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Review of International Studies | 2006

The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies

Tarak Barkawi; Mark Laffey

In this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since World War II. The taken-for-granted historical geographies that underpin security studies systematically misrepresent the role of the global South in security relations and lead to a distorted view of Europe and the West in world politics. Understanding security relations, past and present, requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of European and non-European worlds and their joint role in making history. The politics of Eurocentric security studies, those of the powerful, prevent adequate understanding of the nature or legitimacy of the armed resistance of the weak. Through analysis of the explanatory and political problems Eurocentrism generates, this article lays the groundwork for the development of a non-Eurocentric security studies.


Review of International Studies | 2000

Locating Identity: Performativity, Foreign Policy and State Action

Mark Laffey

This article examines the politics and explanatory plausibility of performative accounts of state action through a critical analysis of the themes of continuity and change in the work of David Campbell. As political interventions, performative models reproduce a number of taken-for-granted conceptual distinctions. As explanations, performative models are undermined by an account of the social that privileges representation. Drawing on materialist feminist critiques of performativity, I argue for the necessity of locating accounts of subject formation and state action in the multiple logics that constitute the social.


Security Dialogue | 2012

The hybridity of liberal peace: States, diasporas and insecurity

Mark Laffey; Suthaharan Nadarajah

Much contemporary analysis of world order rests on and reproduces a dualistic account of the international system, which is divided into liberal and non-liberal spaces, practices and subjectivities. Drawing on postcolonial thought, we challenge such dualisms in two ways. First, we argue that, as a specific form of governmental reason and practice produced at the intersection of the European and the non-European worlds, liberalism has always been hybrid, encompassing within its project both ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ spaces and practices. Second, through analysis of liberal engagement with diasporas, a specific set of subjects that occupy both these spaces, we show how contemporary practices of transnational security governance work to reproduce the hybridity of liberal peace. The article demonstrates the shifting conditions for local agency in relations and practices that transcend the simple dualism between liberal and non-liberal spaces, in the process showing how practices of transnational security governance also reproduce diasporas as hybrid subjects. The argument is illustrated with reference to the Tamil diaspora and the Sri Lankan state’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.


Archive | 2005

Policing and global governance

Mark Laffey; Jutta Weldes

In a brilliant discussion of power in world politics, Cynthia Enloe has argued that, while much of international relations scholarship has been obsessed with power, the discipline has in fact dramatically “ under estimat[ed] the amounts and varieties of power it takes to form and sustain any given set of relationships between states” (1996: 186). She criticizes in particular the tendency of IR scholars to study only the powerful on the assumption that such a focus will provide insights into and explanations of world politics. Instead, she argues, if we focus on the “margins, silences and bottom rungs” (ibid.: 188), we can see the myriad forms and the astonishing amounts of power that are required for the system to exist at all. In this chapter we take up Enloes challenge. Specifically, we explore power in global governance by examining the increase in and transformation of policing that accompanies, and indeed helps to produce, the globalization of a neoliberal form of capitalist restructuring. Examining mundane practices of policing long ignored within a discipline more attentive to the upper reaches of state power enables us to demonstrate the massive amounts and the intricate relations of power that underpin what Peck and Tickell term the “neoliberalization” of social spaces and relations (2002). These policing practices, we argue, are integral to contemporary global governance and implicate power in all its forms. Beginning with coercion or compulsory power, we trace out the workings of global governance through institutional, structural, and productive forms of power as well.


Review of International Studies | 2003

Discerning the patterns of world order: Noam Chomsky and international theory after the Cold War

Mark Laffey

In this article I argue that Chomskys political writings, widely ignored in the discipline, are a significant resource for thinking about contemporary world politics, how we should analyse it, and to what ends. This claim is defended through an analysis of recent efforts by IR scholars to interpret the post-Cold War order. When viewed through the analytic perspective articulated by Chomsky, disciplinary accounts of the post-Cold War world as liberal and peaceful are shown to be insufficiently attentive to the empirical record. Chomskys political writings are also shown to be compatible with standard accounts of critical social science. How useful is the work of Noam Chomsky for understanding contemporary world politics? It depends who you ask. For the thousands of people around the world who attend his lectures and buy his books, Chomsky is a popular and respected guide to making sense of complex international realities.1 For almost four decades, he has been in constant demand from diverse audiences, in the United States and elsewhere, as a speaker on world politics in general and US foreign policy in particular. Chomskys numerous books, on topics ranging from the Vietnam war, the political economy of human rights, terrorism, and the mass media, to humanitarian intervention, and neoliberal globalisation, amongst others, sell in large numbers. In the twelve months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, a collection of Chomskys interviews, entitled 9-77, sold well over 200,000 copies and had been translated into 19 languages.2 Chomsky is emeritus Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, and widely regarded as the author of an intellectual revolution in linguistics. World politics is his avocation, rendering Chomskys record of achievement all the more remarkable. Not everyone sees Chomsky in such a positive light. Internationally, he is a much sought-after expert contributor to media coverage of world affairs. In the United * Thanks to Eric Herring, Jutta Weldes, Kathryn Dean, Tarak Barkawi, John Game and Noam Chomsky for comments, suggestions and corrections. 1 See Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Milan Rai, Chomskys Politics (London: Verso, 1995); and Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel (eds.) Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky (New York: The New Press, 2002). 2 Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001). Thanks to Greg Ruggiero for sales figures.


Cambridge Review of International Affairs | 2004

US foreign policy, public memory, and autism: representing September 11 and May 4

Mark Laffey; Jutta Weldes

In this article, we examine the social production of autism in US foreign policy discourse. Autism, we argue, is evident in the active forgetting of US foreign policy and its consequences, both in the US and abroad. It is this forgetting, promoted by the US state, that enabled many Americans to respond to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ The explanation for the social production of an autistic attitude in US foreign policy, we argue, lies in the relations between institutional power and competing narratives and articulations of US foreign policy and domestic politics. The argument is illustrated through analysis of the politics of public memory at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where, on May 4, 1970, 13 students were shot, four fatally, while protesting the US invasion of Cambodia.


Review of International Studies | 2004

The red herring of economism: a reply to Marieke de Goede

Mark Laffey

In ‘Beyond Economism in International Political Economy’, Marieke de Goede argues that the study of International Political Economy (IPE) fails to take seriously the insights generated by poststructuralism and discourse analysis. Specifically, much of IPE ‘remains wedded to a profound separation between the ideal and the realm of the real, whereby the politics of representation are seen to have a bearing only on the former domain, leaving the latter intact as an incontestable reality’. The result, especially apparent in analysis of international finance, is economism: the assumption of ‘a prediscursive economic materiality’ constituted independently of ideas, identity and discourse. Getting beyond economism requires using poststructualism to challenge the separation of the ideal and the real in the analysis of international finance and IPE more generally. Drawing on well-established literatures in geography and accounting, de Goede highlights the necessity of analysing the practices through which financial knowledge – and by extension capital itself – is produced.


University of Minnesota Press | 1999

Cultures of insecurity : states, communities, and the production of danger

Jutta Weldes; Mark Laffey; Hugh Gusterson; Raymond D Duvall


European Journal of International Relations | 1997

Beyond Belief: Ideas and Symbolic Technologies in the Study of International Relations

Mark Laffey; Jutta Weldes


European Journal of International Relations | 1999

The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization

Tarak Barkawi; Mark Laffey

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