Mark Lacy

Cinema and Ecopolitics: Existence in the Jurassic Park

In The Age of Capital, a panoramic account of the consolidation of capitalism between 1848 and 1875, Eric Hobsbawm declares that if Europe ‘still lived in the era of baroque princes, it would have been filled with spectacular masques, processions and operas distributing allegorical representations of economic triumph and industrial progress at the feet of its rulers’. He goes on to suggest that the ‘triumphant world of capitalism’ had its own ‘giant new rituals of selfcongratulation’ in the form of cultural events such as the Great International Exhibitions. In the contemporary culture of mainstream Hollywood cinema, there are similar rituals of self-congratulation concerning geopolitical supremacy and capitalist innovation: cinema creates what Michael Shapiro describes as a ‘moral geography’ of global politics, a cartography that provides orientalist mappings of global politics. At the same time, it could be argued that cinema, viewed as a refuge from the ‘time-discipline’ of capitalism, is a mechanism for maintaining docile populations: ‘[a]musement under late capitalism’, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue, ‘is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to cope with it again’. But mainstream American cinema also includes a lucrative brand of countercultural critique. Three Kings, for example, a critique of United States foreign policy in Iraq, develops a similar project to that found in the writings of Zygmunt Bauman, Paul Virilio, and James Der Derian, exploring the manner in which modern technology ‘distances’ the perpetrators from the victims.

Securitization and the global politics of cybersecurity

In ‘Digital disaster, cyber security, and the Copenhagen school’, published in 2009, Lene Hansen and Helen Nissenbaum suggest ways in which securitization theory can help understand the politics of cybersecurity and cyberwar. What was significant about Hansen and Nissenbaum’s article was the way it attempted to add new approaches and questions to a topic that tended to occupy a space in an often highly technical discourse of security, technology and strategy, a discourse that extended in to all aspects of life in a digitizing society. This article asks: What should international relations scholars be doing in addition to the challenge and task – to become more interdisciplinary in order to be able to engage with the potential technification and hypersecuritizations of cybersecurity policy and discourse – that was set out in Hansen and Nissenbaum’s article?

China and discourses of desecuritization: a reply to Vuori

This is a reply to:Vuori, J. 2018. “Let’s just say we’d like to avoid any great power entanglements: desecuritization in post-Mao Chinese foreign policy towards major powers.” Global Discourse 8 (1): 118–136. http://doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2017.1408279.

Intellectuals, International Relations and the Constant Emergency

Abstract In this essay, I return to Hans Morgenthaus and Hannah Arendts writings on the Vietnam war and US foreign policy, which explored questions of bureaucracy, technology, emergency. On one level the essays they wrote illustrate the extent to which the discipline of International Relations (IR) has now caught up with the analyses of politics and war that they were developing in the 1960s and 1970s. We begin to see how lines of thought in Morgenthaus writing connect directly with the work of a younger generation of scholars interested in the work of intellectuals like Giorgio Agamben on the dangers of a security-obsessed politics in a ‘state of emergency’ or ‘state of exception’, or how Arendts and Morgenthaus work on bureaucracy and war is explored in contemporary work; from a pedagogical perspective, drawing out these connections creates the possibility of a different, potentially more subversive, way of introducing students to the discipline of ir.

A History of Violence: Mearsheimer and Walt's Writings from ‘An Unnecessary War’ to the ‘Israel Lobby’ Controversy

Realist academics wrote some of the most lucid critiques of the geopolitics of anger initiated after 9/11 by the Bush administration: John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in particular, began to interrogate the War on Terror with lines of inquiry that lead back to the critiques of U.S. foreign policy—and the ‘fantasies’ and ‘self-deception’ of policy makers—developed in the 1960s by Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt. But then Walt and Mearsheimer published controversial essays on ‘The Israel Lobby’ based on arguments developed in Walts Taming American Power. What interests me in the paper is accounting for a curious move that occurs in the writings of Mearsheimer and Walt since 9/11. By the time that we arrive at Walts Taming American Power and the essays on ‘The Israel Lobby’, critical commentary on the ‘self-deception’ of policy makers and the problems with neo-conservatism has largely disappeared, replaced with an anxiety over the Israel lobby that appears overstated. It is argued that the emphasis on foreign ‘penetration’ is a means of postponing a broader interrogation of the domestic, internal problems of democracy and war in the United States.