Richard Devetak

The Gothic scene of international relations: ghosts, monsters, terror and the sublime after September 11

Accepting Furet’s claim that events acquire meaning and significance only in the context of narratives, this article argues that a particular type of international relations narrative has emerged with greater distinction after the traumatic experience of September 11: the gothic narrative. In a sense the political rhetoric of President Bush marks the latest example of America’s fine tradition in the gothic genre that began with Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne and extends through Henry James to Stephen King. His discourse of national security, it will be shown, assumes many of the predicates of gothic narratives. The gothic scenes evoked by Bush as much as Poe involve monsters and ghosts in tenebrous atmospheres that generate fear and anxiety, where terror is a pervasive tormentor of the senses. Poe’s narratives, for example, turn on encounters with dark, perverse, seemingly indomitable, forces often entombed in haunted houses. Similarly, Bush’s post-September 11 narratives play upon fears of terrorists and rogue states who are equally dark, perverse and indomitable forces. In both cases, ineffable and potently violent and cruel forces haunt and terrorise the civilised, human world.

Between Kant and Pufendorf: humanitarian intervention, statist anti-cosmopolitanism and critical international theory

Abstract. Immanuel Kant and Samuel Pufendorf were both exercised by the relationship between politics, morality and lawful authority; a relationship that goes to the heart of the sovereign state’s existence and legitimacy. However, while Kant defended the authority of the moral law, believing morality provides higher authoritative norms than the sovereign state, Pufendorf defends the political morality of authority, believing the sovereign state should submit to no higher moral norms. The rivalry between these two positions is reprised in current debate between cosmopolitanism and statism over humanitarian intervention. Arguing against statism, this article defends a Habermasian-style critical international theory which affords a ‘cosmopolitanism without imperialism’. Introduction Born in 1632 in the Saxon town of Dorfchemnitz, Samuel Pufendorf grew up having experienced the horrible brutality and senseless violence of the Thirty Years War. He held university appointments at Heidelberg and Lund before eventually working as historian and counsellor to the Swedish and then Brandenburg courts. Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the Prussian port city of Konigsberg and lectured at its local university. He apparently never left his home town, but on his daily walks the urbane philosopher of enlightenment must have travelled the world in his mind, conjuring ideas of a cosmopolitan system of rights for all peoples across the globe. No such cosmopolitan thoughts occurred to the well-travelled Pufendorf. His political thought remained scaled at the level of the sovereign territorial state that was taking shape across Europe. But for all the differences of personal biography and political outlook, both Kant and Pufendorf were exercised by the relationship between politics, morality and lawful authority: a relationship that goes to the heart of the sovereign state’s existence and legitimacy.

Security and the War on Terror

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 marked a turning point in international politics, representing a new type of threat that could not easily be anticipated or prevented through state-based structures of security alone. Opening up interdisciplinary conversations between strategic, economic ethical and legal approaches to global terrorism, this edited book recognises a fundamental issue: while major crises initially tend to reinforce old thinking and behavioural patterns, they also allow societies to challenge and overcome entrenched habits, thereby creating the foundations for a new and perhaps more peaceful future. The objective of this volume is to address the issues that are at stake in this dual process of political closure, and to therefore rethink how states can respond to terrorist threats. The contributors offer a unique combination, being drawn from leading conceptual theorists to policy-oriented analysts, from senior academics to junior researchers. The book explores how terrorism has had a profound impact on how security is being understood and implemented, and uses a range of hitherto neglected sources of insights, such as those between political, economic, legal and ethical factors, to examine the nature and meaning of security in a rapidly changing world.

Diplomatic divergence in the Antipodes: Globalisation, foreign policy and state identity in Australia and New Zealand

This article compares the constitutive relationship between foreign policy and globalisation in Australia and New Zealand. Drawing upon insights from constructivist international relations theory we argue that foreign policy instantiates a states social identity, its self-understanding of its role and moral purpose by projecting a distinctive image onto the global stage. We explore the differences and the similarities between Australia and New Zealand by examining how each country views international order, global trade, global governance and human rights and international security. Although both countries appear to be transforming themselves into more ‘globalised’ states, there are significant differences in the way each seeks to balance the competing strategic and normative demands. This diplomatic divergence, we argue, stems from different conceptions of state identity.

After the event: Don DeLillo's White Noise and September 11 narratives

In this article I enquire into the conceptualisation and construction of the event, a topic much neglected in International Relations, but one which has become increasingly central to recent debates in continental philosophy. I juxtapose the fictional event depicted in Don DeLillos brilliant novel, White Noise, with the non-fictional event of September 11. I suggest that apprehending any kind of socially or politically significant event, depends on narrative. To take the argument further, I argue that narrative is a crucial device by which we moderns (and postmoderns) actually experience such events and social reality.

A rival Enlightenment? Critical international theory in historical mode

This article proposes an understanding of critical international theory (CIT) as an historical rather than philosophical mode of knowledge. To excavate this historical mode of theorizing it offers an alternative account of CITs intellectual sources. While most accounts of critical international theory tend to focus on inheritances from Kant, Marx and Gramsci, or allude in general terms to debts to the Frankfurt School and the Enlightenment, this is not always the case. Robert Cox, for example, has repeatedly professed intellectual debts to realism and historicism. The argument advanced here builds on Cox by situating CIT in a longer intellectual heritage that extends from Renaissance humanism and passes through Absolutist historiography before reaching Enlightenment civil histories, including Vicos history of civil institutions. The critical element in this intellectual heritage was the formation of a secular political historicism critically disposed to metaphysical claims based on moral philosophies. By recovering this neglected inheritance of criticism, we can articulate not only a critical theory to rival problem-solving theories, but propose a conception of theory as a historical mode of knowledge that rivals philosophical modes yet remains critical by questioning prevailing intellectual assumptions in International Relations theory.

Historiographical Foundations of Modern International Thought: Histories of the European States-System from Florence to Göttingen

Summary The foundations of modern international thought were constructed out of diverse idioms and disciplines. In his impressive book, Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage focuses on the normative idioms of natural law and political philosophy from the Anglophone world, from Hobbes and Locke to Burke and Bentham. I focus on parallel developments in the empirically-oriented disciplines of history and historiography to trace the emergence of histories of the states-system in the Italian- and German-speaking worlds, from Bruni and Sarpi to Pufendorf and Heeren. Taking seriously Armitages remark that ‘the pivotal moments in the formation of modern international thought were often points of retrospective reconstruction’, I argue that the historical disciplines supplied another significant intellectual context in which the modern world could be imagined as ‘a world of states’.

An Introduction to International Relations

Part 1 Introduction: 1. What Is International Relations?. Part 2 Micro-international relations: 2. The Actors. 3. Foreign Policy as the Pursuit of the National Interest. 4. Influences on Foreign Policy-making - The Domestic Environment. 5. Influences on Foreign Policy-making - the International Environment, 6. Means of Achieving Objectives. 7. The Processes of Policy-making. Part 3 Macro-international relations: 8. International Systems. 9. State Systems. 10. Behavioural Systems. 11. System Transformation. Part 4 Micro-macro linkages: 12. The Micro-macro Conceptualisation. 13. Some Other International Relations Conceptualisations. Conclusion. Further Reading. Index.

The modern state and its origins

Introduction This chapter introduces the principal actor in international relations: the sovereign state. It begins by defining the state. Second, it explores the origins of the state in the transition from the medieval to the modern world. Third, it examines the concept of sovereignty, especially as it was enunciated in early modern political thought. Fourth, it surveys different historical explanations of how the sovereign state triumphed over alternative forms of political society. Finally, it surveys some of the continuing debates about the morality and utility of the modern state. What is a state? The state may not be the only actor in world politics (see chapter 23), but it is widely recognised as the one that has the greatest impact on peoples lives. It is, as John Dunn (2000: 66) says, ‘the principal institutional site of political experience’. This is why the title of Australian scholar J. D. B. Millers book, A world of states, seems like such an apt description of international relations. But although we live in a world of states today it was not always thus. At various moments in time, city-states, empires, feudal states, absolutist states or nation-states have been the dominant institutional form. So although humanity has always been divided into separate political societies, the character of these societies has varied historically and geographically.

International Relations Theory

Since the 1960s the discipline of International Relations (IR) has grown increasingly exercised by its origins and development. This self-reflection has become an important aspect of the discipline and its self-image. In developing this self-image the discipline itself has become an important object of inquiry in IR. A number of articles and book chapters have been published on the historiography of the discipline and on the shifting contours of the discipline as it passed through different phases or debates (Bull 1972b, 33). In their different ways these reflections are attempts to capture the discipline’s shape and to define its proper focus. Such reflections are never simply innocent exercises in reminiscing; they are political attempts to legitimise certain approaches, whether they are dominant or marginalised.