Charlotte Epstein

Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics

This article aims to show the theoretical added value of focussing on discourse to study identity in international relations (IR). I argue that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. My starting point is a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically borrowed from psychology. Jacques Lacan’s ‘speaking subject’ offers instead a non-essentialist basis for theorizing about identity that has been largely overlooked. To tailor these insights to concerns specific to the discipline I then flesh out the distinction between subject-positions and subjectivities. This crucial distinction is what enables the discourse approach to travel the different levels of analyses, from the individual to the state, in a way that steers clear of the field’s fallacy of composition, which has been perpetuated by the assumption that what applies to individuals applies to states as well. Discourse thus offers a way of studying state identities without presuming that the state has a self. I illustrate this empirically with regards to the international politics of whaling.

Theorizing Agency in Hobbes's Wake: The Rational Actor, the Self, or the Speaking Subject?

The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.†In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agency that were first incarnated in the disciplines self-understandings by Hobbess natural individual. Despite its turn to social theory, this persistent individualism has hampered constructivisms ability to appraise the ways in which the actors and structures of international politics mutually constitute one another “all the way down.†My purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonindividualist, adequately relational, social theory of international politics. To this end I propose a third model of agency, Lacans split speaking subject. Through a Lacanian reading of the Leviathan, I show how the speaking subject has in fact laid buried away in the disciplines Hobbesian legacy all along.

Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations. Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight

In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social structures (Wendt, 1999). I then revisit the origins of poststructuralism via the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to bring its founding moves to bear directly on International Relations constructivism. Engaging with constructivism’s founding fathers, Nicholas Onuf, Alexander Wendt and Friedrich Kratochwil, I show that the search for unconstructed universals, grounded in an innate ‘human nature’, persistently haunts International Relations constructivism, even when it foregrounds language as the medium of social construction, and notably when it engages the question of gender. Just as language provided the original site for orchestrating the ‘moving beyond’ (the ‘post’ of poststructuralism) fixed, naturalized structures, I argue that a return to language holds the promise of renewal, and of constructivism’s being able to fulfil its founding promise to theorize constitutivity and the constructed-ness of International Relations’ world.

The postcolonial perspective: an introduction

In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in international relations (IR), such as ‘norms’. In this perspective colonisation appears as a foundational shaper of these orders, to a degree and with effects still under-appraised in the discipline. The postcolonial perspective is thus deeply historical, or rather genealogical, in its dual concerns with, first, the genesis of norms, or the processes by which particular behaviours come to be taken to be ‘normal’. Second, it is centrally concerned with the power relations implicated in the (re)drawing of boundaries between the normal and the strange or the unacceptable. Together, these concerns effectively shift the analysis of the ideational processes underpinning international orders from ‘norms’ to the dynamic and power-laden mechanisms of ‘normalisation’. In addition, I show how theorising international politics from a postcolonial perspective has implications for IR’s conceptions of time, identity, and its relationship to difference, as well as agency.

Securing Fish for the Nation: Food Security and Governmentality in Japan

Abstract Concerns about supplies of food have been a feature of Japanese politics since Japan started modernising in the second half of the 1800s. It has remained a prominent political issue even after Japan cemented its status as a wealthy country in the 1980s, with the Japanese Government continuing to protect domestic food production from international competition. Protectionism is a curious policy for a country so dependent on world trade, including for food. Protectionist practices have led to entrenched interests in some sections of government and industry. Protectionist ideas are used in nationalist arguments against food imports. The protection of domestic food production, however, resonates positively well beyond the groups that benefit economically from protection and those that indulge in chauvinist notions about the dangers of “foreign” food. The issue, therefore, is broader than interest-group capture or xenophobia. We find it is deeply embedded in Japanese policies relating to food domestically and internationally, and goes beyond government policy as such, involving ways of thinking about protection of national culture, and social and environmental responsibility. Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality helps to explain this approach to food security, accounting for the balancing act between free trade and protection as well as the pervasiveness of this rationality beyond government as such.

Surveillance, Privacy and the Making of the Modern Subject Habeas what kind of Corpus?

In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary surveillance society. I use biometric technologies as a lens for tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy. Adopting a broader genealogical perspective, I retrace the role of the body in the constitution of the modern liberal political subject. I consider two different understandings of the subject, the Foucauldian political subject, and the Lacanian psychoanalytic subject. The psychoanalytic perspective serves to appraise the importance of hiding for the subject effects of excessive exposure to the Other’s gaze. I conclude to the importance of the subject’s being able to hide, even when it has nothing to hide. By considering these two facets of subjectivity, political and psychic, I hope to make sense of our enduring and deeply political passionate attachment to privacy.

Minding the Brain: IR as a Science?

Invited by the editors to respond to Professor Neumann’s inaugural lecture,1 in this article I take issue with his core, unquestioned assumption, namely, whether IR should be considered as a science. I use it as a starting point to re-open the question of how the stuff that humans are made of should be studied in IR today. Beyond Neumann’s piece, I critically engage with two emerging trends in the discipline, the so-called new materialisms and the interest in the neurosciences, and articulate my concern that these trends have not addressed the deterministic fallacy that threatens to undermine their relevance for the study of a world made by humans. To the latent anxiety as to whether the discipline has finally achieved recognition of its epistemological status as a science, I respond by recalling that other grand tradition in IR, interpretive methods. The study of meaning from within, without reducing it to countable ‘things’ or to neuronal traces, is, I suggest, better attuned to capturing the contingency, indeterminacy and freedom which constitute key characteristics of the constructed, social world that we study in IR.

Forum: Interrogating the use of norms in international relations: postcolonial perspectives

In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in International Relations (IR), such as norms. In her contribution Ayze Zarakol argues that the constructivist paradigm of ‘norm diffusion’ commits two fallacies: first, it mishandles the causal explanation because it conflates internalisation, socialisation and compliance. Second it reproduces existing international social hierarchies by treating (bad) non-compliance by non-Western actors as endogenously driven, and (good) compliance as the result of external Western stimuli. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of stigmatisation to show how our understanding of norm diffusion in the international order – or lack thereof – can be improved. Julia Gallagher’s article examines the norm of good governance as acted out by the World Bank in its policies towards African countries. She uses psychoanalytic object relations theory to show how the Bank employs good governance to structure the world into good and bad objects, thereby overcoming internal ambiguity and creating an idealised self-image. Robbie Shlliam’s contribution challenges constructivism to attend to calls for epistemic justice regarding the delineation of interpretive communities to the ostensibly “moderns”. He does so by explicating the understandings of slavery provided by knowledge traditions inhabited by descendants of enslaved Africans. Vivienne Jabri’s article mobilises Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon in a critical engagement with constructivist readings of postcolonial agency in the normative ordering of the international. She argues that a postcolonial reading of the international must account for both the discursive and material presence of the postcolonial subject, a presence at once both constituted and constituting of the international.

Vers une reformulation antagonique de la lutte pour la reconnaissance

Les articles reunis dans ce dossier sont presqu’integralement le fruit d’un workshop international organise au CERI en juin 2014. Prenant comme point de depart un engagement critique envers la litterature de la reconnaissance, notre propos etait de revenir sur les traces de l’Hegel de la Phenomenologie de l’esprit pour reformuler le concept de la lutte pour la reconnaissance. Ce retour nous offre un approfondissement des concepts contemporains de la reconnaissance tres largement influences par une conception consensuelle dans la litterature classique malgre l’accentuation de la reconnaissance comme lutte a l’instar d’Axel Honneth. Centre sur ce retour antagonique de la conception originale d’Hegel, ce workshop reunissait des philosophes, des politistes, des theoriciens du social et des Relations internationales ainsi que des sociologues et des juristes. Dans cet article, nous introduisons des contributions diverses et suggererons comment des conversations au-dela des frontieres disciplinaires sont susceptibles de reformuler le concept de reconnaissance et de preparer son utilisation dans les analyses critiques des phenomenes politiques et sociaux prenant davantage en compte ses dimensions antagoniques et actionnelles.