International Political Theory
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Recent papers in International Political Theory
Situated within the wider post-secular turn in politics and international relations, this collection focuses not on religion per se, but rather explicitly on theology. Contributions to this volume highlight the political theological... more
As the majority perpetrators of sexual violence, it is plausible to see men as responsible for war rape not only as individuals, but also as collective bystanders, facilitators and beneficiaries. Following recent criticisms of individual... more
“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976... more
The paper discusses the role that Islamic values can play in articulating Islam as an ethical tradition that can shape the international relations.
The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa once wrote that ‘the village is larger than the city’ because you can see ‘more of the world from there’ than you can from anywhere else. In this small world, the familiar and intermittent sounds of... more
[DE] Die Rezeptionsgeschichte des Werks von Carl Schmitt lässt sich grob in zwei Etappen gliedern. Während zunächst seine Kritik an der liberalen Demokratie im Zentrum des Interesses stand, verlagerte sich der Fokus nach dem Ende des... more
Action-sentences about states, such as 'North Korea conducted a nuclear test', are ubiquitous in discourse about international relations. Although there has been a great deal of debate in IR about whether states are agents or actors, the... more
For nearly a century, it has been assumed that self-determination of the world's peoples through creation and territorial guarantee of independent, ethnically defined polities was central if not essential to Woodrow Wilson's vision for a... more
Frankfurt, Friday 22nd January 2016
Originally published in 2012, this book of mine had its second edition in 2016. It is a contribution to international relations theory debates from a perspective from the South.
Multiplicity claims to provide common ground for International Relations and, potentially, to appeal across the epistemological and theoretical spectra of the discipline. However, Multiplicity also challenges existing theories of the... more
Neorealism is one of the most influential theories of international relations, and its first theorist, Kenneth Waltz, a giant of the discipline. But why did Waltz move from a rather traditional form of classical realist political theory... more
The intimately local violence of torture is, simultaneously and increasingly, a global phenomenon. This paper explores a transnational convergence in the local morphologies of torture practices across time, space, and state-type through... more
The 'structural injustice' framework is an increasingly influential way of thinking about historical injustice. Structural injustice theorists argue against repara-tions for historical injustice on the grounds that our focus should be on... more
THE sample of my book forthcoming with Oxford University Press in February 2018 in Oxford Constitutional Theory series.
This talk starts from the presumption that the quantum challenge, as a set of philosophical questions, was a dialogue far beyond the discipline of physics. Quantum sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and philosophers Henri Bergson and Alfred North... more
This paper is an attempt to give and account of human rights. It shows that this account makes sense of, and reconciles, two competing views concerning who is entitled to refugee hood - and then tries to draw some implications from this... more
The way in which societies institutionalize “collective memory” is one of the most important aspects of contemporary politics, feeding directly into the constitution of individual and communal identities, and creating sources of discord... more
This is the table of contents of my forthcoming book, Political Theology of International Order, Oxford University Press, 2020. It investigates presuppositions of international order that originate in medieval theology. The main argument... more
This chapter focuses on the reflections on empire, nation, and race produced by three classically trained and rather atypical Afrikaner intellectuals: J. H. Hofmeyr, T. J. Haarhoff, and Martin Versfeld. The background of these three men... more
Just war theory is a prominent topic of debate today in international law, relations and humanitarian efforts, but almost no thought has been developed on the topic of a just peace. The "father of international law," Hugo Grotius,... more
The United Nations as a quintessential " universal " International Organisation, was established in 1945 to save succeeding generations from the scourge of another catastrophic world war, which till date, it has successfully precluded.... more
Table of Contents
(Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2018)
(Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2018)
It is only in the early decades of the twentieth century that the “Hobbesian state of nature” and the “discourse of anarchy” came to be seen as virtually synonymous. In examining Hobbes’ international state of nature, this article rejects... more
This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List’s theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence,... more
One of the most problematic aspects of the 'Harvard School' of liberal international theory is its failure to fulfil its own methodological ideals. Although Harvard School liberals subscribe to a nomothetic model of explanation, in... more
Immanuel Kant is recognized as one of the first philosophers who wrote systematically about global justice and world peace. In the current debate on global justice he is mostly appealed to by critics of extensive duties of global justice.... more
This paper discusses IPE and it’s theories for the purpose of the International Relations exam of CSS.