Postcolonizing the International brings post-colonialism directly into engagement with contemporary international studies, while at the same time reflecting back on the discourse, noting certain blindspots and shortcomings in critique. Reversing the established agenda, it begins with the position of non-European societies and the legacies of colonialism. Two companion essays on knowledge formations about the international and the changing nature of the political are followed by challenging reinterpretations of contemporary global politics focusing on race, skewed development, cultural difference, and everyday life. Individual chapters speak to the significance of consumption and commodification, the need for redirecting Western development stategies, initiatives of the Tibetan cabinet in exile, and sexuality as metaphor. Contributors: Phillip Darby, Paul James, Gabriel Lafitte, Marcia Langton, Ashis Nandy, Edgar Ng, Sekai Nzenza, Simon Obendorf, Nabaneeta Dev Sen.

International crime and justice are powerful ideas, associated with a vivid imagery of heinous atrocities, injured humanity, and an international community seized by the need to act. Through an analysis of archival and contemporary data, Imagining the International provides a detailed picture of how ideas of international crime (crimes against all of humanity) and global justice are given content, foregrounding their ethical limits and potentials. Nesam McMillan argues that dominant approaches to these ideas problematically disconnect them from the lived and the specific and foster distance between those who have experienced international crime and those who have not. McMillan draws on interdisciplinary work spanning law, criminology, humanitarianism, socio-legal studies, cultural studies, and human geography to show how understandings of international crime and justice hierarchize, spectacularize, and appropriate the suffering of others and promote an ideal of justice fundamentally disconnected from life as it is lived. McMillan critiques the mode of global interconnection they offer, one which bears resemblance to past colonial global approaches and which seeks to foster community through the image of crime and the practice of punitive justice. This book powerfully underscores the importance of the ideas of international crime and justice and their significant limits, cautioning against their continued valorization.

This book discusses postpositivist theories foregrounding postpositivism against the reigning realist and positivist-pluralist orthodoxies. The book explicates seven theories, not as disparate endeavours, but as developments linked by a common thread that seeks to enunciate globalist emancipatory goals for the theoretical field and the world that these theories seek to change. It focuses on the following themes: feminism, environmentalism or green theory, the English school, critical theory, constructivism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. Additionally, a separate chapter on globalization shows that while mainstream (neo)realist international relations theories respond hostilely to globalization and liberal-pluralist theories react benignly to it, postpositivist theories positively welcome it. The book offers a competent meta-theoretical gridwork, showing on which side of the opposing disciplinary positions in the fourth debate each of the seven theories are located. It is a comprehensive guide to the postpositivist restructuring of the discipline of international relations. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of political science, international relations, history, humanities and literature.

This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.

Mediating Across Difference is based on a fundamental premise: to deal adequately with conflict—and particularly with conflict stemming from cultural and other differences—requires genuine openness to different cultural practices and dialogue between different ways of knowing and being. Equally essential is a shift away from understanding cultural difference as an inevitable source of conflict, and the development of a more critical attitude toward previously under-examined Western assumptions about conflict and its resolution. To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalizing world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the editors present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict. Contributors: Roland Bleiker; Volker Boege; Morgan Brigg; Stephen Chan; Frans de Jalong, Sr.; Lorraine Garasu; Mary Graham; Hoang Young-ju; Carwyn Jones; Joy Kere; Debra McDougall; Norifumi Namatame; Chengxin Pan; Oliver Richmond; Deborah Bird Rose; Muhadi Sugiono; Tarja Väyrynen; Polly O. Walker; Jacqueline Wasilewski.

An interdisciplinary collection of essays, Reworking Postcolonialism explores questions of work, precarity, migration, minority and indigenous rights in relation to contemporary globalization. It brings together political, economic and literary approaches to texts and events from across the postcolonial world.

The Australian Study of Politics provides the first comprehensive reference book on the history of the study of politics in Australia, whether described as political studies or political science. It focuses on Australia and on developments since WWII, also exploring the historical roots of each major subfield.

The book comes at a very critical moment in the debate on civilization and responds to the lack of scholarly attention by international relations and political theorists as to how the discourse of dialogue of cultures, religions, and civilizations can contribute to the future of world order.

This book brings postcolonial critique directly to bear on established ways of theorizing international relations. Its primary concern is with the non-European world and its relations with the North. In advancing an alternative conception of "relations international", the book draws on alternative source material and different forms of writing. It also features short stories, an interview and explores the role of poetics and performance. The suzerainty of the disciplinary writ is challenged on three primary grounds. Firstly on its Eurocentrism, which leads the discipline to pass lightly over the distinctive life experiences of most of the world’s people. Secondly, on the discipline’s failure to engage in any systematic way with other bodies of knowledge about the international, as for example international political economy, postcolonialism and development. Lastly, it confronts the ‘top down’ nature of the politics of the discipline, and that seldom addresses everyday life. From squatter towns to the evasions of the poor, from law through to literature, this work raises a number of problems for International relations. It challenges a colonial mindset, de-centres the west and opens the field to new approaches that are far more inter-disciplinary than international relations generally allows. It is a provocative contribution for students and scholars of IR and Postcolonial studies alike.

Long considered a subfield of international relations and political science, Peace Studies has solidified its place as an interdisciplinary field in its own right with a canon, degree programs, journals, conferences, and courses taught on the subject. Internationally renowned centers offering programs on Peace and Conflict Studies can be found on every continent. Almost all of the scholars working in the field, however, are united by an aspiration: attaining Peace, whether “positive” or “negative.” The telos of peace, however, itself remains undefined and elusive, notwithstanding the violence committed in its name. This edited volume critically interrogates the field of peace studies, considering its assumptions, teleologies, canons, influence, enmeshments with power structures, biases, and normative ends. We highlight four interrelated tendencies in peace studies: hypostasis (strong essentializing tendencies), teleology (its imagined “end”), normativity (the set of often utopian and Eurocentric discourses that guide it), and enterprise (the attempt to undertake large projects, often ones of social engineering to attain this end). The chapters in this volume reveal these tendencies while offering new paths to escape them. Visit http://www.rethinkingpeacestudies.com/ for further details on the Rethinking Peace Studies project.