R. B. J. Walker

Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics

The dilemma before us seems obvious enough. Threats to people’s lives and well-being arise increasingly from processes that are worldwide in scope. The possibility of general nuclear war has been the most dramatic expression of our shared predicament, but potentially massive ecological disruptions and gross inequities generated by a global economy cause at least as much concern. Nevertheless, both the prevailing interpretations of what security can mean and the resources mobilized to put these interpretations into practice are fixed primarily in relation to the military requirements of supposedly sovereign states. We are faced, in short, with demands for some sort of world security, but have learned to think and act only in terms of the security of states. Symptoms of this dilemma are readily apparent. States are less and less convincing in their claims to offer the security that partly legitimizes their power and authority. Moreover, processe’s set in motion by the demands of military defense evidently make us all more and more insecure as inhabitants of a small and fragile planet. Whether judged through apocalyptic images of extermination, in terms of the comparative costs of missiles and medical facilities, or on the basis of accounts of the integration of military production into the seemingly benign routines of everyday life, we know that it is scarcely possible to invoke the term %ecurity” without sensing that something is dreadfully wrong with the way we now live. Elements of this dilemma have been familiar for a considerable time. They have provoked controversy ever since the states system emerged from the decaying feudal hierarchies of early modern Europe. The contradiction between the presumed legitimacy of war and claims about reason, progress, enlightenment, and civilization has

Realism, Change, and International Political Theory

Much recent commentary on the theory of international politics has focused on the analysis of change and the continuing vitality of political realism. This paper argues that the philosophical dilemmas posed by the concern with change and by the claim to political realism are intimately related. The argument is pursued in the context of contrasting traditions of political realism, of the antithesis between structuralism and historicism in contemporary social and political theory, and of recent tendencies and controversies in the literature on neorealist theories of international politics. The paper concludes that political realism ought to be understood less as a coherent theoretical position in its own right than as the site of a great many interesting claims and metaphysical disputes. As there is no single tradition of political realism, but rather a knot of historically constituted tensions and contradictions, these tensions and contradictions might be reconstituted in a more critical and creative manner. This involves an examination of the way the core categories of international political theory depend upon a particular formulation of the relationship between identity and difference—a formulation which must be refused.

Lines of Insecurity: International, Imperial, Exceptional

Recent literatures have become sceptical about the concept of an international, preferring to make claims about new forms of imperial or exceptional politics. This article examines the relation between these three concepts as conventionally understood within discourses of internationalism; expresses scepticism about the use of the term ‘imperial’ for capturing what is at stake in challenges to international order; and seeks to clarify what is at stake in contemporary practices of exceptionalism. Where exceptions were conventionally declared at the limits of the sovereign state, qualified by the ordering capacities of a system of sovereign states, enabled by a theory of history marking the modernity of sovereign authorities and inhibited by resistance to imperial and theological order, exceptions are now enacted in ways that exceed official cartographies of sovereign authorization. Consequently, traditions and debates about what it means to secure the modern subject that have largely reproduced options laid out by Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen in the 1920s and 1930s must become engaged with questions about the limits of specifically modern forms of political life. If exceptions are not being made where they are supposed to be made, subjects will not be secured where they are supposed to be secured.

History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations (1989)

The explanation of social and political life is a notoriously contentious enterprise, and the Anglo — American discipline of international relations is no exception to the general rule. As with so many other disciplines that have been shaped by the broader ambitions of post-war social science, controversy has occurred largely on the terrain of epistemology. All too often, the more far-reaching epistemological problems, posed by those who seek to understand what is involved in making knowledge claims about social and political processes, have been pushed aside in favor of more restricted concerns about method and research techniques. Narrowing the range of potential dispute in this manner has undoubtedly enhanced an appearance of professional solidarity. But it has also obscured many of the more troublesome and, in my view, more important fractures visible to anyone now canvassing contemporary debates about the general nature and possibility of social and political enquiry.

Political Sociology and the Problem of the International

This paper revisits the multiple theoretical antagonisms mobilised by a claimed opposition between the international and the global/local so as to elaborate the stakes of working through traditions of political sociology that have been marginalised in most forms of international relations theory. The paper especially addresses the contribution of recent work on the social production of limits and borders and the re-articulation of practices of exception. Resisting conventions of international theory predicated on Schmittian accounts of limits in territory and law, the paper assesses recent claims about sovereignty, security and liberty informed by a reflection about the way concepts of field and dispositif may be used in an analysis of the boundaries of contemporary politics. To this end, the paper draws attention to the topology of a moebius ribbon as an especially suggestive comparison with topologies affirming clear distinctions between internal and external sites of sociopolitical life.

Polis, Cosmopolis, Politics

Most debates about our collective futures remain in thrall to the polis, or at least to some vaguely remembered and creatively reimagined ideal of the polis expressed in modern statist claims to political community and identity - especially to the community of blood that we call the nation and the community of law that we engage as citizens. Some are content to declare or assume that this is what there is. Canonical traditions and grand theoretical assertions erase our sense of historical contingency. All ontological axiological, and epistemological possibilities are delineated in the stroke of an assertion, in the sovereign act of discrimination and authorization. Hobbes gave us what remains the most elegant modern account of how such an assertion might be achieved through the modern sovereign state. Kant gave us an altogether smoother, deeply ambivalent, but no less troubling, account of how it might be achieved once modern subjects learned to rule themselves, to minimize politics and maximize ethics. Other philosophers, and political economists, then taught us how to forget about what was involved in these declarations of modern possibility, these affirmations of the necessary freedom of the modern subject, allowing us to go looking for, or escaping from, politics in, say, the market, civil society, history, representation, and the personal. While claims about where and what political life is supposed to be have now been sharply contested over many centuries, we now keep catching ourselves affirming the natural necessity of the modern polis by reproducing the sovereign states own self-affirming account of how it is both natural and necessary, and all other alternatives are impossible, even if in some sense they might be desirable. Most would nonetheless insist that this self-proclaimed natural necessity is a historical achievement, and perhaps even a rather fragile one at that. It is this historical achievement that supposedly distinguishes us from those living in tribes and empires, even from

Culture, Discourse, Insecurity:

There is a special urgency about the developing patterns of military relationships that are visible in the modern world. This urgency is expressed through a wide range of ideological and philosophical prisms. I t is felt rather differently depending on geographical region. Sometimes concern is raised over highly specific weapons systems. At other times there is no more than a vague sense of broad historical trends. In whatever way this urgency is understood or expressed, it has undoubtedly become one of the most pressing themes in political life in the late twentieth century. The most obvious concern, at least in more prosperous societies, arises from the deployment of nuclear technology. The promise of final annihilation has transcended the bounds of religious eschatology to become an all too real possibility. This concern is heightened by instabilities in the geopolitical and strategic relations between the superpowers. The changing configurations of global power and multiple systemic and regional crises are made even more complex by a spectacular capacity for technological innovation in weapons systems. Whatever logic there has been to the way nuclear weapons have been managed over the past few decades now appears increasingly fragile. The teasing rituals of arms control negotiations and the constant resort to technological solutions for political problems do not inspire confidence. While the so-called nuclear arms race between the superpowers claims most attention, many analysts now point to a more general and insidious tendency to resort to military solutions to social and political conflict on a global scale. Military force, it is suggested, is becoming both more violent and more thoroughly integrated into different arenas of human activity. Armaments are becoming more and more lethal, even when non-nuclear. More significantly, they function not only as weapons, but also as commodities, as both military and economic artefacts. In his classic study On War, published in 1832, Karl von Clausewitz depicted war as “a remarkable trinity”

World Politics and Western Reason: Universalism, Pluralism, Hegemony*

Much recent thinking about international politics and world order reflects a number of challenges, at the levels of both theory and praxis, to the global hegemony of Western modernity. It converges upon a major critique of the universalist aspirations for one united world that have emerged from the utopian or idealist traditions of international political theory. Three elements of this critique are of particular importance: the reassertion of the value of nationalism and the autonomy of the state in the face of a tradition of thought which has usually viewed the state as the major problem to be overcome; an emphasis on the importance of ‘culture’ as a central focus of analysis; and the attempt to canvass non-Western cultural traditions as a necessary part of the search for a ‘just’ world order. This study is concerned to delineate the way in which each of these issues appears if examined in the context of recent critiques of the conventional categories of modern sociopolitical theory. It argues that there is a possibility that the critique of Western hegemonic discourse will become co-opted into the categorial scheme of that discourse. It also suggests that the external challenge to Western hegemonic discourse impinges directly upon a knot of difficulties within this discourse itself. It concludes that it is the convergence of these external and internal critiques which is important, for they both underline the extent to which many attempts to transcend the sterility of the conventional categories of world order thinking are subverted by a dichotomous logic of we/they, subject/object, universal/plural. Recognition of the limits of the current language of world order discourse clarifies the possibilities for transformation.

Security, Critique, Europe

though I have been neither formally involved in its production nor entirely able to avoid conversations with some of its participants or commentary on some of its specific formulations. My initial sense was that this is an important initiative, and I am increasingly persuaded that it marks a key moment in the self-articulation of an emerging scholarly community. I am also persuaded that this process of self-articulation is the primary achievement of the project; certainly more important than any of its substantive claims or its declared ambitions as a manifesto. It is especially interesting as an internal mapping of an emerging field of scholarship enacted primarily by junior scholars likely to make a career within the academic world they are in the process of creating. In the end, the text will be judged less on what it says in substantive terms than on how it helps to stimulate and shape future understandings of what it means to engage with claims about security in a critical rather than dogmatic manner. As such, the project expresses many broader developments. It both responds to and seeks to come to terms with a broad range of problems provoking anxiety not only in relation to specific arenas of public policy but also in relation to some of the most densely contested arenas of modern political principle. It has been energized through the increasingly Europeanized and networked research communities and institutions in which very different national and disciplinary expectations collide and intersect. At the same time, and in ways that are doubtless but nevertheless obscurely related, it responds to the rapid unravelling of concepts of security predicated on strict national and disciplinary divisions, especially as these had congealed into the conventional assumptions of Anglo-American theories of international relations. In this sense, the project is both an effect of and an attempt to make sense of historical and structural developments that have turned the analysis of security from a more-or-less ritualized account of nationalized identities to

On the Possibilities of World Order Discourse

As an expression of a particular historical moment and of particular sitesof privilege, the World Order Models Project has expressed a particular sense of time, a narrative about the present as an era of tremendous transformation, albeit a transformation that has been blocked by the spatial fragmentations of the states system and especially by the peculiar architectures of the Cold War. Its framing of the problem of world order arises from a sustained concern with the structures of political power, with the seemingly intransigent capacity of a states system founded in early-modern Europe to reproduce practices of self-interest in an era urgently in need of collective vision. As an expression of privileged status and as an heir to intellectual traditions more impressed by historical disruptions than by structural reifications, this literature has perhaps been overdetermined in its embrace of universalism as the obvious solution to the fragmentations and particularisms of the modern states system. From history, one could see that the times were certainly changing, and changing in a manner that made it possible-indeed, sensible-to speak of common fates and common futures: of humanity as a whole as the bearer not only of common instrumentalities but also of shared rights and a converging culture on a small and vulnerable planet. From geopolitics, it was clear that nuclear weapons iR the hands of what Hedley Bull once called the great irresponsibles threatened universal annihilation and required a much less volatile set of ordering principles than one predicated on the necessity and legitimacy of war. From this place, at this time, what other ways of framing alternative futures could there possibly be? Even in retrospect, this diagnosis commands considerable re-