Post-positivism, Post-structuralism, Post-modernism in International Relations

“how many circulating clichés do we have to absorb before having the competence to utter an opinion about a film, a companion, a situation, a political stance? If you began to probe the origin of each of your idiosyncrasies, would you not [trace a] star-like shape that would force you to visit many places, people, times, events that you had largely forgotten? This tone of voice, this gait, this posture…”

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

Post-modernism

Post-positivism

American Revolution 1775

French Revolution 1789

Scientific Method

Progress

"a late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories."

Industrial Revolution

Positivism: "a philosophical system recognizing only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism."

Modernity

Russian Revolution 1917

August Comte, Henri De Saint-Simon

and the Science of Society

Positivism

The Enlightenment

Mao's Great Leap Forward

The Holocaust

Rationality becomes instrumental

Stalin's Gulags

Universalism as the

destruction of difference

Revolutionary Terror

Industrial Warfare

Capitalism and alienation

Science used for destruction

Nuclear Weapons

Emancipation

Technological Progress

Knowledge

Rationality

Mastery/Control

Universal Truths

Post-structuralism

Application to IR Theory

Structuralism: "a method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behaviour, culture, and experience, which focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system".

Networks

Biopower

Governmentality

Richard Ashley, Untying the Sovereign State (1988)

Political Community

Power

Fluidity

Hardt and Negri, Empire (2000)

Jens Bartelson, A Geneology of Sovereignty (1995)

The State

Lyotard

Decentred

Concepts and Methods

National Identity

Sovereignty

Meaning is constructed

The Subject

Discourses

Science

Rationality

Foreign Policy

Reality is mediated

Meta-Narratives

Borders

Discourse creates objects

Inside/Outside

David Campbell, Writing Security (1998)

Rob Walker, Inside/Outside (1993)

Religion

Inter-textuality

Boundaries

Foucault

Subaltern Groups

Knowledge is context dependent

Recovers marginalised histories

Othering

Knowledge/Power

Geneology

Lene Hansen, Security as Practice:

Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (2006)

Shapiro and Alker, Challenging Boundaries:

Global Flows, Territorial Identities (1996)

Reveals historical gaps

Traces singular events

Power is productive

Power produces subjects

Biopower

Subject/Object

No human nature

Rejects modern bounded rational subject

Deconstruction

No Objective Observer

Binaries

Subjects produced via inclusions and exclusions

Take theories apart

to discover their biases

Derrida

Conclusions

Against Totalities

All universalisms lead to

elimination of difference

Emancipation

Negative Critique

Multiple Truths

Multiple Narratives

Relativism

Inter-textuality

Plurality

Truth

Anti-Foundational

Nihilism

Multiple voices

No grand narrative

Agency

Anti-humanist?

Sites of Resistance

No modern 'subject'