Time, Temporality And Violence In International Relations: (De)Fatalizing The Present, Forging Radical Alternatives (Interventions)

This work brings together critical theorists, artists, and poets using time and temporality as the conceptual framework for investigating a diverse array of experiences and structures of oppression and exploitation in International Relations, focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization, disrupting dominant modes of understanding our present times. This book argues the present as a vulnerable space through which radically different temporal experiences appear. Defatalizing the present, or thinking of the present as self-interrupting, irrevocably ruptured, and discontinuous, requires multiple forms of struggle that articulate multiple figures for projects without a telos. It calls for an interruption of final ends and final meanings. The scholars look at different parts of the world to consider the ways people participate in shaping their societies while disrupting the violent strategies of expediency, including laws and democratic institutions that abstract their everyday struggles and, consequently, betray them. Starting with an examination of these shattering experiences of betrayal provides a way to trace how imaginations become captive and how the "everyday politics of expediency" re-animate a faith that takes people towards a revolution that is neither about redemption or erasure but about a new writing. These authors and artists examine the logics of violence: wars, imprisonments, slaughtering, and increasing levels of unemployment and poverty. They engage with slavery, social death, revolutions, and the temporal transformations wrought by neoliberalism, to analyze how people and things are transformed. They look at global uprisings and shattering experiences that have led people to organize against and intervene in repressive mechanisms. If the project of radical transformation demands this disruption and unruliness, and if we are to avoid repeating the expedient institutionalization and appropriations of relations, then defatalizing the present demands an aesthetic politics, including creative theorizations that sustain alternative fragments of imaginations other than the dominant ones. This groundbreaking new work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory and postcolonial studies.

• | Author: Anna M. Agathangelou, Kyle Killian
• | Publisher: Routledge
• | Publication Date: Mar 08, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 342 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Political Science
• | ISBN-10: 0415712718
• | ISBN-13: 9780415712712