week eleven: post structuralist theories of IR

What is postmodern scholarship characterised by?

Postmodern scholarship is characterised more by diversity than by a common set of beliefs.

It’s also become a contentious label – feared embracing postmodern values would throw us into a dangerous nihilist void.

What are the two ways to conceptualise inquiries into the post-modern?

Attempts to demonstrate that we have entered a fundamentally new historical epoch

Modernity is generally understood to be the historical period that followed the middle ages – linked to features as industrialisation, advances in science and technology, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The nation-state with all its disciplinary practices emerged as the dominant political actor.

Postmodern approaches assume changes over the past few decades have been significant enough to suggest we have entered a fundamentally different period: associated with processes of globalisation, such as the rapid evolution and spread of mass media, computers and other communicative measures. These have led to a ‘transparent society’ to an ‘ecstasy of communication’ to a post industrial phase whose main feature is knowledge production or advance of new technologies and consumer democracy that provides capitalism with an inherently new cultural logic.

Often postmodern dynamics and perspectives are intertwined with postcolonial questions.

When did post-modernists enter ir?

Entry into IR: Gained prominence in the 1980s during the "third debate" over epistemology (how we know world politics).

What are the approaches of post-modernist in IR?

Dissident Approaches: Critique realist, positivist, state-centric, and masculine perspectives.

Grand Narratives: Postmodernists oppose universalizing frameworks that claim to explain or emancipate everyone.

Focus: Examining processes of inclusion/exclusion in knowledge and politics.

What is power and knowledge within IR according to post-modernism?

Defining "common sense" is seen as an act of political power, shaping what is possible or legitimate in theory and practice.

Is post modernism a right or left wing ideology?

Post modernism is thus neither a right wing or left wing, but rather an approach that urges us to grapple with the political nature of the foundation we stablish to organise collective life.

That is the best we can do: recognise the links between power and knowledge so politics can become as just and inclusive as possible not in the form of uncontested truth claims that lie beyond scrutiny, but in a manner that cultivates awareness of the inevitable process of inclusion and exclusion that lies at the heart of advancing political positons.

Hansen talks about seduction, in a postmodern sense. What does that mean within security and security narratives?

Emotional Appeals in Security Narratives: Hansen highlights how political leaders often use emotional appeals to frame security issues, such as invoking fear or patriotism, to garner support for security measures. These emotional appeals can be seen as forms of seduction that influence public perception and acceptance of security policies.

Gender and Security: In her broader work, Hansen examines how gender dynamics play a role in the construction of security narratives. She argues that traditional security studies often overlook gendered perspectives, which can lead to incomplete analyses of security issues.

Implications for Security Studies: By integrating the concept of seduction into security studies, researchers can develop a more nuanced understanding of how security issues are constructed and how they resonate with audiences. This approach encourages scholars to consider not only the discursive elements of security but also the emotional and affective dimensions that influence public perception and policy.

→ the interplay between power, discourse and emotion.

what is post structuralism

Poststructuralism: disturbing/challenging/ questioning the categories we use to think with since 1960s

Sceptical of then-dominant (modernist) Western philosophies, particularly of dominant philosophical streams of thought: liberalism and marxism. Radical Marxist-inspired but not advocates of Marx – scholars who were writing on the tradition and set themselves in opposition to…

Developed from critiques of structuralist thought (notably Ferdinand de Saussure

and Claude Lévi-Strauss)

Identified the rules and patterns of how meaning is created and communicated.

We want to pay attention to how meaning is more fluid rather than rigid.

minimal commitments of post structuralism?

1) The self is contingent (neither essential nor fixed). You have subjectivity according to liberalism and Marxism as virtue of being human – but post-structuralists believe there is no single authoritative, knowing self. We are always being constituted in relation to the society we inhabit.

2) Meaning is constructed in the interactions between the self  and the text (see Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author). Just as there is no single authoritative contingent self – meaning is always constructed between the author and text. We cannot assume that we truly know what the author intended to mean, we only know what we bring to it (all the dimensions of our own experiences affect interpretation. We are constructing meaning through text always.

3) All texts have multiple and multifaceted possible interpretations. No overarching or singular truth. Multiple competing interpretations, no apparent way of adjudicating between them. What makes one interpretation more valid than another becomes an inherently political question.

Material realities cannot be realised without language. We cannot know materiality other than through language – we are always caught up in the political side of language.

Consider this: if she throws a ball and it hits you, you know that she did this. It’s fact. But you don’t know why she did it? Until she begins to put language and explain it. Whatever the case, we cannot access meaning unless it’s through language.

What becomes accepted as truth changes creates what Foucault calls a ‘regime of truth’ – norms, ethics, morality, politics etc. They are very complex and these regimes are rooted in all sorts of governing arrangements.

What are the key concepts of post-modernism?

1. Discourse

2. Power

3. Binary opposition

4. Performativity

What exactly is discourse?

One of the most important aspects.

More than ‘just’ language. Discourse has ontological significance.

If we cannot access the materiality/objective reality of the world other than through language, we need to pay attention to discourse.

Practices/ images/ buildings: all of the meaning-making symbols, texts, and

tropes that we use to communicate

Constitutive of social/ political reality

‘What is denied is not that ... objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence’ (Laclau and Mouffe [1985] 2001, 108)

Discourse analysis ‘consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972: 49, emphasis added).

Discourse are made up of practices, forms of representation. Within a discourse, we have a series of practices that we present and attach meaning to. Meaning is constructed through the way we describe, think about and encounter.

Discourses are attentive to power because they cannot stabilise meaning without repetition and exercise of power. To create and recreate, stabilise and restabilise around a particular thing.

Power is evident in all discursive. Who has it, why, what kind of meaning is being allowed and denied? It is always fair to ask what interests are being served here.

What exactly is power?

Power (/knowledge)Power is productive not just repressive: power is “a productive network whichruns through the whole social body, much more than ... a negative instance whosefunction is repression’ (Foucault 1977, 119).

How power is seductive, induces pleasure. Power works through everybody in a discursive field. It is also dispersed throughout the whole body of society. We all play our own part within these power arrangements. Every discursive practice is simultaneously a practice of power – they are inseparable and two sides of the same coin.

“There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its

persistence and instability. What I would propose ... is a return to the notion of

matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes

over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter”

(Butler 1993, 9, emphasis in original)

What exactly is binary opposition?

How meaning is relational and constituted through association/rejection of things that are good/bad.

“the meaning of a concept is often defined in relation to its direct opposite – as

in night/day” (Hall 1997, 31)

“we are not dealing with ... peaceful coexistence ... but rather, a violent

hierarchy. One of the two terms governs” (Derrida 1972, 41) Dichotomies “(right versus wrong, rational versus emotional, strong versus weak) forestall our consideration of nonoppositional constructs (right in relation to plausible, persuasive, possible, coherent; rational in relation to consistent, instrumental, logical; strong in relation to effective, principled, respected)” (Peterson and Runyan 1999, 38).

“The subject” (Self/Other)

The self is constituted in/ through discourse (or “performed”, per Butler [see next slide]) and always in relation to the Other

There is no “core self” (the self is emergent)

This raises complex questions about agency and autonomy

Intersects here with postcolonial thought, especially Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)

What is performativity?

Building on the ideas of Austin and Searle regarding speech acts (performative

utterances)

“If the body is not a ‘being’, but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is

politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field of gender hierarchy and

compulsory heterosexuality, then what language is left for understanding this corporeal

enactment, gender, that constitutes its ‘interior’ signification on its surface? ... Consider

gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an ‘act’, as it were, which is both intentional

and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent

construction of meaning” (Butler [1990] 1999, 189-190)

“there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed’ ... the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and

through the deed” (Butler [1990] 1999, 195)

What are examples of security as practice in IR?

Representations of identity are always employed in the legitimisation of foreign

policy (Hansen, 2006, p.30)

Hansen uses discourse analysis and a historical genealogy to trace the representations of identity of the Bosnian war

How the Self vs Other is used within Security Discourses: ‘The Balkans’, ‘The Bosnian

Victim’, ‘The Civilised (and Innocent) West’

How does poststructuralism tie to international political economy?

Poststructuralism and International Political Economy (IPE)

Question neutrality of economics, IPE, and global governance more

broadly

How is ‘economic growth’, ‘labour’ and ‘financial stability’ defined, and

who do these definitions privilege/ disadvantage

How are these definitions gendered, and racialised?

Thinkers: Penny Griffin, Georgia Peters

How does neoliberalism and gendered foundations of global governance tie into post-structuralism?

Gendering The World Bank: Neoliberalism and the Gendered Foundations of Global Governance

“Discourse analysis does not look for truth, but who claims to have truth” (Carver, 2002, p.52 cited in Griffin, 2009, p.26)

“...the Heterosexual Economic Man becomes an essential truth to neoliberal discourse, a ‘fact’ of economic interaction to which all subjects must modify themselves and their behaviour” (Griffin, 2009, p.208)

This determines the ‘input’ and ‘outcome’ of the World Bank’s strategies

How can post-structuralism be used in IR?

What knowledge does the discourse presume? What does it take as objective?- How are certain objects/ subjects described? What adjectives are used to describe them?- How are different subjects positioned in these discourses? Who is in a position of privilege, and who is not?- What are the effects of these positionings, descriptions, and assumptions? How does it impact how we act? (Doty, 1993, p.306-307)