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International crises, most recently the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often radically change our view of the world and our place within it. The European Union (EU) has been particularly impacted by these developments... more
International crises, most recently the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, often radically change our view of the world and our place within it. The European Union (EU) has been particularly impacted by these developments because these crises have accentuated some of its ontological and epistemological uncertainties and insecurities. While the EU’s resilience turn initiated by the EU Global Strategy of 2016 aimed at strengthening the EU’s ability to prepare and recover from external shocks and crises, since then, the concept of resilience has undergone a transformation. In recent years, we have seen the EU turning back in on itself and abandoning the radical aspects of resilience. Hence a paradox has emerged – the more complex the problems faced by the EU, the more it turns away from the logics of complexity present in the idea of resilience. In this article, we examine this conceptual shift through the lenses of concepts in action and the way these have reflected c...
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This article sets out a new way of understanding how resilience works as a form of governmentality with specific focus on international interventions. It argues that resilience governs though failure and denial, suggesting that it builds... more
This article sets out a new way of understanding how resilience works as a form of governmentality with specific focus on international interventions. It argues that resilience governs though failure and denial, suggesting that it builds on both failures to govern complex systems and past failures of intervention, in order to promote a new governance through denial that further shifts responsibility onto the governed. It suggests that resilience, rather than being a radical new approach, fits with existing discourse and practices, but offers something new in terms of its approach to knowledge, the social, and the human. Running this through the themes of failure and denial, the article suggests that resilience offers certain possibilities for human action, but that its emancipatory potential is largely constrained by the way it limits how we understand the bigger picture. This is explored in relation to international interventions and the way that resilience contributes to global go...
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The aim of this article is to understand populism as a hegemonic project involving a struggle for power between different social forces. We take a critical realist approach in defining populism. This implies several things. We develop a... more
The aim of this article is to understand populism as a hegemonic project involving a struggle for power between different social forces. We take a critical realist approach in defining populism. This implies several things. We develop a new approach to understanding populist politics by taking neither a purely discursive (Laclau), nor a solely structural (Poulantzas), but a critical realist approach and analysing the three-way relationship between structural conditions, agency, and institutional framework. Second, it implies that populist politics is composed of complex and often contradictory dynamics and emergent features involving mainly domestic but also international processes. We develop this through a combination of three concepts – passive revolution, hegemonic depth, and partial hegemony. These indicate how a hegemonic project is situated in deeper social relations and how hegemonic leadership responds to this. We take the policies of AKP government in Turkey as a case in p...
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Resilience has emerged as a key theme in recent policy making. It spans a range of policy fields from infrastructure protection through to humanitarian intervention. This Research Paper looks at resilience as a theme of development... more
Resilience has emerged as a key theme in recent policy making. It spans a range of policy fields from infrastructure protection through to humanitarian intervention. This Research Paper looks at resilience as a theme of development strategy and humanitarian intervention and examines how it has emerged in German policy making. It argues that the dominant approach to resilience is a form of neoliberal governmentality that seeks to govern populations from a distance, devolve responsibility to people and communities, promote market mechanisms, encourage entrepreneurial behaviour and promote adaptation innovation and transformation among traditional communities. However, it is also recognised that this is a strongly Anglo-Saxon approach, targeted at specific individuals and communities. The purpose of the paper is to consider the extent to which German policy making is simply a reflection of this dominant Anglo-Saxon approach, or whether there is a more distinctive German view of resilie...
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In this chapter it is argued that resilience is a strongly Anglo-Saxon idea which is, nonetheless, gaining influence in other countries, albeit in selected areas. Focusing on its emergence in two different areas of German policy... more
In this chapter it is argued that resilience is a strongly Anglo-Saxon idea which is, nonetheless, gaining influence in other countries, albeit in selected areas. Focusing on its emergence in two different areas of German policy making—national infrastructure protection and overseas disaster and humanitarian intervention—we here compare German understandings of resilience with the more established discourse in the UK and US. Here we will look at differences of emphasis in the German and Anglo-Saxon approaches to infrastructure resilience as well as identifying similarities, particularly in overseas intervention where an Anglo-Saxon approach is more widely accepted by the main actors in the field.
This contribution challenges the way that IR has traditionally set up its field of analysis and in particular the framework of system/unit. This framework has been reinforced by the work of neo-realism and the levels of analysis debate to... more
This contribution challenges the way that IR has traditionally set up its field of analysis and in particular the framework of system/unit. This framework has been reinforced by the work of neo-realism and the levels of analysis debate to the point where it is accepted even by many critical IR scholars. By and large the international has come to be defined as a structure or a system, while the units may range from individuals to states. This distinction runs parallel to other (perhaps more methodological) oppositions such as holism/individualism and macro/microtheory. While there are many debates as to where to place the emphasis, there are not so many debates about such distinctions themselves. This essay is concerned with showing how we might question such a way of seeing things and examines the Marxist tradition to see how things might be conceptualised differently. The first section will criticise IR approaches while the second will explore Marxist approaches. By switching attention to Marxism it can be shown how issues raised within IR such as reductionism have quite different meanings elsewhere.
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This paper argues that the current calls for a practice turn in International Relations (IR) while positive in many respects, are problematic and potentially limiting because they are premised on a confused understanding of the role of... more
This paper argues that the current calls for a practice turn in International Relations (IR) while positive in many respects, are problematic and potentially limiting because they are premised on a confused understanding of the role of philosophy and realist philosophy in particular and a restricted view of the role of sociological investigation. This arises from the problematic tendency to lapse into advocacy of an anti-realist philosophical and sociological imagination. We suggest that the problems that practice theorists point to should lead not to knee-jerk anti-realism but rather can motivate a reinvigorated conversation with realism. This entails revisiting the role of philosophy, realism, and sociology in the study of practices. We argue that far from being antithetical to practice theory, a reconsideration of realist philosophy helps make sense of the role of practice and provides those advocating practice theory with better tools to deal with the challenges which motivated ...
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The European Union is facing multiple challenges. Departing from mainstream theory, this article adopts a fresh approach to understanding integration. It does so by taking two theoretical steps. The first introduces the structure–agency... more
The European Union is facing multiple challenges. Departing from mainstream theory, this article adopts a fresh approach to understanding integration. It does so by taking two theoretical steps. The first introduces the structure–agency debate in order to make explicit the relationship between macro-structures, the institutional arrangements at European Union level and agency. The second proposes that the state of integration should be understood as the outcome of contestation between competing hegemonic projects that derive from underlying social processes and that find their primary expression in domestic politics. These two steps facilitate an analysis of the key areas of contestation in the contemporary European Union, illustrated by an exploration of the current crisis in the European Union, and open up the development of an alternative, critical, theory of integration.
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Civil society organizations and grassroots groups are often unable to play an active role in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding. A possible explanation for the observed challenges in peacebuilding is the gap or decoupling... more
Civil society organizations and grassroots groups are often unable to play an active role in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding. A possible explanation for the observed challenges in peacebuilding is the gap or decoupling between international expectations and norms from practical action, local norms and capacities. External actors are often overly instrumental and operate according to a general template that fails to start from what the local capacities might actually be. This often leads to the decoupling of general values from practical action, which helps account for the observed barriers of engaging local civil and community organizations in reconstruction. We examine the different types of decoupling and the challenges these present. We evaluate our general theoretical argument using evidence based on the experiences of Liberian women’s civil society organizations. Given the compliance of the Liberian government with international norms, we should expect external a...
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... After criticizing Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Alessandro Ferrara, Martin Seel, and Axel Honneth for failing to provide 'objectivist' (non-arbitrary and universal) standards for their ... Edited by John Rundell,... more
... After criticizing Michel Foucault, Charles Taylor, Alessandro Ferrara, Martin Seel, and Axel Honneth for failing to provide 'objectivist' (non-arbitrary and universal) standards for their ... Edited by John Rundell, Danielle Petherbridge, Jan Bryant, John Hewitt and Jeremy Smith. ...
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... For Jade, Oisin and Yanina Marx@2000 was first published in 2000 in a cased edition in Great Britain by Macmillan Press Ltd ... Copyright © Ronaldo Munck, 2000 Cover designed by AndrewCorbett Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by... more
... For Jade, Oisin and Yanina Marx@2000 was first published in 2000 in a cased edition in Great Britain by Macmillan Press Ltd ... Copyright © Ronaldo Munck, 2000 Cover designed by AndrewCorbett Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Biddies Ltd, www.biddles.co.uk A ...
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This is a highly stimulating book that sets out to challenge conventional ideas about the role and function of the police. It questions both liberal conceptions that relate the role of the police to the maintenance of law, and Marxist... more
This is a highly stimulating book that sets out to challenge conventional ideas about the role and function of the police. It questions both liberal conceptions that relate the role of the police to the maintenance of law, and Marxist approaches that restrict the police function to a repressive one. Instead, Neocleous argues for an extended conception of the police that relates it to what he calls the fabrication of social order. Neocleous develops his expanded conception of the role of the police in relation to how civil society is ordered. Challenging the modern use of the term, he looks at how: ‘As noun, verb and adjective “police” was historically used to describe the way order was achieved, and part of the argument here is to suggest that it is through policing that the state shapes and orders civil society’ (p. xi). This ordering of society has an important philosophical aspect to it as the role of police relates to crucial bourgeois ideas of sovereignty, legitimacy and consent. In short, the role of the police is important to the selfunderstanding of bourgeois society. Mark Neocleous The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power
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> series offers a selection of concise introductions to particular traditions in socio-cal thought. It aims to deepen the reader's knowledge of particular theoretical roaches and at the same time to enhance their wider... more
> series offers a selection of concise introductions to particular traditions in socio-cal thought. It aims to deepen the reader's knowledge of particular theoretical roaches and at the same time to enhance their wider understanding of sociological arising. Each book will offer: a history of the chosen approach and the debates that z driven it forward; a discussion of the current state of the debates within the roach (or debates with other approaches); and an argument for the distinctive con-ution of the approach and its likely future value. 'dished
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PHRONESIS A series jrom Verso edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moujfe Since 1989, when the first Phronesis book was published, many events of fundamental importance to the series have taken place. Some of them initially brought the... more
PHRONESIS A series jrom Verso edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Moujfe Since 1989, when the first Phronesis book was published, many events of fundamental importance to the series have taken place. Some of them initially brought the hope that great possibilities ...
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This is a highly stimulating book that sets out to challenge conventional ideas about the role and function of the police. It questions both liberal conceptions that relate the role of the police to the maintenance of law, and Marxist... more
This is a highly stimulating book that sets out to challenge conventional ideas about the role and function of the police. It questions both liberal conceptions that relate the role of the police to the maintenance of law, and Marxist approaches that restrict the police function to a repressive one. Instead, Neocleous argues for an extended conception of the police that relates it to what he calls the fabrication of social order. Neocleous develops his expanded conception of the role of the police in relation to how civil society is ordered. Challenging the modern use of the term, he looks at how: ‘As noun, verb and adjective “police” was historically used to describe the way order was achieved, and part of the argument here is to suggest that it is through policing that the state shapes and orders civil society’ (p. xi). This ordering of society has an important philosophical aspect to it as the role of police relates to crucial bourgeois ideas of sovereignty, legitimacy and consent. In short, the role of the police is important to the selfunderstanding of bourgeois society. Mark Neocleous The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power
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This book deals with a diverse range of developments in French critical theory and within its various dialogues. The first chapters engage most with post-structuralism; the middle section with German critical theory; and the final... more
This book deals with a diverse range of developments in French critical theory and within its various dialogues. The first chapters engage most with post-structuralism; the middle section with German critical theory; and the final chapters with Durkheim and classical French ...
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This chapter evaluates critical realism, a term which refers to a philosophy of science connected to the broader approach of scientific realism. In contrast to other philosophies of science, such as positivism and post-positivism,... more
This chapter evaluates critical realism, a term which refers to a philosophy of science connected to the broader approach of scientific realism. In contrast to other philosophies of science, such as positivism and post-positivism, critical realism presents an alternative view on the questions of what is ‘real’ and how one can generate scientific knowledge of the ‘real’. How one answers these questions has implications for how one studies science and society. The critical realist answer starts by prioritizing the ontological question over the epistemological one, by asking: What must the world be like for science to be possible? Critical realism holds the key ontological belief of scientific realism that there is a reality which exists independent of our knowledge and experience of it. Critical realists posit that reality is more complex, and made up of more than the directly observable. More specifically, critical realism understands reality as ‘stratified’ and composed of three ont...
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This contribution sets out a research agenda that explores the promises of combining theories of hegemony and governmentality in the study of world politics. It is argued that certain forms of governmentality are 'strategically selected'... more
This contribution sets out a research agenda that explores the promises of combining theories of hegemony and governmentality in the study of world politics. It is argued that certain forms of governmentality are 'strategically selected' and form part of hegemonic strategies while hegemonic strategies are enhanced by techniques of governmentality. It is also important to look at the underlying context that allows for micro practices to be 'colonised' by macro actors and which drives such actors to use such techniques. The theory of hegemony is seen as better at highlighting the context in which strategic action takes place, while governmentality is better at showing the workings of the technologies and techniques that are deployed by strategies of governing. Hegemony and governmentality therefore form part of the back and forth between macro and micro, structure and agency, institution and practice, highlighting different aspects of this constant interaction.