Anni Kangas

From Interfaces to Interpretants A Pragmatist Exploration into Popular Culture as International Relations

Following the ‘aesthetic turn’ in International Relations (IR) the discipline has witnessed an upsurge of interest in new types of research material. Products of popular culture are one among these. Although works that articulate international relations with popular culture have yielded interesting research results, there is a need for sustained methodological and metatheoretical reflection. The article suggests that pragmatism would provide an untapped yet fruitful resource for this task. The unique value of pragmatism lies in the fact that it offers a solid metatheoretical basis for inquiries as well as a methodological solution. Metatheoretically, pragmatism has a specific contribution to make as it begins with practice, with the need to come to terms with the concrete facts of worldly existence. Instead of conceptualising international relations and popular culture as separate categories which form ‘interfaces’ with one another, pragmatism views them as dialectically related moments of semeiosis. Methodologically, this thought can be operationalised by way of analysing products of popular culture as a set of ‘interpretants’ — a term which designates one side of Charles S. Peirce’s sign theory’s triangular conception of the sign. The theory contains a set of distinctions which can be turned into a fruitful interrogative framework with the help of which it is possible to avoid forms of reductionism and to generate multidimensional explanations of international political phenomena.

Governmentalities of Big Moscow: Particularising Neoliberal Statecraft

In the summer of 2011, the Russian state initiated a project to significantly expand the size of its capital, Moscow, developing it into a polycentric urban formation and a ‘global city’. This article approaches the global city as a circulating form of governmentality by way of analysing discussions prompted by the plan for Big Moscow. It proposes that the logic of optimisation at work in the plan implies that it can be characterised as a neoliberal reform. The focus of the essay is on how neoliberalism becomes particularised in the context of the analysed discussions as it gains backing from constellations of authoritarian politics or historically rooted forms of cultural understanding. This does not render the examined case an anomaly but rather provides a paradigmatic example of how the productive entwinement of seemingly disparate governmental techniques is a necessary effect of the installation and functioning of the neoliberal regime.

Beyond Russophobia A practice-based interpretation of Finnish–Russian/Soviet relations

The article offers a practice-based analysis of Finland’s relationships with Russia. It works on the basis of ideas that have been presented in conjunction with the so-called practice and pragmatist turns in international relations. After identifying three key schools of thought in previous research on Finnish–Russian relations – primordialist, instrumentalist and identity-based – the article moves on to give a practice turn inspired account of the ways in which the proximity of Russia was dealt with in Finland during the inter-war period. Combining insights from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Charles S. Peirce, it introduces a research design built with the help of such analytical tools as the doubt-belief model of social action, relational properties and fields. These tools are then applied on research materials that comprise Finnish parliamentary documents and political cartoons. The materials are argued to be particularly well suited for attempts to apply practice insights in actual research, as they simultaneously function as embodiments of meaningful patterns of social and political activity and actively correlate with the urgencies of the contexts in which they appear.

Decolonizing knowledge: neoliberalism beyond the three worlds

ABSTRACT This article argues that critiques of neoliberalism tend to rely on and reproduce the coloniality of knowledge. It analyzes how recent academic scholarship has mobilized the notion of neoliberalism to make sense of postsocialist transformations and identifies in it an epistemological meta-geography that reproduces the three-worlds scheme, a specific Cold War era articulation of the colonial matrix of power. The article traces various ways in which this meta-geography has structured academic debates on postsocialist neoliberalism. It emphasizes the importance of moving beyond the spatial and temporal infrastructure of the three worlds, and identifies a set of epistemological alternatives that would enable decentering this infrastructure. In conclusion, the paper argues that although postsocialism has received relatively little attention in attempts to decolonize knowledge, it has potential to serve as a critical form of thought in destabilizing Eurocentric assumptions in theorizing neoliberalism and opening up spaces for imagining the world differently.

Global Cities, International Relations and the Fabrication of the World

The global city presents one available model for understanding urbanisation and associated hierarchies of power. In International Relations (IR), the global city is treated as a unit in a new type of international system, an increasingly important actor in world politics, or a site through which global processes operate. This article forwards an alternative perspective. It treats the global city as a dispositif of power. While the global city captures the fact that power and wealth are spatially concentrated in today’s urbanising world politics, the concept also has a world-making capacity. The article analyses this capacity in two contexts. Firstly, it presents a genealogy of the voyage of the global cities concept from critical academic scholarship to a buzzword of city elites and business consultants. Secondly, it performs a governmental analysis of global city reports and indexes. Finally, the article suggests that conceptualising the global city as a dispositif enables the important task of imagining alternative ways of framing the meaning of urbanisation in world politics.