Anna M. Agathangelou

Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown, and the Seductions of Empire

As the killing of those at the margins of liberal and neoliberal sovereignty continues to be glamorized and fetishized in the name of ‘democracy,’ we are confronted with urgent questions about the ways in which life, death, and desire are being (re)constituted in the current political moment. The intensification of carnage wrought by empire has brought with it a renewed thrust to draw in precisely those who are the most killable into performing the work of murder. As we are seduced into empire’s fold by participating, often with glee and pleasure, in the deaths of those in our own communities as well as those banished to the ‘outsides’ of citizenship and subjectivity, we must ask: How are these seductions produced and naturalized?1 What forms of (non)spectacular violence must be authorized to heed the promises being offered by empire? These are the central problematics this paper engages.2

Power and Play through Poisies: Reconstructing Self and Other in the 9/11 Commission Report

Analyses of 9/11 tend to narrowly punctuate understandings of Self vs Other. These mystify the power of politics in international relations, fixing us in locked cycles of dominance, retaliation, and indeed, anihilation. We explore an alternative method (poetry) derived from a dialectical epistemology (poisies) framed by a prismatic ontology (Worldism) to address the relations between Self and Other, and their implications for an emancipatory, transformative world politics. We focus on the 9/11 Commission Report as a starting point.

Bodies of Desire, Terror and the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the ‘New’ Imperium

The leaders of the neoliberal world order are now intensifying their interventions by unleashing force with impunity while slaughtering people in the name of liberal internationalism’s peace, freedom, democracy and security. Their calls, interventions of imperial violence, push us to ask: how do we disrupt these dominant processes guided by ontological antagonisms and existential wars whose ultimate goal becomes ‘bringing life back’? In this article, I draw on Foucault’s biopolitics and articulate beyond his theorisations that imperial processes such as liberal internationalisms, neoliberal entrepreneurships and neoconservative politics are intimately converging and diverging in the reassembling and reconstructing of international life. More concretely, an analysis of the CPA planners and forces in Iraq points to those processes and terrains of antagonism that are foundational to the reassembling and reconstructing of this order: the direct use of force and the racial and gendered corporeal reconstructions (i.e. which bodies are deemed structurally impossible and ontologically dead) to engineer this universal/global order.

Rocking the Kasbah: Insurrectional Politics, the “Arab Streets”, and Global Revolution in the 21st Century

The Arab Spring revolutions have caught the global elites flat footed as they have watched Arab peoples challenge and pierce the thin veneer of the structures of inequality and repression in place in the Arab world. The Arab uprisings also signaled to the rest of the world’s peoples that the relations and institutions of political and economic control and domination are far from being permanent; they can be rattled to the core, pushed into a crisis, and be transformed in radical-democratic ways. Arab revolutionaries have shown that it is possible to organize nonhierarchically and effect change without engendering authoritarianism. Their struggles have already inspired others around the world including the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the US. All this might yet be a new beginning. We argue that undercurrents of discontent, in the Middle East and North African region, about the unfinished national liberation struggles, the military regimes, and the neoliberal elites propelled the rocking of the Kasbah, or of the familiar order in the regions and beyond. We end the piece by describing in short the authors’ contribution to the whole forum. This forum opens up space to continue the conversation about what has become a powerful, unstoppable force in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Yemen. The Middle East and North Africa, as we have known is no more. It has taken the Arab masses, long dismissed as prisoners of the “Oriental soul”, little time to radically transform the region at a time of a broad “political” crisis around the world. At the time of writing, in Egypt and Tunisia, the initial uprisings have ushered in transitional processes, including constitutional reforms heralding greater participatory politics. Various political groups, ranging from the secular to neoliberal to Islamist are vying for political prominence, if not for dominance. In Yemen, the struggle for power has spiraled into a protracted war of attrition with no end in sight. Bahrain has managed to suppress the popular uprisings using its geo-strategic importance to enlist both Arab (i.e. Saudi Arabia) and US support. In Syria, months of relentless repression by the Assad regime have failed to stem the tide. Although

Making Anew an Arab Regional Order? On Poetry, Sex, and Revolution

The protests and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region define and exceed the imperialisms new manifestations and challenge the ‘stabilities’ and ‘business as usual’ in their moves to make anew the Arab region. Emerging revolutionary sexual poetics, I argue, ride the transformative power of the erotic while resisting and interrupting tired gendered and universal portrayals of the local-feminine backward East region and masculine rational forward West-global. The practical and conceptual shifts of the protests in the MENA present an energeia that disrupts ‘business as usual’ capitalism and substantively transforms power and sexual relations. The regions poetry (poems, slogans, songs) is an essential driver of this energeia which contests fetishized syndromes of transformation. In fact, in the MENA region, sex and poetics are major contestation sites of alternative ethical imperatives of being in time including practical and conceptual shifts in world-making projects. Las protestas y revoluciones en el Medio Oriente y África del Norte (MENA, por sus siglas en inglés) definen y exceden a las nuevas manifestaciones imperiales y retan como siempre a las ‘estabilidades’ en sus movimientos para crear una nueva región árabe. Sostengo que la poética sexual incipiente recorre el poder transformativo del poder erótico, en tanto que las representaciones locales resistentes e interrumpidas atrasadas de género femenino de la región de oriente y las representaciones masculinas racionales, avanzan hacia el occidente global. Los cambios prácticos y conceptuales de las protestas de MENA presentan una energeia que deteriora al ‘capitalismo de siempre’ y transforma sustancialmente al poder y a las relaciones sexuales. La poética de la región (poemas, eslóganes y canciones) es una impulsora esencial de esta energeia que contradice a los síndromes fetichados de la transformación. De hecho, en la región de MENA, el sexo y la poética son puntos de mayor debate de imperativos éticos alternativos de hallarse a tiempo incluyendo cambios prácticos y conceptuales en la creación de proyectos mundiales. 中东及北非地区的抗议游行和革命，限定和超越了皇帝的新衣，它们刷新阿拉伯地区的行动挑战了所谓的“稳定”和“一切正常”。我认为，新兴的革命的性别诗学，乘情诗的转变性力量之势而上，同时抵制和打断了对地方—女性的落后东方地区和男性、理性的先进西方—全球地区所进行的疲惫不堪、性别的普世描摹。中东和北非地区的抗议在实践和概念上的转变提供了一种现实性，冲击了“一切照常”式的资本主义，也实实在在地改变了权力与性的关系。这一地区的诗作（诗歌、标语、歌曲）是这种现实性不可或缺的驱动力，争夺成为拜物教的转变综合症。事实上，在中东北非地区，性和诗学是替代性、务须及时的道德律令的主要争执场，包括创造世界的计划中实践和概念的转变。

Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement

Abstract Poetics, as an epistemological approach, articulates alternative imaginaries to those proffered by the neoliberal world order. With a long history of drawing upon various sites to further its aims (e.g. the academy, the international studies association, political parties, the state), the neoliberal world order has used its epistemologies to constitute a hegemony emphasizing the state as the primary actor of political life. Feminists and scholars in postcolonial IR, black studies, and ethnic studies have challenged this idea, arguing that there are differential epistemological economies in world politics. Larger questions at stake in these different sites/cites include self and collective knowledge of marginal peoples and the envisioning of alternative, oppositional histories of decolonization, struggle and contestation. Traditional disciplinary boundaries become sites/cites of contestation about the forging and making of alternatives as academics, grassroots organizers, and activists, through poetics, work together to creatively engage questions of economies, power, history, and subject-formations.

Deconstructing sexuality in the Middle East

Deconstructing Sexuality in the Middle East is a unique and welcome contribution to feminist studies and its lucid engagement of the concrete sexual and bodily contestations in the region of the Middle East offers us epistemological insights otherwise marginalized in feminist theorizations. The edited volume explores the ‘contemporary dynamics of sexuality in the Middle East/North Africa’, paying particular attention to the methods that states and societies use to retrench the rights of women and other sexual marginalized populations. This volume begins with the assumption that sexuality is at the forefront of the contestations of power and struggles in the formation of subjects. In the introduction _ Ilkkaracan argues lucidly that sexuality is a crucial, politically-contested site that decides the future of women’s reproductive rights, queers’ rights and, above all, their existence. The authors in the volume point to the disjuncture that exists between moralistic and legal discourses on sexuality and gender (i.e. the declarations made by state officials about women’s reproductive rights) that ends up affecting women’s lives not just tenderly but violently. The volume comprises nine chapters that engage different sexual struggles in the constantly changing contexts of Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey. Each chapter illuminates how discourses and debates by different actors complicate gender and sexual relations. For instance, _ Ilkkaracan argues that, despite modernization changes and transformations of legal regimes, many countries in the Middle East are still not securing women’s rights with regards to reproduction, choice, and sexual expression. She complicates the regional sexual and gender contestations with other mediating axes of power (i.e. religion, different imperial colonizations, technological innovations, etc.) that shape and are shaped by the political and socio-economic context of the Middle East. She proceeds to argue that there are reductive (I would call them Orientalist) moves by the ‘west [and feminists] to view Islam and so-called Muslim culture as the sole parameters that determine sexual politics in Muslim societies’ (p. 3). Narrowly punctuated epistemological insights about this region’s complex and nuanced emergence and shifts of power relations and contestations that reduce everything to ‘religion, culture, or a simple binary opposition between the religious right and advocates of feminism or secularism’ (p. 11) are problematic as they end up colluding with ‘promot[ing] rigid

Humanitarian Innovations and Material Returns: Valuation, Bio-financialisation and Radical Politics:

This article critically examines the global humanitarian innovation movement by conjuncting it with the stem cell biotech sector to trace how in the assemblage of matter and code conflicts emerge about notions of suffering, pain, enhancement as well as markets that alter the very material forms of life and economy. In the first section, I look at two things simultaneously: a bio-humanitarian project—the Cypriot search for and DNA identification of the post-war missing—and clinical trials performed by the biotech corporate sector. I trace their respective methods of value and valuation as not only dependent social molecuralised practices but also as translation technologies of kinship, creation of new notions of life and death and governance. In the second section, I take a close look at the emergence of humanitarian and clinical labour as a global assemblage to show how humanitarian organisations and transnational corporations orient themselves towards certain labour assemblages in the search ‘anywhere’ to learn about, borrow and translate technologies supporting the ‘business’ of empire. I finish with broader theoretical implications of the humanitarian work post war and the clinical labour of patients in stem cell therapies.

Bruno Latour and Ecology Politics: Poetics of Failure and Denial in IR

Failure and denial are seductive concepts, and they were explicitly theorised at the Millennium conference in October, 2015. Though used to evoke an array of images to understand the condition of International Relations (IR) as a discipline and in relation to other social sciences, the concepts were not previously deemed pivotal for theorising world events. This article critically assesses how failure and denial are used by IR’s scholarly community as signifiers, and what it is that they signify. To this end, it considers Bruno Latour’s keynote address at the 2015 Millennium conference, along with some of Latour’s shorter works. Drawing on STS (science and technology studies), postcolonial and queer sensibilities, it concludes with a discussion of the significance of theatre in IR scholarship, and examines the broader social and political implications of how we think and understand failure and denial in the era of the Anthropocene.

Wither Anarchy? Harvesting the ‘Global’ Bio-tech Body, Indian Markets and Biomedical Technologies

The co-emergence of life and value, bodies and the body politic is a major aspect of world politics today. This chapter, first, frames key debates in IR on anarchy, order and postcolonial understandings of the ‘corporeal’ and the ‘international’ with a focus on debates of biocapital and biovalue in STS. Second, I grapple with how biological sciences are simultaneously contesting and facilitating global biotechnology ventures, and how the ‘international’ and ‘corporeality’ co-emerge. I argue that what counts as corporeal and what counts as international must be critically examined in order to break away from the delirious and omnipresent re-inscriptions of imperialism and its dominant presumptions of anarchy and order that come with the imaginary, the thinking, and praxis of bio-value. In the attempt to craft a distinctive geopolitical niche, states and markets bio-innovate the making and (un)making of living beings and their distribution as symptomatic of practices, discourses, and strategies that define, zone, and make possible the appropriation and governing of life. The emergence of infrastructures of biotechnology and ‘lively capital’ debates in India and the play Harvest orient us at what is at the forefront of claiming and constituting ‘global’ power. Reading these debates in India, I want to argue, opens up the space for articulating analytics grounded in the empirical-as-‘material-semiotic configurations’ and ‘orientations’ that offer lessons and methods for IR and STS by challenging strategies of zonings (i.e., the ‘international’ and the ‘corporeal,’ theory and practice, bioeconomy and capital) upon which a geopolitically spatiotemporal order of modernity depends. I conclude with some insights into the ethical imperative to read ontologies and epistemologies that transgress and alter the hierarchies and disciplinary formations that come with anarchy and order.