Kate Schick

Acting out and working through: trauma and (in)security

Trauma, the silenced aftermath of violence, has been largely neglected by international security studies, which perceives trauma as having little relevance to global politics. However, this article contends that trauma profoundly influences global security. Unless traumatic events are worked through, they can heighten insecurity not only in the immediate aftermath of violence but decades and even generations later. The article is divided into three parts. The first section examines trauma in general terms, noting its individual, social and political dimensions. The second section examines acting out in response to trauma, with a particular focus on the meaning-making narratives adopted in order to make sense of traumatic experiences: the heroic soldier, good and evil, and redemptive violence. These narratives serve to secure the state by shutting down questioning and showing strength and decisiveness in the wake of traumatic shocks. Section three examines the notion of working through trauma. Working through involves a process of mourning, in which past atrocities are acknowledged, reflected on, and more fully understood in all their historically situated complexity. It is a deeply political process that struggles to understand and challenge those structures and practices that facilitate traumatic loss.

Beyond Rules: A Critique of the Liberal Human Rights Regime

This article critiques the liberalism that sustains human rights discourse as focused on rules to the detriment of focusing on the suffering of individuals. Too much human rights discourse has focused on the codification of human rights norms rather than the ways they are implemented and the failure to enforce them. International liberalism celebrates the advent of human rights whilst failing to confront the deeper structural dilemmas that the international political economic system generates. An engagement with critical theory leads to new ways of seeing human rights that might lead to alternative understandings of politics at the global level.

The Vulnerable Subject

International Relations remains faithful to its rationalist roots focusing on instrumental forms of power and authority to address global problems and, in the process, fail to acknowledge a sense of vulnerability permeating the global community. This book challenges such assumptions establishing an account of international politics that draws on the ethical assumptions of agonism. it highlights the inherent struggle associated with individual and community based engagement to address this struggle. While it does not offer one single mode of engagement to overcome vulnerability per se, it hopes to elicit a series of reactions, on the part of the reader, provoking grater reflection on the nature of such shared vulnerabilities thereby challenging the dominance of rationalist assumptions.

Gillian Rose and Vulnerable Judgement

The unifying theme of this volume is the centrality of human vulnerability as a starting point for ethics. But how should we think about and respond to vulnerability? In this chapter, I argue there is a danger that responses to vulnerability in world politics will bifurcate into rational universalist attempts to eliminate vulnerability on the one hand and radically particularist attempts to perpetually encircle vulnerability on the other hand. I draw on the unorthodox Hegelian thought of British philosopher Gillian Rose to argue that an adequate response to vulnerability takes the form of anxious negotiation of the middle between these two approaches.1