, and the third theme inquires into relationships between our understanding of time and human nature. In many articles, the boundaries between these themes are blurred and fluid. Yet, this general classification does indicate the present state of the art in studies of time, technology and education