Xavier Guillaume

Europe, Knowledge, Politics — Engaging with the Limits: The c.a.s.e. collective Responds

HAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’, the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitizationHAVING ONE’S WORK closely read and critically debated is a rare pleasure. It was thus with great joy that we saw that our collective article ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) provoked several thoughtful responses to the theoretical premises of the manifesto and its intellectual and political ramifications. The replies to the manifesto created a new space of selfinterrogation in which the c.a.s.e. collective grappled with some of the limits that our critics addressed. Before we address some of these more directly, it may be useful to restate the original objective of the collective manifesto. First, the authors that were part of the collective had a desire to push critical innovations in security studies beyond the framing of critical security studies in terms of schools. The aim of working and writing as a collective, as a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, was based on a desire to break with the competitive dynamics of individualist research agendas. Alluding to the emancipatory connotations of the word ‘manifesto’,1 the aim of the article was to carve out and open up an intellectual space for critical thinking – both in the disciplinary sense of formulating an alternative space to mainstream security studies and in the political sense of thinking through the ethico-political implications of security and securitization. If, in this sense, the article can be read as a manifesto (with, we should note, the important prefix ‘networked’), we did not assert, as Andreas Behnke Rejoinder

The Right to Justification: Towards a Critical Theory of Justice and Democracy. An Interview with Rainer Forst

Xavier Guillaume: How did you become interested in political theory? What were your formative intellectual influences? And in light of those influences, how would you reflect on your own trajectory in terms of the normative questions you have tried to raise and engage with over the past two decades?

Misdirected understandings: Narrative matrices in Japanese politics of alterity toward the West

Abstract This article aims to understand how the politics of alterity in Japan led to a misdirected understanding of the West during the early Tokugawa period and the interwar periods. By means of two specific narrative matrices shinkoku [land of the gods] and kokutai [national polity essence], conceptual frameworks that operate with powerful begetting capabilities, it is shown how parallel structurations are at work in two distinct, but decisive, confrontations with the West. Shinkoku and kokutai discourses were specific self-understandings/representations promoted by ruling elites, which combined internal and external elements, and which developed the notion of a group and a related process of identification. originating in medieval times, the shinkoku discourse was used during the early modern period to confront alternative self-understandings/representations, perceived as seditious and pernicious; in particular, christianity. Within the country, shinkoku discourse contributed to the design of the Tokugawas knowledge and moral spaces, in which a Japanese national identity was to be situated. The kokutai discourse, although essentially “spiritual” in the first half of the nineteenth century, rapidly became the same kind of knowledge and moral-spaces marker as the shinkoku discourse. This became more evident and dramatic during the Showa era when kokutai became a legal tool, in the 1925 Peace Preservation Law, to counter the perceived threat of what was described as either modanizumu [modernism] or Amerikanizumu [Americanism]. By means of these two narrative matrices, it will be shown that the constant aim of the Japanese ruling elites was to develop and implement a politics of alterity. The aim was therefore to unify, homogenize and naturalize a specific self-understanding/representation for the Japanese people that eradicated diversity and difference. Thus, orthodoxy and normalcy in Japan should be seen as misdirected understandings of the West, aimed at constructing a Japanese national identity.