Daniel J. Levine

Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR:

Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.

Why Hans Morgenthau Was Not a Critical Theorist (and Why Contemporary IR Realists Should Care)

A growing body of critical and reflexive international relations (IR) realism draws on the work of Hans Morgenthau. While not without merit, I argue that these appropriations rely on selective – perhaps even wishful – readings of Morgenthau’s work: the reflexivity that he calls for, I argue, is not matched by what his theory actually delivers. Raising that distinction, I then trace out its consequences for contemporary critical and reflexive IR realists, in two steps. First, I identify similar reflexive shortcomings in recent work by neoclassical realist Randall Schweller. These, I suggest, point to abiding challenges to which contemporary critical/reflexive realism must prove itself equal. I then survey the notions of reflexivity at work in the critical/reflexive realism of Michael C. Williams and Richard Ned Lebow. Do they go far enough? Do they answer those challenges? I conclude by arguing that Morgenthau’s legacy for critical and reflexive realism should be reconsidered: properly understood, his work signals an impasse that is general to IR as a discipline. Signaling the depth of that impasse constitutes a lasting legacy, with which critical/reflexive realists have not yet dealt adequately.

The closing of the American mind: ‘American School’ International Relations and the state of grand theory

Senior ‘American School’ International Relations theorists — John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Robert Keohane, and others — have evinced a growing concern about a rise of technocratic hypothesis-testing, and a parallel decline in grand theory. We share many of their concerns; yet, we also find such discussions deeply unsatisfying. Grand theory descends into ‘technocracy’ because of reifying and depoliticizing processes deeply woven into both thought and the academic vocation. While confronting such processes is possible, these same scholars are among those who dismiss — and have long dismissed — the key intellectual moves that would sustain such a confrontation. That infelicitous combination, we argue, is unlikely to produce a renaissance of grand theory; indeed, past precedent suggests that it will further stifle it. To suggest how these theorists might better revalorize grand theory, we develop disciplinary-historical case studies around two key research programs: neo-functionalism and structural liberalism. Both were the product of an abiding commitment to grand theory; yet, both fell into reified and depoliticized stances that left little space for such theory. Breaking that cycle of reification and depoliticization might yet be possible; but it will require thinking beyond the call for ‘more grand theory.’

‘The World Is Too Much with Us’: Reification and the Depoliticising of Via Media Constructivist IR

International Relations’ constructivist turn – that body of approaches emerging in the late 1980s/early 1990s in which international outcomes were held to be predicated upon complex social arrangements, rules, norms, institutions, language and culture – emerged from a unique historical and intellectual moment. Initially, this theoretical turn was deeply committed to reflexivity and circumspection: since events were held to be contingent and theorists were bound up in them, the obligation to sustained critical self-reflection was central to the project. That commitment would not last, however. By the mid-1990s, it had given way to a ‘middle ground’ (or via media) position, which aligned itself with dominant materialist and rationalist methodologies and epistemologies. We wish to examine that moment of realignment: how it happened, and what it might mean. We argue that having imbibed a degree of the free-floating optimism that was ‘in the air’ in the 1990s, via media constructivism’s leading scholars came to believe that it was no longer necessary to problematise the historicity and contingency of their own historical moment and philosophical horizons. The post-Cold War ‘world’, we hold – or, at any rate, one account of it – was ‘too much with’ via media constructivism: selectively constraining its reflexive impulses and critical tools in ways that, however unintentionally, provided cover for particular normative and ideological configurations. To move past this, we argue that via media constructivists need a sustainably critical ethos: one which ‘repoliticises’ international theory by unmasking its hidden ideological and political starting points.

The Apocalyptic Sting and the Rise of Israeli Unrealism: Toward a Negative-Dialectical Critique

Abstract This paper explores Gershom Scholems notion of an ‘apocalyptic sting’—a messianic political theology which, he feared, haunted Jewish and Israeli politics through the Hebrew language. The paper makes four key moves. First, I unpack Scholems ‘sting’ in relation to contemporary Israeli religious radicalism. Second, I tie that notion of a sting to Frankfurt-School discussions of reification and its political effects. Third, I survey attempts to critique this notion of a sting, through the work of Israeli International Relations (IR) Realist Yehoshafat Harkabi. Drawing on the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno, I then draw out and deepen Harkabis reflexive stance, with an eye to setting out a vocation for critical IR-realism in the context of contemporary Israeli security discourse.

After tragedy: Melodrama and the rhetoric of realism

Responding to renewed interest in political rhetoric among contemporary International Relations (IR)–realists, this article advances three main claims. First, it suggests that tragedy—the dominant aesthetic-narrative mode to which these realists have turned in their rhetorical considerations—is ill-suited to the contemporary political moment. In the context of a late-modern “nuclear condition,” the turn to classical tragedy seems set to reproduce the resentful, anti-realist hubris that its promulgators hope to dispel or disenchant. Second, it suggests that late modern politics is widely experienced not in tragic terms but in melodramatic ones, and that contemporary reflexive realists would do well to alter their rhetorical approaches accordingly. Third, it explores rhetorical frameworks that might better meet the challenges posed by politics experienced in such terms.

Threat inflation as political melodrama: ISIS and the politics of late modern fear

ABSTRACT Fearful talk surrounding ISIS discloses two ‘public secrets’ that collectively define the dilemma of late modern politics. The first is a transition from politics that is experienced and narrated chiefly as tragedy to one that is experienced chiefly as melodrama. The second is a motivated wish to shed the moral burden which tragedy places on the contemporary political subject. ISIS, then, is terrifying not because it represents a throwback to premodern forms of charismatic domination or political atavism, but because its embrace authorises a politics informed by what Tamsin Shaw calls ‘the freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility.’ Assessing the effects of, and developing responses to, the wish for such freedom should be a priority for students of democratic and normative international theory.

Defending Planet Politics

Since the article ‘Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR’ (hereafter the Manifesto) was published in 2016, it has provoked discussion and debate in multiple forums.2 Sessions have been dedicated to it at the 2016 European Workshop on International Studies on ‘Politics in the Anthropocene’, the R.J. Vincent Colloquium at the Australian National University, the Oceanic Conference on International Studies in Brisbane, in two roundtables at the 2017 ISA in Baltimore, and this October at the Earth System Governance Conference. In May 2017, Joseph Camilleri dedicated a web forum with 12 contributors to the question, ‘Can world politics save planet Earth?’3 The 2017 Millennium Conference drew another reference in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s keynote. These