Articles

Forthcoming

2020

128. (with Amandine Orsini, Philippe Le Prestre, Peter M Hass, Malte Brosig, Philipp Pattberg, Oscar Widerber, Laura Gomez-Mera, Jean-Frederic Morin, Neil Harrison and Robert Geyer) ‘Complex Systems and International Governance’ (Forum article), International Studies Review, Vol. 22, No.4 (2020), pp.1008-1038

127. (with Julian Reid) ‘Becoming Indigenous: The “Speculative Turn” in Anthropology and the (Re)colonization of Indigeneity’, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2020), pp.485-504

The indigenous have become central to contemporary critical and governmental imaginaries as the West tries to cope with planetary crises imbricated in the legacies of modernity and settler-colonialism. As such, indigenous methods and practices are increasingly constructed as offering futural possibilities for ‘becoming’ rather than belonging to the archives of an underdeveloped past. Central to this transformation has been the speculative or ontological turn in anthropological discourse, which we argue has opened up new possibilities for a Western and colonial appropriation of indigeneity. This turn is the subject of this article and is critically engaged with to pursue a number of avenues which problematise this form of ‘ontopolitical anthropology’. The reduction of indigenous lives to the speculative ‘other’ of Western modernity inherently tends to reify or ‘exoticise’ indigenous thought and practices or, as we state, to ‘ontologize indigeneity’. This, we argue, is particularly problematic in the context where critical imaginaries of precarious ‘life in the ruins’ tend to affirm contemporary governmental approaches rather than challenge them. Ironically, rather than opening up alternative possibilities, these approaches reduce the reality of indigenous struggles and sufferings to a mere foil for the speculative imaginaries of a privileged white Eurocentric academic elite.

126. ‘The Coronavirus: Biopolitics and the Rise of ‘Anthropocene Authoritarianism’, Russia in Global Affairs, Vol.18, No.2 (2020), pp.26-32. Also available online here.

With politics suspended, societies under lockdown, parliaments closed and states of emergency in force globally (Runciman, 2020), many commentators have turned to Foucauldian-inspired understandings of biopolitics and population control to analyze contemporary events (Horvat, 2020; Agamben, 2020a; Demetri, 2020; Singh, 2020; Sotiris, 2020). Biopolitics has become a key concept in critical discourses of security governance in the last two decades (Rose, 2007; Esposito, 2008; Dillon, 2015). Deriving from the work of Foucault, at the heart of biopolitical thought is the relationship of politics to life as both the basis of governance and as an object to be secured (Foucault, 2007; 2008). For Foucault, ‘life’ was a way of articulating an ‘outside’ to the human world of politics, an outside that appeared natural but was, in fact, a malleable construct (Lemke, 2011).

125. ‘Security through Societal Resilience: Contemporary Challenges in the Anthropocene’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol.41, No.2 (2020), pp.195-214

The concept of societal resilience has rapidly spread throughout the policy world, driven by the desire to use systems theories and process understandings to develop new security approaches for coping, bouncing-back, and adaptive improvement in the face of shocks and disturbances. However, this article argues that under the auspices of the Anthropocene, the assumptions and goals of societal resilience become problematic. This is because external interventions often ignore feedback effects, meaning that attempts to resolve problems through focusing upon enabling and capacity-building can be seen as counterproductive “fire-fighting” rather than tackling causation. Even more “alternative” or “community-based” approaches, relying upon interventions to enable so-called “natural” processes, either through an emphasis on local and traditional knowledge or new monitoring technologies, constitute problems for resilience advocacy: firstly, the problem of unrecognized exploitation; and secondly, the problem of continuing to sacrifice others to maintain unsustainable Western modes of consumption and production.

124. ‘Biopolitics 2.0 – Reclaiming the Power of Life in the Anthropocene’ (review article), Contemporary Political Theory, Vol.19, No.1 (2020), pp.14-20

Biopolitics was once the preserve of critical Foucauldian-influenced theorists. This is no longer the case. The rise of new materialisms, networked and object-oriented ontologies and demands for the ‘renaturalization of politics’ (Grosz, 2011; Sharp, 2011) have turned the political into the biopolitical in much of radical contemporary political theory. Here, the biopolitical is often in tension with the Foucauldian discourses of the last few decades, affirming alternative possibilities rather than merely critiquing regimes of power (Malabou, 2008; Kirby, 2011; Taussig, 2018). One factor in this shift has been the impact of anthropogenic climate change and global warming on the contemporary political imagination, increasingly refracted through conceptualizations of the Anthropocene (Tsing, 2015; Cohen et al, 2016; Chandler, 2018). A second factor has been that the life sciences no longer appear to support understandings of deterministic differences but rather to cast evolution in sympoietic and entangled ways, making biology appear as no longer essentialising but as increasingly importable into politics, in ways which disrupt modernist or liberal conceptions of the culture/nature divide (Haraway, 2016). Two important but very different engagements, which reflect these affirmative readings of biopolitics, are reviewed here, from the fields of postcolonial literature and gender and race in international politics.

123. (with Jonathan Pugh) ‘Islands of Relationality and Resilience: The Shifting Stakes of the Anthropocene’, Area: Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol.52, No.1 (2020), pp.65-72

In recent decades island studies scholars have done much to disrupt static notions of the island form, increasingly foregrounding how islands form part of complex networks of relations, assemblages and flows. In this paper, we shift the terms of debate more explicitly to relationality in the Anthropocene. We consider the implications and challenges that a wider set of debates, particularly surrounding island ‘resilience’, concerning the Anthropocene in the social sciences and humanities pose for island studies.

122. ‘The Rise of Data-Driven Governance’, Current History, January 2020, pp.3-8

The world appears to be overflowing with data, thanks to rapid developments in technology over the past ten to fifteen years. It is increasingly argued that data-driven knowledge is capable of changing the ways in which we understand the world and also the ways in which it can be governed. This essay is not about the governance of data–concerns over privacy, data protection and management, and so forth–but about how new forms of data collection and analysis are being touted as a means of doing governance differently.

2019

121. ‘Rethinking the Ambiguities of Abstraction in the Anthropocene’, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Special Issue: The Ambivalances of Abstraction. Guest co-editors: Celia Lury and Mike Michael. Vol.20, No.3 (2019), pp.301-312

The ambiguities of abstraction were at the heart of critical approaches to the problems of modernity. Abstraction, so fundamental to the modernist episteme, was seen to have alienated humanity from itself and from its entangled relations with its environment, constituting a fundamental rift between the subject and the world. This article analyses how the critique of the modernist episteme has increasingly shifted under the auspices of the Anthropocene. Rather than seeking to overcome the ambiguities of abstraction and return the human to the world, approaches that seek to affirm the Anthropocene have emphasised that modernist thought did not take abstraction far enough. Rather than abstraction being problematic for contemporary thought, abstraction is seen to be a facet of the world in its lively, partial and contingent interaction. This article is organised in three sections. The first section introduces the problematic of abstraction in the Anthropocene, highlighting that critical theory approaches tend to see the Anthropocene within a discourse of modernist critique. The second section draws out the importance of understanding the distinct mode of contemporary affirmation, which rather than seeking to return man to the world, emphasises the impossibility of finding meaning in the world. It is this inverting of critical understandings that enables abstraction to be seen positively rather than problematically. The final section expands on this point to consider how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of abstraction as the guide to contemporary modes of life.

120. ‘Kosovo: Statebuilding Utopia and Reality’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol.13, No.5 (2019), pp.545-555

Twenty years of international statebuilding have seemingly made little impact on the ‘stateness’ of Kosovo. Rather than tracing the intricacies of policy-making in Kosovo itself, covered elsewhere in this Special Issue, this article considers the changes in the understanding of the statebuilding project itself. The article traces the shift from the liberal internationalist assumptions of the late 1990s to the pragmatic realism of today. It does this through the lenses of E H Carr’s classic work The Twenty Years’ Crisis, UN policy thinking on the problematic assumptions of international statebuilding and the diagnoses in David Lake’s 2016 book The Statebuilder’s Dilemma, which sets out three pragmatic alternatives. The article concludes that all three of these alternatives can be seen in practice in Kosovo.

119. ‘Resilience and the End(s) of the Politics of Adaptation’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, Vol.7, No.3 (2019), pp.304-313

This closing article focuses on the problematic of the politics of adaptation and suggests that resilience appears to be increasingly exhausted as a governmental or analytical framing. The article is in three sections. The first provides an overview of the problems facing adaptation today, especially where ‘top-down’ or ‘engineering’ approaches to resilience are considered to be artificial or ‘coercive’. The second section analyses alternative approaches to adaptation, from the bottom-up, often relying on the engagement of local communities, aided by the rolling out of ubiquitous computational technologies, like the Internet of Things. In closing, I suggest that resilience as a policy framework of adaptation appears to be drawing to a close as it lacks an adequate agential or transformative aspect: it is always too oriented to adapting to feedbacks and modulating around sustaining what exists.

118. ‘Forum 2: The Migrant Climate: Resilience, Adaptation and the Ontopolitics of Mobility in the Anthropocene’, Mobilities, Vol.14, No.3 (2019), pp.381-387

While modernist or ‘top-down’, ‘command-and-control’ approaches to climate and migration worked at the surface or ontic level of the redistribution of entities in time and space, resilience approaches call for a different approach to mobility (for an extensive discussion of resilience as a distinctive governance regime see, for example, Grove, 2018; Chandler, 2014). These discourses construct mobilities that are more transformative, in fact, ones that question traditional liberal modernist notions of time and space and of entities with fixed essences. These mobilities do not concern moving entities in space but rethinking mobility in relation to space. Mobility then becomes more a matter of changing the understandings and practices relating to spaces and entities than of moving things from one place to another. Becoming ‘mobile’ thus would apply to the development of capabilities or ‘response-abilities’ (Haraway, 2016: 2) to sense, adapt, recompose, repurpose and reimagine problems and possibilities; taking responses to crises beyond the static and binary conceptions of mobility and space epitomised by The Clash lyrics in the epigraph.

117. ‘Rethinking the Role of the Armed Forces in Statebuilding: From Annihilation to Acceptance’, REPATS (Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas Avançadas do Terceiro Setor/ Journal of Studies and Advanced Researches on Third Sector), Brasília/Brazil, ‘Rethinking The Role of the Armed Forces in a Changing Security Environment’, Special Issue, n.02, Jul-Dec, 2019, pp.4-18

This article analyses how international statebuilding has shifted from ‘problem-solving’ towards a new discursive regime of acceptance and affirmation. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or ‘post-liberal’ approaches in the early 2000s led to a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It then describes a process of reflection upon statebuilding as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations, in order to take problems seriously, begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the ‘bottom-up’ approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of statebuilding, seems to have further intensified it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to ‘unlearn’ from the opportunities opened up through the practices of exploring and engaging with the ‘other’.

116. ‘The Death of Hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene’, Globalizations, Vol.16,  No.5 (2019), pp.695-706

This article engages with the imaginary that the great age of hope as critique is finally at an end. For hope’s detractors, the Anthropocene is imagined to be a gain in intelligibility at the price of the eclipse of both the modernist imaginary (with its optimistic telos of universal knowledge and progress) and its romantic critical counterpart of re-enchantment and hope. It appears that hope may have no place in the Anthropocene if re-enchantment is no longer possible. Man can then never be returned to the world or somehow reunited with nature (internally and/or externally). As some contemporary theorists are delighted to inform us, it seems possible that we will lose the belief that the world was ever there, in some way, ‘for us’ or that we can imagine moving beyond Enlightenment assumptions and returning the human, in less modern ways, to perhaps hear and heed the needs of our non-human planetary kin. It is argued here that, for hope to survive, it is necessary that the world be imagined as one in which it is possible for humans to find a sense of purpose or meaning in the world.

115. ‘The Transvaluation of Critique in the Anthropocene’, Global Society, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2019), pp.26-44

This article considers the transvaluation of critique through the lens of the new affirmative critical approaches of the Anthropocene. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The second section then highlights how the Anthropocene thesis poses a problem for critique through fundamentally decentring the human as subject and challenging the temporal claims of Enlightenment progress. The third section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches and the shift towards a more positive view of the present: no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist. Critique thus becomes additive, affirmative and constructive. The final section expands on this point and concludes with a consideration of how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of critique.

2018

114. ‘Planetary Boundaries and the Challenge to Governance in the Anthropocene’ REPATS (Revista de Estudos e Pesquisas Avançadas do Terceiro Setor/ Journal of Studies and Advanced Researches on Third Sector), Brasília/Brazil, ‘Planetary Boundaries and Governance Mechanisms in the transition to the Anthropocene’, Special Issue, n.01, Jul-Dec, 2018, pp.21-41

This article considers the challenge to governance posed by new Anthropocene discourses of planetary boundaries. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The Anthropocene is thus seen to fundamentally decentre the human as subject and the temporal linearity of Enlightenment progress. The second section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches to governance, which increasingly accept and reproduce these ontopolitical assumptions. The tasks of governance thus become transformed, no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist in the present. Governance becomes increasingly an act of affirmation rather than a discourse of change and transformation. The third section expands on this point to consider how contemporary governance approaches articulate the status quo in increasingly radical and enabling ways.

113. ‘Intervention and Statebuilding beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2018), pp.80-97

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations, in order to take problems seriously, begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the ‘bottom-up’ approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise.

112. (with Julian Reid) ‘“Being in Being”: Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity Today’, European Legacy, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2018), pp.251-268

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology. Rather than indigenous peoples simply having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ‘ontological turn’ suggests their importance is that they constitute different worlds, and that they ‘world’ in a performatively different way. The radical promise is that a different world already exists in potentia and that access to this alternative world is a question of ontology – of being differently: being in being rather than thinking, acting and ‘worlding’ as if we were transcendent or ‘possessive’ subjects. We argue that ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but instead as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Rather than ‘provincialising’ dominant western hegemonic practices, discourses of ‘indigeneity’ are functioning to extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.

111. (with Erika Cudworth and Steve Hobden) ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Liberal Cosmopolitan IR: A Response to Burke et al.’s “Planet Politics”‘, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2018), pp.190–208

2017

110. (with Kevin Grove) ‘Introduction: Resilience and the Anthropocene: The Stakes of “Renaturalising” Politics’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2017), pp.79-91

The Anthropocene marks a new geological epoch in which human activity (and specifically Western production and consumption practices) has become a geological force. It also profoundly destabilises the grounds of Western political philosophy. Visions of a dynamic earth system wholly indifferent to human survival liquefy modernity’s division between nature and politics. Critical thought has only begun to scratch the surface of the Anthropocene’s re-naturalisation of politics. This special issue of Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses explores the politics of resilience within the wider cultural and political moment of the Anthropocene. It is within the field of resilience thinking that the implications of the Anthropocene for forms of governance are beginning to be sketched out and experimental practices are undertaken. Foregrounding the Anthropocene imaginary’s re-naturalisation of politics enables us to consider the political possibilities of resilience from a different angle, one that is irreducible to neoliberal post-political rule.

109. (with Francis J. Gavin, Bridget L. Coggins, Stephen D. Krasner and David A. Lake) ‘Roundtable: David A. Lake. The Statebuilder’s Dilemma: On the Limits of Foreign Intervention’, International Security Studies Forum, Vol. IX, No. 15 (2017), pp.1-18

108. ‘Securing the Anthropocene? International Policy Experiments in Digital Hacktivism: A Case Study of Jakarta’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2017), pp.113–130

This article analyses security discourses that are beginning to self-consciously take on board the shift towards the Anthropocene. Firstly, it sets out the developing episteme of the Anthropocene, highlighting the limits of instrumentalist cause-and-effect approaches to security, increasingly becoming displaced by discursive framings of securing as a process, generated through new forms of mediation and agency, capable of grasping inter-relations in a fluid context. This approach is the methodology of hacking: creatively composing and repurposing already existing forms of agency. It elaborates on hacking as a set of experimental practices and imaginaries of securing the Anthropocene, using as a case study the field of digital policy activism with the focus on community empowerment through social-technical assemblages being developed and applied in ‘the City of the Anthropocene’: Jakarta, Indonesia. The article concludes that policy interventions today cannot readily be grasped in modernist frameworks of ‘problem solving’ but should be seen more in terms of evolving and adaptive ‘life hacks’.

2016

107. ‘New Narratives of International Security Governance: The Shift from Global Interventionism to Global Self-Policing’, Global Crime, Vol. 17, Nos. 3–4 (2016), pp.264–280

2015

104.  ‘Critique: The Ideology of Complexity’, in Pol Bargués, Jessica Schmidt, Mario Schmidt and Kai Koddenbrock (eds) ‘After Modernity into Complexity? Possibilities for Critique in an Age of Global Cooperation’, Global Dialogues, No.10 (2015), pp.52-62

Today there is a broad agreement in the discipline of International Relations regarding the new relational ontology of Critique. Critique rejects the linear, reductionist and ‘top-down’ understandings of foundationalist critical theory, understood to deny the political and transformative possibilities of today’s world. Critique is based upon the failure of liberal and neoliberal modes of governance, and suggests that it fights with ontological truth on its side: that life is relational and complex. In challenging Critique as the ideology of complexity, it will be suggested that the claims of Critique depend not upon the ‘reality’ of complex or relational ontologies but upon the contingent attenuation of political contestation; the ideology of Critique is the reflection of the attenuation of this struggle in the realm of thought.

103. ‘A World without Causation: Big Data and the Coming of Age of Posthumanism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2015), special issue: ‘Quo Vadis IR: Method, Methodology and Innovation’, pp.833-851

Advocates of Big Data assert that we are in the midst of an epistemological revolution, promising the displacement of the modernist methodological hegemony of causal analysis and theory generation. It is alleged that the growing ‘deluge’ of digitally generated data, and the development of computational algorithms to analyse them, has enabled new inductive ways of accessing everyday relational interactions through their ‘datafication’. This paper critically engages with these discourses of Big Data and complexity, particularly as they operate in the discipline of International Relations, where it is alleged that Big Data approaches have the potential for developing self-governing societal capacities for resilience and adaptation through the real-time reflexive awareness and management of risks and problems as they arise. The epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning Big Data are then analysed to suggest that critical and posthumanist approaches have come of age through these discourses, enabling process-based and relational understandings to be translated into policy and governance practices. The paper thus raises some questions for the development of critical approaches to new posthuman forms of governance and knowledge production.

102. ‘Reconceptualising International Intervention: Statebuilding, ‘Organic Processes’ and the Limits of Causal Knowledge’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2015), pp.70-88

This article examines the transformation in the conceptual understanding of international intervention over the last two decades. It suggests that this conceptual shift can be usefully interrogated through its imbrication within broader epistemological shifts highlighting the limits of causal knowledge claims: heuristically framed in this article in terms of the shift from policy interventions within the problematic of causation to those concerned with the management of effects. In this shift, the means and mechanisms of international intervention have been transformed, no longer focused on the universal application of Western causal knowledge through policy interventions but rather on the effects of specific and unique local and organic processes at work in societies themselves. The focus on effects takes the conceptualisation of intervention out of the traditional terminological lexicon of International Relations theory and instead recasts problems in increasingly organicised ways, suggesting that artificial or hubristic attempts at socio-political intervention should be excluded or minimised.

101. ‘Rethinking the Conflict-Poverty Nexus: From Securitising Intervention to Resilience’, Stability: International Journal of Security & Development, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2015), 13, pp.1-14

We are witnessing nothing less than a revolution in international policy-thinking, with a shift from imagining that international policy-makers can solve development/security problems through the export or transfer of policy practices or their imposition through conditionality, to understanding that problems should be grasped as emergent consequences of complex social processes which need to be worked with rather than against. This paper, prepared for the 2014 CEPA conference focuses therefore not so much on the politicisation and securitisation of questions of conflict and poverty but rather the depoliticisation of questions of conflict and poverty, especially through frameworks of resilience.

100. ‘Resilience and Critique’ (Response to Review Symposium on Resilience: The Governance of Complexity), European Political Science, Vol. 14, No.1 (2015), pp.56-58

I would like to thank Philip Hammond and Julian Reid for their thoughtful reviews. For Reid, the ‘life’ focus of resilience thinking is just another liberal/ neoliberal governmentality, enabling the reproduction and extension of biopolitical rule, thus my book provides interesting insights, but is not necessarily essential for the making of such claims. For Hammond, the conceptual distinctions made in the book shed some useful insights into current discussions of how policy understandings are being transformed and the emergence of the new doxa of complexity and its relational ontology (drawing adherents from across the, now defunct, Left–Right ideological divide).

99. ‘The R2P is Dead, Long Live the R2P: The Successful Separation of Military Intervention from the Responsibility to Protect’ (Response to Roland Paris), International Peacekeeping, Vol. 22, No.1 (2015), pp.1-5

Roland Paris is one of those authors whose work is always enjoyable, as he exploits so well the gap between the policy world and academia. His best work reveals a high level of policy insight often before many of his colleagues in academia have caught up. His secret is an ability to analyse the shifting understandings at policy level and to then articulate them in academic terms as if critiquing current policies. This enables his work to be both popular with policy-makers and with their erstwhile critics in academia. His 2004 monograph, At War’s End, captured the shift from peacekeeping intervention and ‘early exit’ to the extended remits of international statebuilding (‘Institutionalization before Liberalization’). It provided a wonderful rationalisation of policy shifts that had already occurred in the late 1990s, starting with the extension of international mandates in Bosnia, from 1996 onwards, and further developed with the Kosovo protectorate in 1999. However, this shift was skilfully reposed as a critique of existing policy-understandings.

98. (with Oliver Richmond) ‘Forum: Contesting Postliberalism: Governmentality or Emancipation?’, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2015), pp.1–24

This article takes the form of a debate between two theorists who work with the concept of postliberalism. Following an introduction reflecting upon what is at stake in this debate, each contribution is organised in three sections. Firstly, as an opening gambit, both authors outline their basic understanding of the concept of postliberalism. Secondly, the authors stake out their very different claims as to whether or not postliberal approaches challenge neoliberal understandings sufficiently to create new conditions for emancipation or merely maintain governmentality. In the respective final sections of their contributions, the authors clarify the workings of postliberal approaches in policy practice.

97. ‘Resilience and the “Everyday”: Beyond the Paradox of “Liberal Peace”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 41, No.1 (2015), pp.27-48

Over the last decade there has been a shift towards critical understandings of ‘liberal peace’ approaches to international intervention, which argue that local culture holds the key to the effectiveness of peace interventions. In this ‘bottom-up’ approach, peace, reconciliation, and a ‘culture of law’ then become secondary effects of sociocultural norms and values. However, these liberal peace critiques have remained trapped in the paradox of liberal peace: the inability to go beyond the binaries of liberal universalism and cultural relativism. This understanding will be contrasted with the rise of ‘resilience’ approaches to intervention – which build on this attention to the particular context of application but move beyond this paradox through philosophical pragmatism and the focus on concrete social practices. This article clarifies the nature of this shift through the focus on the shifting understanding of international intervention to address the failings of the ‘war on drugs’ in the Americas.

2014

96. ‘International Security and Cooperation: Taking Complexity into Account’, Markus Böckenförde (ed.) ‘A Multi-disciplinary Mosaic: Reflections on International Security and Global Cooperation’, Global Dialogues, No. 4 (2014), pp.103-105

Life began to be conceived as complex, both in the natural and social sciences, in the 1920s. Since then, classical mechanical understandings have increasingly given way to emphasis on the growth of ‘uncertainty’: the theorization of the limits to understanding processes of interaction in order to predict outcomes. Linear or reductionist approaches therefore were problematised on the basis that they failed to grasp that which was crucial to understanding the chain of causation: interaction. Whereas chaos theory and deterministic under- standings of complexity pose an epistemological critique of the ability to grasp the world on the basis of law-bound deter- minism, emergent or general complexity approaches promise a radically different ontology of objective unknowability be- yond merely epistemic limits. The problematic of a complex emergent order is not that of knowing more, ‘filling in the gaps’ of knowledge, but an ontological problem, i.e. the prob- lem exists at the level of what is to be known (it is not linear and law-bound) rather than at the level of how we might know the underlying reality.

95. ‘Beyond Good and Evil: Ethics in a World of Complexity’, International Politics, Vol. 51, No. 4 (2014), pp.441-457

This article seeks to analyse the shift away from the moral certainties of the Cold War epoch and of humanitarian interventions in the 1990s, to suggest that ‘evil’ plays a very different role in politics and international relations today. In current constructions of the world – as much more global, complex and non-linear – the past certainties of liberal internationalism appear to be a symptom of problematic moral hubris. Rather than the transcendental moral certainties of good and evil, globalization and complexity seem to suggest a more immanent perspective of emergent causality, eliciting a reflexive ethics of continual work on ‘good’ public modes of being. In which case, ‘evil’ is no longer considered to be an exception but becomes normalized as an ethical learning resource. The 2011 case of the mass killings by Norwegian Anders Breivik will be highlighted as an example of this process. This article suggests that this ‘democratization’ of evil is problematic in articulating evil as a revealed or emergent truth in the world that requires social and personal self-reflexivity, thereby suborning moral choice to onto-ethical necessity.

94. ‘Beyond Neoliberalism: Resilience, the New Art of Governing Complexity’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2014), pp.47-63

Resilience, as a framework informing governance, relies on an ontology of emergent complexity. This article analyses how complexity operates not only as a critique of liberal modes of ‘top-down’ governing but also to inform and instantiate resilience as a postmodern form of governance. In so doing, resilience approaches develop upon and transform neoliberal conceptions of complex life as a limit to liberal governance and directly critique the policy frameworks of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, which seeks to govern complexity ‘from below’. While actually existing neoliberalism focuses governmental regimes on the ‘knowledge gaps’ seen as the preconditions for successful policy outcomes, resilience asserts a flatter ontology of interactive emergence where the knowledge which needs to be acquired can only be gained through self-reflexive approaches. This distinction will be illustrated by drawing upon recent UK government policy practices and debates.

93. ‘Democracy Unbound? Non-Linear Politics and the Politicisation of Everyday Life’, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2014), pp.42-59

In liberal modernity, the democratic collective will of society was understood to emerge through the public and deliberative freedoms of associational life. Today, however, democratic discourse is much more focused on the formation of plural and diverse publics in the private and social sphere. In these ‘non-linear’ approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate to constitute a collective will standing above society but as a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of indi- viduals and communities as the ultimate decision-makers. Government is brought back ‘to the people’ and democracy is seen to circulate through the personal decisions made in everyday life. This article seeks to analyse the development of non-linear approaches to the political sphere, which seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/ private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich von Hayek.

2013

92. ‘Relational Sensibilities: The End of the Road for “Liberal Peace”‘, Wren Chadwick, Tobias Debiel, Frank Gadinger (eds) ‘Relational Sensibility and the “Turn to the Local”: Prospects for the Future of Peacebuilding’, Global Dialogues, No.2 (2013), pp.20-27

Today, classical ‘liberal peace’ approaches to post-conflict development, based on imposing a set of international policy- prescriptions founded on universalist understandings of the importance of liberal democracy, the rule of law and human rights, are out of favour. These approaches are seen to be externally-driven, hubristic – in their assumptions of external actors having the right policies and the means to attain them – and to express a narrow understanding of politics, focusing solely on the limited and artificial formal or public political sphere. Approaches which appreciate the limits of the universalist approach but still adhere to the liberal peace ontology of external intervention, emphasize the alternative policy-approach based on the appreciation of ‘relational sensibilities’, as outlined by Morgan Brigg in the lead piece in this collection. The ‘relational’ understanding of the limits to peacebuilding interventions starts not with the artifice of international designs and blueprints but with the ‘real’, grounded problematic of the local or societal agents and actors and the processes, practices and interrelationships that shape their ideas and understandings. These relational approaches emphasize the importance of local agency (often hidden or unrecognized) to fulfilling international aspirations.

91. ‘A Crítica não-crítica da “Paz Libera”‘, Universitas: Relações Internacionais, Brasília, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2013), pp.39-51.

Para muitos comentadores, a falta de sucesso nos esforços internacionais de construção de Estados tem sido explicada por meio do discurso crítico da ‘paz liberal’, onde é assumido que os pressupostos e interesses ‘liberais’ do Ocidente têm influenciado a formulação da política levando a resultados contraproducentes. No centro dessa crítica está o pressuposto que a abordagem da paz liberal tem buscado reproduzir e impor modelos Ocidentais: a reconstrução de enquadramentos ‘Vestefalianos’ de soberania estatal; o enquadramento liberal de direitos individuais e eleições onde os vencedores levam tudo; e programas econômicos liberais de livre mercado. Este artigo desafia esta visão sobre a formulação da política Ocidental e sugere que a intervenção e a construção do Estado em cenários pós-conflito no pós-Guerra Fria podem ser compreendidas como uma crítica dos pressupostos liberais clássicos sobre o sujeito autônomo – enquadrada em termos de soberania, lei, democracia e mercado. A mistura das formas discursivas com o seu antigo conteúdo liberal cria o perigo das críticas da paz liberal poderem reescrever as intervenções do pós-Guerra Fria de modos que exageram a natureza liberal dos enquadramentos políticos e age como desculpando as falhas da política com base na visão elogiadora de si mesma por parte da elite política Ocidental: que os sujeitos não-Ocidentais não estavam prontos para as ‘liberdades’ Ocidentais.

90. ‘International Statebuilding and the Ideology of Resilience’, Politics, Vol. 33, No.4 (Special Issue: ‘Security and the Politics of Resilience’), (2013), pp.276-286

This article seeks to draw out the ideological nature of discourses of resilience, and traces their rise in international statebuilding approaches. It suggests that this shift to resilience follows disillusionment with liberal internationalist understandings that Western or international actors could resolve problems of development, democracy and peace through the export of liberal institutions. Interventionist discourses have increasingly stressed the importance of local capacities, vulnerabilities and agencies and, in doing so, have facilitated the evasion of Western responsibility for the outcomes of statebuilding interventions through problematising local practices and understandings as productive of risks and threats and as barriers to liberal progress.

89. ‘Human-Centred’ Development? Rethinking “Freedom” and “Agency” in Discourses of International Development’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2013), pp.3-23

Today’s dominant discourses of international development increasingly focus on human agency as the measure of development in terms of individual capabilities. The individualised understanding of development takes a ‘human-centred’ or ‘agent-orientated’ view of the barriers to development. This article seeks to critically engage with the view of the human and of human agency articulated within this approach. In this discourse, development is taken out of a macro-political-economy context, in which development policies are shaped by social and political pressures or state-led policies. Foucault’s insights on the rearticulation of power – shifting from the state-based, sovereign and disciplinary approaches of government ruling over society, towards the biopolitical or ‘human-centred’ approaches of governance through social processes – will be used to critically engage with the capabilities approach. This article genealogically draws out the changing nature of Western discourses of development and the understanding of policy practices as promoting the empowerment of the post-colonial other in order to examine how development and autonomy have been radically differently articulated in discourses of Western power and how today’s discursive framing feeds on and transforms colonial and early post-colonial approaches to the human subject.

88. ‘From Sour Grapes to Vitalism: The Life Politics of the Left’ (review article), Global Change, Peace & Security, Vol. 25, No.3 (2013), pp.367-370

After 1968, the history of the Left can be told as a story of sour grapes. Attributed to ancient Greek writer Aesop, in the fable ‘The Fox and the Grapes’, the fox isn’t able to reach the grapes and declares them to be sour: A famished Fox saw some clusters of ripe black grapes hanging from a trellised vine. She resorted to all her tricks to get at them, but wearied herself in vain, for she could not reach them. At last she turned away, beguiling herself of her disappointment, and saying: ‘The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought’. David Eden’s powerful study of autonomist Marxism or post-Operaismo, which shot to prominence with the popularity of Hardt and Negri’s Empire in 2000, is one of the best stories of the sour grapes of the Left written thus far. Eden focuses on three contemporary currents in autonomist Marxism – the work of Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, the Midnight Notes Collective and that of John Holloway – and closely examines their work in terms of their analysis of capitalism, understandings of class and approaches to emancipation; highlighting both their strengths and limitations.

87. ‘Resilience Ethics: Responsibility and the Globally Embedded Subject’, Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2013), pp.175-194

This article seeks to analyse the rise of ‘resilience ethics’, in terms of the shift in ethical approaches away from the hierarchical liberal internationalist constructions of the 1990s and towards broader and more inclusive understandings of ethical responsibility for global problems. This shift in ethical attention away from the formal international politics of interstate relations and towards the unintended consequences of both institutional structures and the informal market choices of individuals has diversified understandings of global ethical responsibilities. It is argued that the recasting of ethical responsibility in the increasingly sociological terms of unintended and indirect consequences of socio-material embeddedness constructs new ethical differentials and hierarchies of responsibility. These framings have facilitated new policy practices, recasting interventionist policy-making in terms of the growing self-awareness and reflexivity of Western actors, reframing ethical foreign policy as starting with the choices of individual citizens, and, at the same time, operating to reify the relations of the market.

86. ‘The World of Attachment? The Post-Humanist Challenge to Freedom and Necessity’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, Special Issue: Materialism and World Politics (2013), pp.516-534

In the ‘human’ world we believed that we could transform necessity into freedom through our own creativity and agency, understanding the laws of the external world and mastering them through the development of culture, science and technology. In the ‘post-human’ world, we are told by new materialists, actor-network theorists and post-humanists that creativity and agency still exist, but that they are not the property of humans alone; rather, they are a product of the assemblages, associations and relationships through which we are attached to the world. Rather than attempting to understand and act in the world on the basis of our separation from it – articulated in the constraining, alienating and resentment-filled modernist divides of human/nature, subject/object, culture/environment – we should develop our understandings of ‘attachment’ to the world. This article critically examines these claims and suggests that, on the contrary, we become less ‘attached’ and that the external word becomes increasingly alien and mysterious to us. In doing so, it mounts a defence of subject/object understandings and social constructions of freedom and necessity.

85. (with Nik Hynek) ‘No Emancipatory Alternative, No Critical Security Studies’, Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2013), pp.46-63

We offer a provocation – that we should stop appending ‘Critical’ to ‘Security Studies’. Critical security as an academically and politically contested terrain is no longer productive of emancipatory alternatives. In making this claim, we seek to reflect upon the underlying dynamics which drove the boom in critical security studies in the 1990s and the early 2000s and its pale afterlife in the recent years. To support the argument empirically, the attention is paid to the role of emancipatory agency at the heart of critical security understandings. As we argue, the current state of ‘critical’ security theorising is no longer informed by the emancipatory impulse of the 1990s and the critical claims have been much damaged by the retreat of liberal internationalism and rise of non-emancipatory and post-emancipatory approaches. The critics that remain in the field thus articulate much lower horizons with regard to policy alternatives and conceptualise no clear agency of emancipatory possibilities. Ironically, ‘critical’ security theorists today are more likely to argue against transformative aspirations – rather than in favour of them.

84. ‘Resilience and the Autotelic Subject: Towards a Critique of the Societalization of Security’, International Political Sociology, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2013), pp.210-226

In discourses of resilience, there is a clear assumption that governments need to assume a more proactive engagement with society. This proactive engagement is understood to be preventive, not in the sense of preventing future disaster or catastrophe but in preventing the disruptive or destabilizing effects of such an event. In this sense, the key to security programs of resilience is the coping capacities of citizens, the ability of citizens to respond, or adapt, to security crises. The subject or agent of security thereby shifts from the state to society and to the individuals constitutive of it. In many ways, this shift away from a sovereign-based understanding to a social or societal understanding of security, under the guidance or goal of resilience, could be understood as a deliberalizing discourse, one which divests security responsibilities from the level of the state down to the level of the citizen. This article seeks to consider some of the genealogical aspects of discourses of resilience as a societal or agent-based understanding of security (particularly focusing on the work of Friedrich von Hayek and Anthony Giddens) in order to work through some of the consequences of the state’s divestment of security responsibilities for traditional liberal framings of state–society relations.

83. ‘Resisting Resilience? Reply to Mark Neocleous’, Radical Philosophy, No. 179 (May/June 2013), pp.58-59

As the editor of the new journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, published by Taylor & Francis, I am pleased to have a chance to respond to the ‘pre-emptive strike’ launched against the journal as a neoliberal ‘corporate-cum-academic dream’ in Mark Neocleous’s piece ‘Resisting Resilience’ (RP 178).

82. ‘International Statebuilding and Agency: The Rise of Society-Based Approaches to Intervention’, Spectrum: Journal of Global Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.1-20

This paper seeks to draw out an understanding of the role of the shift to the social or societal sphere in international statebuilding discourses. It suggests that this shift can be broadly located as taking place in the last years of the 1990s, with greater disillusionment with institutionalist approaches suggesting that Western or international actors could resolve problems of development, democracy and peace through the export of liberal institutions. As we have shifted away from ideas of “quick fixes”, “early exits” and understandings of the ease with which liberal values and institutions can be exported, so we have discovered the importance of society or of local agency on the ground. It is suggested here that this greater sensitivity to the “limits of liberalism” has facilitated a greater focus on the agency and choice-making of the subaltern subjects of international statebuilding. However, this focus on the agency of the non-Western or post-conflict “Other” has merely facilitated the evasion of Western responsibility for the outcomes of statebuilding interventions as well as providing a framework enabling more intrusive intervention, operating precisely upon this agency and its societal influences.

81. ‘Promoting Democratic Norms? Social Constructivism and the “Subjective” Limits to Liberalism’, Democratization, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2013), pp.215-239

This article argues that, since the end of the Cold War, the understanding of democratic norm promotion has shifted through three conceptually distinct and chronologically distinguishable stages: the early 1990s view that democratic norms would be universalized with the Cold War victory of liberal ideals and the spread of new global norms of good governance; the mid- to late-1990s view that barriers to the promotion of democratic norms could be understood as the product of state or elite self-interests; and the perspective dominant since the 2000s, that the promotion of democratic norms necessarily involves much deeper and more extensive external intervention in order to transform social institutions and societal practices. Through charting the shifts in the understanding of democratic norm promotion, this article seeks to highlight the problems inherent in norm promotion discourses that emphasize the importance of subjective agency, normative choices, and cultural and ideational frameworks of understanding. A key problem being that, in the downplaying of social and economic context, agency-based understandings tend to degrade the rational capacities of – and to exoticize and problematize – the non-Western subject. The social constructivist approach, which presupposes a closed or endogenous framework of societal reproduction, has thereby been a crucial paradigm through which Western democracy promotion discourses have shifted to emphasizing the subjective policy barrier posed by the allegedly ‘non- liberal’ mindset of the non-Western subject.

80. ‘Editorial’, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2013), pp.1-2

I would like to welcome you to the first issue of the new journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses. This international journal, peer-reviewed and published by Taylor & Francis, will serve as the leading forum for the development and exchange of ideas regarding resilience and its role in both policy practice and theoretical understandings. As this journal is international in coverage and broad in scope, we neither start from fixed definitions of resilience, nor do we assume a normative editorial position, which talks resilience up as the imagined solution to practically all policy problems or sets out to knock it down as merely a new policy buzzword. For us, resilience – and its ubiquitous rise across the policy spectrum – is an invitation to critically engage with the world around us, to ask new questions of it and to overcome disciplinary and conceptual divides based upon the understandings of the past.

79. ‘Peacebuilding and the Politics of Non-Linearity: Rethinking “Hidden” Agency and “Resistance”‘, Peacebuilding, Vol. 1, No. 1, (2013), pp.17-32

This article reflects upon the shift away from linear understandings of peacebuilding, which assumed that Western ‘blueprints’ could be imposed upon non-compliant elites. Today, it is increasingly suggested, in both policy and academic literatures, that there should be a shift towards non-linear approaches. Rather than focusing upon Western policy prescriptions intra-elite bargaining and formal institutional structures, these understandings stress non-linearity, hybridity, local societal processes and practices and the importance of ‘hidden’ agency and resistance. This article highlights that, while these approaches set up a critique of liberal linear approaches, they tend to reify hybrid, non-liberal or non-linear outcomes as the product of local inter-subjective attachments. In this way, they reproduce the voluntarist and idealist understandings of liberal peace, locating the problems or barriers to peace and development at the cognitive or ideational level rather than considering the barriers of economic and social context.

78. ‘Born Posthumously: Rethinking the Shared Characteristics of the ICC and the R2P’, Finnish Yearbook of International Law, Vol. 21, (2010), pp.5-13. (published 2013). Link is to draft proof

The shared characteristics of R2P and the ICC are considered in the light of their emergence as institutional responses to the problems of liberal interventionism in the late 1990s. Both these institutions are often understood by their advocates as having belied the universalist promise of their birth. This discursive understanding of the limits of R2P and the ICC as being due to the shifting international culture post-9/11 is challenged through re-reading their establishment as an attempt to limit and evade the asserted responsibilities of Western powers in the post-colonial world. The article also traces the shared articulation of this process of limitation and evasion through the development of an institutionalist outlook, which encourages indirect forms of intervention, held to be empowering or capacity-building the post-colonial state, rather than directly undermining its sovereignty. It notes that R2P, operating as a moral norm rather than as a legal mechanism, was better able to make this transitioning than the ICC, and that latterly the ICC has been illustrating a similar shift in priorities and approach.

2012

77. ‘Le Point de Vue de David Chandler’, Politique Africain, No. 125, (2012), pp.219-223 (discussion forum on Mark Duffield’s Development, Security and Unending War, English version of my contribution available here). Published forum: ‘Autour d’un livre. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples, de Mark Duffield, commenté par David Ambrosetti, David Chandler et Vincent Foucher’

Mark Duffield occupe une position centrale dans les débats théoriques sur les liens entre développement et sécurité. Dans Development, Security and Unending Wars, il poursuit et affine les thèmes développés dans ses livres précédents et plus particulièrement dans Global Governance and the New Wars. Publié en 2001, ce dernier ouvrage analysait la manière dont la gestion de la sécurité internationale s’effectuait non plus au moyen des guerres interétatiques mais via l’idéologie du développement. Duffield mettait utilement en lumière la manière dont la gouvernance globale liée à la paix libérale produisait des mécanismes de régulation à travers une gestion interventionniste des comportements et catégories “à risques”.

76. ‘Resilience and Human Security: The Post-Interventionist Paradigm’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 43, No. 3, (2012), pp.213-229

In current discussions, many commentators express a fear that ‘broad’ human security approaches are being sidelined by the rise of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) and the ‘narrow’ focus on military intervention. An alternative reading is sketched out here, which suggests that debates over ‘narrow’ or ‘broad’ human security frameworks have undertheorized the discursive paradigm at the heart of human security. This paradigm is drawn out in terms of the juxtaposition of preventive human security practices of resilience, working upon the empowerment of the vulnerable, and the interventionist security practices of liberal internationalism, working upon the protection of victims. It is suggested that human security can be conceptually analysed in terms of post-intervention, as a shift away from liberal internationalist claims of Western securing or sovereign agency and towards a concern with facilitating or developing the self-securing agency – resilience – of those held to be the most vulnerable.This approach takes us beyond the focus on the technical means of intervention – whether coercive force is deployed or not – and allows us to see how international intervention, including under the R2P, increasingly operates under the paradigm of resilience and human security, thereby evading many of the problems confronted by liberal framings of intervention.

75. ‘Development as Freedom?: From Colonialism to Countering Climate Change’, Development Dialogue, No. 58, (2012), pp.115-129. Special Issue: ‘The End of the Development-Security Nexus: The Rise of Global Disaster Management’

In the new international security order, interventions are posed in the language of individual empowerment, freedom and capacity-building. This short article considers this discourse of empowerment and freedom in relation to the problematic of development. In today’s interventionist paradigm, individual autonomy or freedom is the central motif for understanding the problematic of development. Rather than a material view of development, human agency is placed at the centre and is seen as the measure of development in terms of individual capabilities. In the words of Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, freedom is increasingly seen to be both the primary end and principal means of development: ‘Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency’. In this post-liberal discourse, of ‘human development’, freedom and autonomy are foregrounded but development lacks a transformative or modernising material content. In this discourse, development is taken out of an economic context of GNP growth or industrialisation or a social and political context in which development policies are shaped by social and political pressures or state-led policies.The individualised understanding of development takes a rational-choice view of the individual, or an ‘agent-orientated view’, in which development is about enabling individu- als to make effective choices by increasing their capabilities.

74. ‘Comment le state-building affaiblit les Etats’, Alternatives Sud, (Re-)construire les États, nouvelle frontière de l’ingérence, Vol. 19, No. 1, (2012), pp.23-36

Ce qu’on appelle dans le jargon des internationalistes le state-building (littéralement la construction, l’édification d’Etat, ndt) concerne le développement de mécanismes internationaux de régulation censés restaurer la souveraineté d’Etats en déliquescence. Depuis peu, la faiblesse de certains Etats est effectivement considérée comme un facteur de déstabilisation de l’ordre international et elle devrait, pour cette raison, être prise en considération dans l’élaboration des politiques de sécurité globale.

73. ‘The New Paternalism’ (review article), Radical Philosophy, No. 171, (January/February 2012), pp.42-44

‘Nudge’ and ‘Think’ are currently popular buzzwords of government policy reform, informed by developments in contemporary behavioural economics, psy- chology and the neurosciences. ‘Nudge’ suggests that governments should act to manipulate lifestyle choices – for example, by changing the ways in which choices are presented or the default options involved – while ‘Think’ suggests that citizens need to be influenced to change their decisions or behaviour through participa-tory or deliberative engagement. Such discussions of government intervention to change lifestyle behaviours thus tend to bypass two commonplace approaches: traditional paternalism, or direct intervention – the banning or taxation of behaviour (such as smoking, smacking or fox-hunting) and non-paternalism, such as the provision of information that enables citizens to make up their own minds on a supposedly autonomous basis.

2011

72. ‘”Governance” statt “Government”? Die Grenzen des post-liberalen Peacebuilding am Beispiel Bosnien’, Wissenschaft & Frieden, No. 2 (2011), pp.43-46

Die von den USA angeführten in- ternationalen Versuche von Peace- building im Irak und Afghanistan sind starker Kritik ausgesetzt. Ihre angeblich “liberale” oder “neoliberale” Ausrichtung sei einzig fokussiert auf die Errichtung westlicher Markt-Demokratien, basierend auf einem autonomen, rational denken- den Individuum. Die Peacebuilding-Aktivitäten der Europäischen Union werden hingegen oft als Positivbeispiel herangezogen. Allerdings sind auch diese Maßnahmen kritisch zu bewerten, wie David Chandler am Beispiel Bosnien zeigt.

71. ‘JISB Interview: Albin Kurti: Kosova in Dependence: From Stability of Crisis to Crisis of Stability’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 5, No.1 (2011), pp.89-97

Albin Kurti is the leader of Le ̈vizja VETE ̈VENDOSJE! (Movement for Self- determination!) in Kosova. The movement was standing candidates for the first time in the December 2010 Kosova elections and on 28 October 2010 launched its political programme entitled ‘Development and Statebuilding: Together (it) is Possible’. David Chandler interviewed Albin Kurti at the Le ̈vizja VETE ̈VENDOSJE! offices in Pristina on 2 September 2010 and it was agreed that JISB would publish Kurti’s essay (updated after the elections) articulating how the movement understands the barriers to independence in Kosova today and outlining the political development of its strategy of resistance.

2010

70. ‘The Uncritical Critique of Liberal Peace’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 36 (2010), Special Issue S1 (Evaluating Global Orders), pp.137-155

For many commentators the lack of success in international statebuilding efforts has been explained through the critical discourse of ‘liberal peace’, where it is assumed that ‘liberal’ Western interests and assumptions have influenced policymaking leading to counterproductive results. At the core of the critique is the assumption that the liberal peace approach has sought to reproduce and impose Western models: the reconstruction of ‘Westphalian’ frameworks of state sovereignty; the liberal framework of individual rights and winner-takes-all elections; and neo-liberal free market economic programmes. This article challenges this view of Western policymaking and suggests that post-Cold War post-conflict intervention and statebuilding can be better understood as a critique of classical liberal assumptions about the autonomous subject – framed in terms of sovereignty, law, democracy and the market. The conflating of discursive forms with their former liberal content creates the danger that critiques of liberal peace can rewrite post-Cold War intervention in ways that exaggerate the liberal nature of the policy frameworks and act as apologia, excusing policy failure on the basis of the self-flattering view of Western policy elites: that non-Western subjects were not ready for ‘Western’ freedoms.

69. ‘Neither International nor Global: Rethinking the Problematic Subject of Security’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, No. 3 (2010), pp.89-101

This paper argues that the problematic of the international and the global has been a barrier to understanding the transformation of security discourse over the last decade. Academic treatments of security within the discipline of international relations have been structured by the traditional liberal binaries, which conceive of political communities capable of constituting securing subjects at either the level of the state or the global. Today’s dominant framing of the security problematic seems to evade easy articulation within this structure and in some readings is seen to presage a transitory stage from the international to the global. An alternative reading is sketched out here, that of the post- liberal, which suggests that the apparent shift towards the global can not be captured from within the liberal problematic and highlights that rather than traditional disagreements over the nature of the subject of security – the constitution of the securing actor – we are witnessing the disappearance of securing agency itself.

68. ‘Race, Culture and Civil Society: Peacebuilding Discourse and the Understanding of Difference’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2010), pp.369-390

This article seeks to draw out an understanding of the role of narra- tives and discourses of race, culture and civil society within interna- tional peacebuilding, through the location of the discourse of culture as a transitional stage between interventionist and regulatory dis- courses of race and civil society. It particularly seeks to highlight that the discourse of culture is key to understanding the peacebuilding discourses of intervention and regulation that have developed in the last decade. This is all the more important as the discourse of culture has in many respects been displaced by the discourse of civil society. In drawing out the links between the framings of race, culture and civil society, the article seeks to explain how the discourse of civil soci- ety intervention has been reinvented on the basis of the moral divide established and made coherent through the discourse of culture, and how the discourse of civil society contains a strong apologetic content, capable of legitimizing and explaining the persistence of social and economic problems or political fragmentation while simultaneously offering potential policy programmes on the basis of highly ambitious goals of social transformation.

67. (with Giorgio Shani) ‘Introduction: Assessing the Impact of Foucault on International Relations’, International Political Sociology, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2010), pp.196-197

This forum draws on a selection of papers from two roundtables convened by the editors at the International Studies Association annual convention in New York in 2009. The discussions held on this occasion were unusual in that rather than seeking to apply Foucault to the problematic of International Rela- tions (IR), the panelists were asked to reflect on the impact of Foucault on the discipline itself. Focusing on the central question of ‘‘What has Foucault done for⁄to IR?,’’ this forum therefore takes stock of the achievements, transfor- mations, and limitations of the introduction of Foucault’s sociological insights and powerful epistemological critique to the discipline of IR, particularly in the light of the publication of the English translations of his lectures at the Colle`ge de France.

66. ‘Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault…’, International Political Sociology, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2010), pp.205-207

It is a mantra, doomed to be repeated. It is not a plea. It is not an injunction. We cannot ‘‘forget’’ Foucault in the same way as, in another era, Marx could only repeat his distance from ‘‘Marxists’’ and the defeats of that other era turned Marxism into a dogma. In our era, the transformation of Foucault into the dogmas of ‘‘Foucaultians’’ and ‘‘post-Foucaultians’’ cannot be ended by the work of academics; it is not an academic problem. In the same way, the bloating of the discipline of IR, and the boom of dogmatic Foucaultianism within this, have nothing to do with academia per se, but how the world impinges upon and is reflected within disciplines, overdetermining the transformation of both what we call ‘‘IR’’ and what we call ‘‘political theory’’ and their inter-relationship.

65. ‘Globalizing Foucault: From Critique to Apologia – Reply to Kiersey and Rosenow’, Global Society, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2010), pp.135-142

A special issue of Global Society generated from recent discussions on Foucauldian approaches to IR, some of which I co-convened, with Hiroyuki Tosa at BISA 2008 and Giorgio Shani at ISA 2009, is to be welcomed. For readers of the issue it may have seemed that some of the articles were overly defensive in relation to the criticisms of Foucauldian approaches, which would appear to be limited to a few disparate articles, which I am not sure really constitute putting “the concepts and methods of Michel Foucault (again) on trial”. In fact, as far as I am aware, the few critical voices in the discussion have a great deal of sympathy for Foucault’s “concepts and methods”. The point which they have in common, and which I am keen to highlight here, is a questioning approach to the academic and critical value of some of the work of self-proclaimed Foucauldians developing critiques of the global operation of power relations. In this short response, I would like to draw out what might be politically at stake in the discussion of the “globalising” of Foucault and to highlight that the discussion of the relevance of Foucault’s methods or of whether or not it is legitimate to apply Foucault to IR is somewhat of a red herring.

64. ‘Risk and the Biopolitics of Global Insecurity’ (review article), Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2010), pp.287-297

Both of these books make valuable reading for those attempting to understand the shift from ‘modernist’, ‘Westphalian’, ‘statist’ or ‘rationalist’ discourses of international security to the post-modern, post-political discourses of global insecurity. Both books provide differing but very important insights into the blurring of traditional categories of international politics, international law and the understandings of war and conflict. Dillon and Reid draw out the problematic of war and intervention shaped around the protection, or securing, of life that has become dangerous, both to itself and to others: the framework of ‘liberal’ humanitarian interventions and of broad-ranging discourses of human security, setting up the problem of ‘resilience’ as the framing through which biopolitical power is exercised internationally. Coker, on the other hand, focuses on the problem of war and interventionist policy-making in the context of the self-awareness of Western policy-makers that the life that has become dangerous is that of their own power in an age of complexity and globalised modernity, making any policy interventions likely to produce further destabilising or unintended consequences. Both framings reflect today’s world of global insecurity where war is no longer a discrete act with clear goals through which security can be obtained but part of a process of risk or security ‘management’, where both ‘war’ and ‘peace’ have become outdated categories.

63. ‘No Communicating Left’ (review article), Radical Philosophy, No. 160 (March/April 2010), pp.53-55

Dean pulls few punches in her devastating critique of the American left for its complacency, its limited capacity, and even its lack of awareness of the need to offer a stand of political resistance to power. Dean highlights clearly the disintegration of the collective left and its simulacra in the individuated life-style politics of today’s depoliticized radicalism, where it appears that particular individual demands and identities are to be respected but there is no possibility of universalising them into a collective challenge to the system: no possibility of a left which stands for something beyond itself. She argues that, rather than confront this problem, the left take refuge in the fantasy that technology will overcome their inability to engage and that the circulation of ideas and information on the internet will construct the collectivities and communities of interest, which are lacking in reality. For Dean, this ‘technology fetishism’ marks the left’s failure: its ‘abandonment of workers and the poor; its retreat from the state and repudiation of collective action; and its acceptance of the neoliberal economy as the “only game in town”’.

62. ‘R2P or Not R2P? More Statebuilding, Less Responsibility’, Global Responsibility to Protect, Vol. 2, Nos. 1-2 (2010), pp.161-166

In 2001, in the aftermath of the war in Kosovo, when the concept of ‘the responsibility to protect’ was first articulated, it appeared that the growing demand for a right of humanitarian intervention might fatally undermine the authority and structures of the United Nations. Firstly, it was argued that the UN Security Council was unsuitable as the final arbiter of whether military force was lawfully used, with suggestions of independent criteria for judging the ‘legitimacy’ of force. Secondly, it was argued that the concept of sovereign equality, the bulwark of the UN international legal order, no longer seemed to be adequate when some states abused their sovereign rights to claim impunity for mass atrocities and human rights abuses.

61. ‘Liberal War and Foucaultian Metaphysics’ (review article), Journal of International Cooperation Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2010), pp.85-94

This book, by the two leading Foucaultian theorists of international security, makes compulsory reading by virtue of the claim it stakes in developing a Foucaultian, biopolitical, critique of the‘liberal way of war’. There is little doubt that the question of the relationship between Foucault’s conception of biopolitics and an understanding of the global politics of peace and war today, which they seek to explore, is of tremendous importance.

60. ‘The EU and Southeastern Europe: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010), pp.69-85

This article suggests that EU governance in Southeastern Europe reproduces a discourse in which the failures and problems which have emerged, especially in relation to the pace of integration and the sustainability of peace in candidate member states such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, have merely reinforced the EU’s external governance agenda. On the one hand, the limitations of reform have reinforced the EU’s projection of its power as a civilising mission into what is perceived to be a dangerous vacuum in the region. On the other hand, through the discourse of post-liberal governance, the EU seeks to avoid the direct political responsibilities associated with this power. Rather than legitimise policy making on the basis of representative legitimacy, post-liberal frameworks of governance problematise autonomy and self-government, inverting the liberal paradigm through establishing administrative and regulatory frameworks as prior to democratic choices. This process tends to distance policy making from representative accountability, weakening the legitimacy of governing institutions in Southeastern European states which have international legal sovereignty but lack genuine mechanisms for politically integrating society.

59. ‘The Paradox of the Responsibility to Protect’ (review article), Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 45, No. 1 (2010), pp.128-134

One of the most striking aspects of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine appears to be the gap between the promise and the reality. In 2001, when the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) published its report ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, there was little doubt that, as stated in the Foreword, the concept of R2P was ‘about the so-called “right of humanitarian intervention” – the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive – and in particular military – action, against another state for the purpose of protecting people at risk in that other state’. The ICISS was tasked with trying to develop a global political consensus on the question of humanitarian intervention, which it believed it had achieved through reformulating the problem in terms of the ‘responsibility to protect’.

2009

58. ‘The Global Ideology: Rethinking the Politics of the “Global Turn” in IR’, International Relations, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2009), pp.530-547

Many commentators appear to take for granted the fact that the sphere of political power and contestation has shifted from the national level to the global level. This article seeks to question the assumptions made about politics at the global level, highlighting the elision of ‘global politics’ with the globalisation of the political. It will be suggested that major changes have taken place in terms of political subjectivity and how we view political community, blurring the lines of distinction between the domestic and international realms. The understanding of these changes in primarily spatial terms – from the level of the nation state to the global – mystifies the qualitative shift in political consciousness, political engagement and political instrumentality involved. In fact, the relationship between political subjectivity and the external world is inversed. The Global Ideology posits material changes at the global level as the explanatory factor for the breakdown of state-based forms of political identification and collective engagement, understanding these changes as marking the birth of global politics. In relocating this shift in consciousness in the attenuation of political engagement and collective identification it is possible to explain the shift in political subjectivity in terms of the globalisation of the political – as the result of our more individuated relationship to our external world.

57. ‘Unravelling the Paradox of ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 20 (2009), pp.27-39

This paper explains that the desire to evade Western responsibility is at the heart of the paradox of ‘the responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine, and that this desire for evasion enables us to understand the gap between the rhetorical promise of ‘never again’ and the reality of a lack of ‘political will’ to intervene in situations where mass atrocities are ongoing. The paper traces the shifting discourse away from the 1990s ‘right to intervene’; through the 2001 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s report re-posing military intervention in the vague terms of ‘the responsibility to protect’; to the 2005 World Summit and 2009 follow-up document, which de-link military intervention from R2P and focus instead upon non-Western state and regional ‘responsibilities’. Through the reworking of the doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’, questions of military intervention, which threatened to undermine the UN framework, have been transposed into technical and administrative problems, serving to strengthen and extend UN institutional structures.

56. ‘War without End(s): Grounding Global War’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 3 (2009), pp.243-262

This article seeks to explain the limits of critical discourses of ‘global war’ and biopolitical framings of ‘global conflict’ that have arisen in response to the globalization of security discourses in the post-Cold War era. The central theoretical insight offered is that ‘global war’ should not be understood in the framework of contested struggles to reproduce and extend the power of regulatory control. ‘Global war’ appears ‘unlimited’ and unconstrained precisely because it lacks the instrumental, strategic framework of ‘war’ understood as a political-military technique. For this reason, critical analytical framings of global conflict, which tend to rely on the ‘scaling up’ of Michel Foucault’s critique of biopolitics and upon Carl Schmitt’s critique of universal claims to protect the ‘human’, elide the specificity of the international today. Today’s ‘wars of choice’, fought under the banner of the ‘values’ of humanitarian intervention or the ‘global war on terror’, are distin- guished precisely by the fact that they cannot be grasped as strategically framed political conflicts.

55. (with Daniele Archibugi) ‘A Dialogue on International Interventions: When are they a Right or an Obligation?’, Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2009)

In 15 years, the international community has been blamed for resorting too easily to the use of force on some occasions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo), and also it has been blamed for intervening too late or not at all in other crises (Rwanda, Bosnia and today Sudan and Congo). Even today, one of the most contested questions of international politics is the legitimacy for the use of force. David Chandler, Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster (UK) and Daniele Archibugi, a research director at National Research Council (Italy) and Professor at Birkbeck College (University of London), discuss about the use of force, how the theory and practice of warfare and humanitarian intervention have evolved in the contemporary world and the international responsibility of states. In his Empire in Denial: The Politics of State-building (Pluto Press), David Chandler has forcefully argued that Western interventions are destablizing exercises of power without responsibility. Daniele Archibugi has been equally critical of these armed interventions, although in his The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton University Press), he urges for a cosmopolitan responsibility based on non-violence and inclusion.

54. ‘Iraq and the Problematic Discourse of Defeat’, Globalizations, Vol. 6, No.1 (2009), pp.133-138

The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq was the occasion for practically every commentator, apart from George W. Bush, to declare that the war in Iraq has resulted in a defeat for the West. While the consensus is clear, what is not so clear is the meaning of this discourse of defeat. One could be forgiven for thinking that, for many commentators, the declaration of the defeat of the intervening powers in Iraq was seen to be a cause, if not of celebration, then at least of a certain vicarious satisfaction. This short discussion piece seeks to locate the meaning and importance of defeat and to explore the implicitly ethical or critical connotation behind the discourse of defeat. It concludes that defeat seems to be based less on the military, strategic, or political defeat of the US and UK than in a wider sense of loss expressed by the blurring of a critique of the Iraq war with a more general disillusionment with political engagement.

53. ‘Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism?: The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach’, International Political Sociology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2009), pp.53-70

Today there is a widespread recognition of the erosion of political community on the territorial basis of the nation-state. Instead, alterna- tive framings of ‘‘being’’ political or of engaging in politics have argued for a more radical post-territorial space of political possibilities, of what it means to be political, and of how we envision political community. Through focusing on the two dominant articulations of post-territorial political community, liberal cosmopolitan and radical poststructuralist approaches, this article seeks to analyze the possibilities and limitations inherent in the search for political community beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. The aspiration to engage in, construct, or recognize the existence of a post-territorial political community, a community of broader humanity, has been articulated in liberal terms as cosmopoli- tanism, driven by global civil society, and in poststructuralist terms as ‘‘political cosmopolitanism,’’ ‘‘cosmopolitanism-to-come’’ or the ‘‘solidarity of the governed,’’ given its force by the creativity of the resistance to liberal universalism of the ‘‘multitude.’’ This article seeks to draw out the similarities between these two contrasting approaches, ostensibly based upon either the extension of or the critique of liberal political ontologies.

2008

52. ‘The Limits of Post-Territorial Political Community: From the Cosmopolitan Politics of Global Civil Society to the Biopolitics of the Multitude’, Filozofski Godišnjak, (Philosophical Yearbook of the Department of Philosophy, University of Belgrade) Vol. 21, Special Issue supplement, pp.67-82

51. ‘Textual and Critical Approaches to Reading Schmitt: Rejoinder to Odysseos and Petito’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2008), pp.477-481

My original article developed a critical understanding of the dynamic driving the revival of interest in Carl Schmitt’s work within the discipline of International Relations. It concluded that Schmitt’s revival said more about the idealism and defensiveness of critical theorising today than about any deeper appreciation of Schmitt’s work itself. I very much welcome the response of Odysseos and Petito which, despite consciously evading my main points, provides some useful insights into the problematic nature of ‘critical’ readings of Schmitt’s work. Here, I only have space to briefly highlight how their response seeks to evade the task of critique: that of historically and politically understanding theory in relation to the context in which it is developed and used. First, they seek to evade any critique of Schmitt’s work itself, providing a dehistoricised textual reading which celebrates ambiguity and indeterminacy. Second, they evade the task of critical engagement with IR theorising today, seeking to shift the focus from what constitutes a critical approach to IR to a narrow discussion of textual interpretations.

50. ‘Normative Power and the Liberal Peace: A Rejoinder to John O’Brennan’, Global Society, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2008), pp.519-529

This rejoinder to John O’Brennan reasserts the case that the EU enlargement process has a depoliticising effect, which weakens the connections between Western Balkan states and their societies. It suggests that O’Brennan’s response is more apologia than analysis; evading issues raised by asymmetrical relations of power between the EU and Western Balkans states. Here the EU is idealised, with the ascribed status of a “normative actor” projecting power merely through “soft power” mechanisms. The points raised in rejoinder seek to clarify that the more “muscular” use of condition- ality and direct management of policy reforms inevitably limit the possibilities for public and political debate and consensus-making. Moreover, they distance political elites from their societies. In particular, the use of political conditionality is high- lighted, to demonstrate that whether “hard” powers of imposition or “soft” powers of conditionality are used matters less to those on the receiving end of external impo- sition than to the EU itself, which has attempted to distance itself from its use of execu- tive powers in the region.

49. ‘The Revival of Carl Schmitt in International Relations: The Last Refuge of Critical Theorists?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2008), pp.27-48

This article seeks to question the ‘critical’ readings of Carl Schmitt’s understanding of international law and the use of force in international relations, particularly the approaches taken by many critical cosmopolitan theorists and many post-structuralists who have used Schmitt to distance themselves from, and to critique, American foreign policy, especially under the Bush administrations. I suggest that these critical theorists engage in a highly idealized understanding of Schmitt, focusing on his contingent political conclusions, using his work descriptively rather than analytically. It is argued that the ideal- ist approach to Schmitt stems from these commentators’ concerns to describe their work as critical rather than from any attempt to use Schmitt’s underlying ontological framing of the relationship between law, ethics and the use of force to develop analytical insights into the practice and jurisprudence of the international sphere today. The revival of Schmitt in international relations therefore tells us more about the crisis of critical theorizing than the relevance of Schmitt’s analysis to today’s world.

48. ‘Human Security: The Dog that Didn’t Bark’ (review article), Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2008), pp.427-438

The history of the radical challenge of ‘human security’– from the first usage of the term in the United Nations Development Programme’s 1994 Human Development Report until the present time – is often written in terms that pose the centrality of the struggle between tradi- tional, state-based, interest-based approaches and new, deterritorialized, values-based approaches that focus on individual human needs. For some authors, the struggle is at the heart of how we conceive of international relations and questions of security, and one that, after 9/11 and with the ongoing disaster of Iraq, is more important than ever. This struggle for the heart and soul of global policymaking is often posed as one between two different ‘paradigms’, two entirely different outlooks on the world, one paradigm reproducing current power relations and inequalities and insecurities, the other challenging such a view, recognizing the interconnectedness, interdependence and mutual vulnerabilities of security threats and the need for collective, collaborative, human-centred responses.

47. ‘Human Security II: Waiting for the Tail to Wag the Dog: Rejoinder to Ambrosetti, Owen and Wibben’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2008), pp.463-469

In my original review article, ‘Human Security: The Dog That Didn’t Bark’, I sought to highlight the dangers of idealism inherent in advocacy (by academics and policymakers) of human security frameworks, which were held to empower the vulnerable and marginalized. I posed the question of the need to consider why the frameworks of human security had been so rapidly mainstreamed into the policy and programmes of leading Western states and international organizations, and, in conclusion, suggested that this shift reflected the needs of policy elites and reinforced existing hierarchies of power.

46. ‘From Security to Insecurity: Kaldor, Duffield and Furedi’ (review article), Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2008), pp.265-276

These three important books focus on the changing nature of the security problematic from security—the inter-state threat of war—to insecurity—the permanent risk of instability. This shift is fundamental to our understanding of new international policy frameworks, particularly within the sphere of conflict, security and development. For Mary Kaldor, globalisation has led to the internationalisation of risks and threats, creating the need for cosmopolitan solutions to the problem of ‘human’ insecurity. For Mark Duffield, the permanent war on insecurity is a product of the neoliberal biopolitical division of the world between the insured and the uninsured. For Frank Furedi, the expanding perception of insecurity is driven by the isolation and pessimism of political elites in the West.

45. ‘Avrupa Birliği Ulus İnşaasi: Liberal Barişi Ab Genişlemesiyle Güven Altina Alma’, Stratejik Öngörü Dergisi (Journal of Strategic Insight), TASAM (Turkish Asian Centre for Strategic Studies), Vol. 5, No. 12 (2008), pp.13-20

2007

44. ‘Introduction: Inside the Bosnian Crisis’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Special Online Supplement, ‘Inside the Bosnian Crisis’, 1 December 2007

On 1 November 2007 Bosnia’s Serbian prime minister Nikola Špirić resigned bringing government to a standstill. Richard Holbrooke, the US architect of the Dayton peace agreement, highlighted in the Washington Post the warning of Raffi Gregorian, the US deputy High Representative in Bosnia, that ‘Bosnia’s very survival could be determined in the next few months if not the next few weeks’. The European Union has circulated to its member state ambassadors a document recognising that: ‘The eruption of the long- simmering political crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina has painfully exposed the failure of the most intensive effort ever at internationally-supervised statebuilding.’ However the current crisis is resolved, it is the underlying problems of the framework of international regulation in the country, which is the central concern of this special supplement of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

43. ‘The Security-Development Nexus and the Rise of “Anti-Foreign Policy”‘, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2007), pp.362-386

Current debates and discussions of the emerging security–development nexus tend to portray this as signifying the increased importance of the problems of non-Western states to Western policy-makers.This article seeks to challenge this perspective and analyses how the policy ‘nexus’ reflects a retreat from strategic policy-making and a more inward-looking approach to foreign policy, more concerned with self-image than the policy consequences in the areas concerned. Rather than demonstrating a new seriousness of approach to tackling the security and development problems of the non-Western world, the discussions around this framework betray the separation between policy rhetoric and policy planning.This reflects the rise of anti-foreign policy: attempts to use the international sphere as an arena for self-referential statements of political mission and purpose, decoupled from their subject matter, resulting in ad hoc and arbitrary foreign policy-making.

42. ‘European Union Statebuilding: Securing the Liberal Peace through EU Enlargement’, Global Society, Vol. 21, No. 4 (2007), pp.593-607. Special issue: ‘The Liberal Peace and Post-war Reconstruction

This paper suggests that the liberal peace, secured by state capacity building in the process of EU enlargement to the Balkans, hides a dual process taking place within the political establishment of the European Union. On the one hand, the European Union seeks to project its power into what is perceived to be a vacuum in the region, on the other hand, it seeks to avoid the direct political responsibilities associated with empire. This exercise of power and avoidance of responsibility is driven by the European Union’s own lack of confidence in its expansion to the east, particularly with regard to its ability to legitimate this project to the citizens of EU member states. However, the consequences of the policies which seek to deny the power exercised by the European Union are destabilising ones for the Balkan states, where the relations of power are separated from relations of accountability. This tends to create weakened states which have international legal sovereignty but lack genuine mechanisms for politically integrating society. The pre-existing fragility of state–society relations in this region means that these relations of domination risk exposing the weakness and external dependency of political elites and the discrediting of the European project.

41. ‘Hollow Hegemony: Theorising the Shift from Interest-Based to Value-Based International Policy-Making’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2007), Special Issue: Theorising the International, pp.703-723

Today, attempts to explain the post-Cold War shift away from interest-based to value-based policy-making are increasingly caught in a cleft stick between Post-Realist (e.g. neo-Gramscian and post-structuralist) revelations of hegemonic power relations and Post-Liberal (essentially Constructivist) assertions of the transformative power of ideas, communicative networks and emerging international norms. This paper suggests that neither Post-Realist nor Post-Liberal approaches are able to tell us much about the interrelationship between interests and ideas in the current historical conjuncture. This is because neither framework can easily countenance a disjunction between material ‘interests’ and the discursive forms in which power is projected internationally. Using the ontological focus and epistemological framework adopted in Karl Marx’s study of the crisis of political subjectivity, and the consequential retreat into idealism, of the German Ideology, this paper argues that a materialist grounding of ethical declarations of value-based policy does not necessarily lead back to the direct, or even indirect, interests of hegemonic powers. Rather, it indicates an era of ‘hollow hegemony’ marked by the lack of instrumental policy-making and the inability to construct a clear political project cohering values, frameworks and strategic interests.

40. ‘Potemkin Sovereignty: Statehood without Politics in the New World Order’, The Monist: An International Journal of General Philosophical Enquiry, Vol. 90, No. 1, (2007), special ‘Sovereignty’ issue, pp.86-105

39. ‘Deriving Norms from “Global Space”: The Limits of Communicative Approaches to Global Civil Society Theorising’, Globalizations, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2007), pp.283-298

This paper outlines the limits of the conception of ‘global space’ at the centre of attempts to establish the existence of certain communicative norms of ‘global civil society’. It particularly focuses on theoretically asserted claims made for an idealized global public sphere which are the basis upon which theoretical structures of communicative values and global norms are constituted. These, in turn, are used to inform normative critiques, from the standpoint of ‘global civil society’, which challenge present international practices. The concluding sections outline the limitations of this political project, highlighting the problematic, de-socialized, nature of these conceptions of ‘global space’; which, in lacking any mediating framework between the asserted ‘moral autonomy’ of actors in global civil society and the global norms allegedly derived from them, makes communicative global civil society theorizing innately conservative in character.

38. ‘Global Space: Positivism, Progress and the Political – Reply to Kaldor, Dallmayr, Lipshutz, Beregsen and Patomäki’, Globalizations, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2007), pp.318-320 (for draft of the responses replied to click here)

I am grateful for the range of commentaries which my short article ‘Deriving Norms from “Global Space”’has elicited. Because there are five responses and my ‘right of reply’ is strictly limited, I will draw out the key points from two commentators, whose responses are indirectly related to my paper, and spare more time engaging with the three more fundamental critiques of my piece.

37. (with Jon Pugh and Caspar Hewett) ‘Commentaries: Debating (De)territorial Governance’, Area: Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2007), pp.107-109

‘Deterritorialization’ has become one of the central themes of our time. Some academics are trying to understand its mechanisms, others are offering deterri- torialization as a political aspiration; many are increasingly doing both. This shift reflects an increasing lack of faith in peoples’ abilities to form territorial institutions for collective representation that can actually help themselves and others. The state in particular has come increasingly under attack, as the spatialization of politics throws up new issues for forms of democratic governance. And so a new politics which privileges deterritorialized expression over collective territorial political governance is being advocated in many quarters. The number of alternatives to representative state governance – from ‘anti-politics’ to ‘cosmopolitanism’, the idea of a ‘smooth world’ and certain forms of ‘global civil society’ – increasingly dominates academic debate.

36. ‘The Possibilities of Post-Territorial Political Community’, Area: Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2007), pp.116-119

This paper argues that the lack of purchase of traditional territorial constructions of political community does not necessarily indicate the emergence of new post-territorial forms of political belonging. Rather, the claims made for new ‘immanent’ or ‘emerging’ forms of post-territorial political community reflect the highly individuated forms of political activity which have accompanied the break-down of domestic social and political links. This breakdown of territorial forms of belonging has facilitated the development of a variety of unmediated forms of expression of individual claims, tending to privilege the individual over any communal collectivity. This discussion paper concludes by suggesting what the possibilities of a reconstitution of political community might imply.

35. (with Simon Chesterman and Liisa Laakso) ‘Editors’ Introduction’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2007) pp.1-2

Welcome to the first issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, a new cross-disciplinary journal devoted to academic and practitioner analysis of international intervention with the purpose of strengthening state capacities.

34. (with Christopher Bickerton) ‘JISB Interview: Lord Paddy Ashdown: The European Union and Statebuilding in the Western Balkans’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2007) pp.107-118

Christopher Bickerton and David Chandler interviewed Paddy Ashdown, international High Representative and EU Special Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, May 2002/January 2006, at the House of Lords, 5 July 2006. He is currently working on a book distilling the lessons of his experience of statebuilding in the region.

2006

33. (with Daniele Archibugi) ‘Las intervenciones internacionales: ¿cuándo derecho, cuándo obligación? Un diálogo entre David Chandler y Daniele Archibugi’, Papeles: De Cuestiones Internacionales, Inverno 2006/2007, No. 96, pp.109-127

In Spanish here.

Nieves Zúñiga García-Falces is a researcher at Peace Research Center (CIP-FUHEM, Spain) and editor of the quarterly Papeles de Relaciones Ecosociales y Cambio Global. This interview was originally published as ‘Las intervenciones internacionales: ¿cuándo derecho, cuándo obligación? Un diálogo entre David Chandler y Daniele Archibugi’, Papeles: De Cuestiones Internacionales, Inverno 2006/2007, No. 96, pp.109-127.

32. ‘Comment le state-building affaiblit les Etats’, Cahiers Marxistes, August-September 2006, No. 233, special issue ‘Le Defi Imperial’, pp. 39-52

Ce qu’on appelle dans le jargon des internationalistes le state-building (littéralement la construction, l’édification d’Etat, ndt) concerne le développement de mécanismes internationaux de régulation censés restaurer la souveraineté d’Etats en déliquescence. Depuis peu, la faiblesse de certains Etats est effectivement considérée comme un facteur de déstabilisation de l’ordre international et elle devrait, pour cette raison, être prise en considération dans l’élaboration des politiques de sécurité globale.

31. ‘Back to the Future? The Limits of Neo-Wilsonian Ideals of Exporting Democracy’,  Review of International Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, (2006), pp.475-494

International state-building has become central to international policy concerns and has marked a clear neo-Wilsonian shift in international thinking, spurred by the leadership of the United States and the European Union. Today’s approaches insist on the regulatory role of international institutions and downplay the importance of locally-derived political solutions. This privileging of ‘governance’ over ‘government’ is based on the assumption that the political process can be externally influenced through the promotion of institutional changes introduced at the state level and pays less attention to how societal pressures and demands are constitutive of stable and legitimate institutional mechanisms. This article questions this approach and analyses the transformation in the assessment of the importance of the societal sphere. It considers how this shift has been shaped by current understandings of war and conflict, and how the prioritisation of governance has fitted with critical and post-positivist trends in academic thinking in international relations and security studies. The discussion is illustrated with examples drawn largely from the Balkans and the international regime in Bosnia–Herzegovina in particular.

30. ‘The EU and Bosnia after Dayton: the Reform of International Policy towards Bosnia’, Studia Diplomatica: The Brussels Journal of International Relations, Vol. LIX (2006), No. 1, pp. 95-116

29. ‘State-Building in Bosnia: The Limits of “Informal Trusteeship”‘, International Journal of Peace Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2006), pp.17-38

Many commentators suggest that the transition to Bosnian ownership has been held back by the Dayton framework, which created a weak central state and a country divided into two separate Entities, the Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation, with ten cantonal governments, as well as an autonomous region, Brcko. Ten years on, the idea that the post-war transition has been frustrated by a surfeit of Bosnian governing institutions, protected by their Dayton status, could not be further from the truth. Rather, the international powers of administration, under the Office of the High Representative, have been vastly increased, reducing the Bosnian institutions established by Dayton to administrative shells. There has been a transition away from Dayton, but this has been from the ad hoc regulatory controls of the self-selected ‘coalition of the willing’, the Peace Implementation Council, towards an expanded framework of European Union regulation, covering all aspects of the post-Dayton process. Dayton has created an ‘informal trusteeship’, with external institutions rewriting their mandates and powers. But despite the transformation in post-Dayton mechanisms, it is still too early to talk of any indications of a shift towards Bosnian ‘ownership’.

28. ‘Building Trust in Public Institutions? Good Governance and Anti-Corruption in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Ethnopolitics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2006), pp.85-99

Ten years after Dayton corruption and good governance rather than ethnic nationalism are widely alleged to be the central problems facing international attempts to construct capable and legitimate Bosnian state institutions. Political corruption substitutes private interests for public interests and in so doing undermines trust in public institutions, which depends on the fair and equal treatment of all citizens. In prioritizing anti-corruption and good governance initiatives, the international administration in Bosnia reflects an increasing international focus on these aspects as crucial to state-building initiatives. This paper considers the anti-corruption policies developed in the past decade and assesses the extent to which anti-corruption and good governance practices, developed by Bosnia’s international administrators, have, in fact, rebuilt trust in Bosnia’s public institutions.

27. ‘Holding a Looking-Glass to the “Movement” A Response to Worth and Abbott’, Globalizations, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2006), pp.65-67

Owen Worth and Jason Abbott raise a number of useful points about the lack of clarity and direction of the anti-globalization movement and also highlight what they see as the danger of a progressive left-wing anti-capitalist agenda being hijacked by the radical right. The problem with the article is that in many respects the opposite has occurred, the political collapse of the left has meant that those searching for a radical critical framework today have plundered the poli- tics of romantic reaction with its attention to difference, cultural diversity, natural limits, ecology and sustainability and its hostility to commodification and mass consumerism.

2005

26. ‘Editor’s Introduction: Peace without Politics?’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2005, pp.307-321

It is ten years since the Dayton peace settlement, which formally ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in November 1995. Since then there has been much discussion about the steep learning curve necessary for the new inter- national tasks of state-building and post-conflict peacebuilding. BiH was the first such extensive international project since the post-Second World War US- led occupations of the defeated Axis powers Germany and Japan. Today, with the end of cold war geo-political divisions, BiH has become widely seen as a template for new experiments in international administration and external assist- ance in state reconstruction and post-conflict reconciliation. The contributions in this specially commissioned collection seek to probe the lessons of the BiH experience and highlight the nature of the problems confronted by international policy-making institutions; exploring the limitations and possibilities for external influence and drawing attention to some of the unintended consequences of projects of this kind.

25. ‘Bosnia: From Dayton to Europe’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2005, pp.322-335

Many commentators suggest that the transition to Bosnian ownership has been held back by the Dayton framework, which created a weak central state and a country divided into two separate entities, the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Muslim-Croat Bosnian Federation (FBiH), with ten cantonal governments, as well as an autonomous region, Brcko. Ten years on, the idea that the post-war transition has been frustrated by a surfeit of Bosnian governing institutions, protected by their Dayton status, could not be further from the truth. Rather, the international powers of administration, under the Office of the High Represen- tative, have been vastly increased, reducing the Bosnian institutions established by Dayton to administrative shells. There has been a transition away from Dayton, but this has been from the ad hoc regulatory controls of the self-selected ‘coalition of the willing’, the Peace Implementation Council, towards an expanded framework of European Union regulation, covering all aspects of the post-Dayton process. Dayton has proved highly flexible, with external institutions rewriting their mandates and powers. However, despite the transform- ation in post-Dayton mechanisms, it is still too early to talk of any indications of a shift towards Bosnian ‘ownership’.

2004

24. ‘Building Global Civil Society “From Below”?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2004, pp.313-339

Whereas state-based political action is held to reinforce frameworks and hierarchies of exclusion, new social movements, said to constitute a global civil society ‘from below’, are seen to herald new forms of emancipatory political action that recognise and include diversity and build new forms of global ‘counter-hegemonic’ politics. This paper seeks to examine and challenge these claims. It suggests that, rather than expanding the sphere of inclusiveness, global civic activism tends to undermine community connections. This is because the political ethics it advocates are deeply corrosive of social engagement and prone to elitist rather than inclusive consequences. The argument that the individual should have no higher political allegiance beyond their own moral conscience merely reflects and legitimises the radical rejection of collective political engagement and its replacement by elite advocacy and personal solipsism.

23. ‘The Problems of “Nation-Building”: Imposing Bureaucratic Rule From Above’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2004, pp.577-591

With the problems of stabilising Iraq continuing under the ‘fully sovereign’ Iraqi interim government, which formally replaced the United-States-led transitional administrative authority on 28 June 2004, many critics have argued that the United Nations (UN) should play a much larger role in the transition process. This article suggests that while imposing an alternative set of external administrative ‘advisers’ might be popular with European powers, it is unlikely that greater UN involvement would make much difference to the people of Iraq. Using the example of the international protectorate of Bosnia, which is also a ‘fully sovereign’ state, where the UN plays a fully engaged role, it is clear that external enforcement can provide little legitimacy for Iraqi institutions. This article challenges the idea that the ‘rule of law’ can be imposed from outside by focusing on two areas of legal activism in Bosnia: constitutional change and property return. It suggests that the ‘rule of law’ approach sees legal or administrative solutions as a short cut to addressing political problems, fetishising the legal framework at the same time as marginalising the political sphere. Rather than more coercive external involvement in the form of pressures for more legislation and better law enforcement, the experience of Bosnia highlights the need for greater levels of political legitimacy, a need that runs counter to the logic of the ‘rule of law’ approach.

22. ‘Culture Wars and International Intervention: An ‘Inside/Out’ View of the Decline of the National Interest’, International Politics, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2004, pp.354-74

Today there is a consensus that the foreign policy of leading Western powers cannot be understood by considering nation states as egoistic actors pursing narrow self-interest. Since the end of the Cold War, major states have increasingly stressed the importance of ethics and values in the shaping of international goals and have intervened internationally on the basis of ‘other-regarding’ concerns such as human rights and international justice. Many commentators have understood this shift to ‘value-led’ or ‘ethical’ foreign policy through an ‘outside/in’ approach to the question, viewing this value shift as a response to international pressures of globalization and the creation of new cosmopolitan constituencies. This article instead employs an ‘inside/out’ approach, which suggests that the shift away from the articulation of national interests and the drive to defend ‘values’ through international intervention can be understood as products of and responses to the domestic political malaise at the heart of Western politics, often referred to in the US as an outcome of the ‘Culture Wars’.

21. ‘Imposing the ‘Rule of Law’: The Lessons of Bosnia-Herzegovina for Peacebuilding in Iraq’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2004, pp.312-333

With the task of establishing a new set of regime structures in Iraq, many policy-makers have turned to the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) experience for lessons in peacebuilding. The key lesson advocated by international officials has been the prioritization of the ‘rule of law’ rather than the focus on political processes and elections. It is held that while regular elections have merely reinforced the dominance of political elites hostile to reform, internationally-imposed legal changes have galvanized the peacebuilding process. This article challenges that perspective through focusing on three areas of legal activism in BiH: consti- tutional change, property return and employment laws. It suggests that the ‘rule of law’ approach sees legal or administrative solutions as a short cut to addressing political problems, fetishizing the legal framework at the same time as marginaliz- ing the political sphere. Rather than more coercive external involvement in the form of pressures for more legislation and better law enforcement, the experience of BiH highlights the need for greater levels of political legitimacy, a need which runs counter to the logic of the ‘rule of law’ approach.

20. ‘The Responsibility to Protect: Imposing the “Liberal Peace”?’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 11, No. 1, Special Issue: Peace Operations and Global Order, 2004, pp.59-81

Since the end of the Cold War, debate over international peacekeeping has been dominated by the question of the so-called ‘right of humanitarian intervention’. Advocates of the right of intervention, largely Western states, have tended to uphold liberal internationalist claims that new international norms prioritizing individual rights to protection promise a framework of liberal peace and that the Realist framework of the Cold War period when state security was viewed as paramount has been superseded. In an attempt to codify and win broader inter- national legitimacy for new interventionist norms, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty released a two-volume report, The Respon- sibility to Protect, in December 2001. In the light of this report and broader developments in international security in the wake of September 11, this essay suggests that rather than a moral shift away from the rights of sovereignty, the dominance of the liberal peace thesis, in fact, reflects the new balance of power in the international sphere. Justifications for new interventionist norms as a framework for liberal peace are as dependent on the needs of Realpolitik as was the earlier doctrine of sovereign equality and non-intervention.

2003

19. ‘Rhetoric without Responsibility: The Attraction of “Ethical” Foreign Policy’, British Journal of Politics & International Relations, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2003, pp.295-316

This article analyses the shift, from the openly declared pursuit of national interests in foreign policy, to the growing emphasis on ethical or moral duties to protect the rights and interests of others, often in areas where western states have little economic or geo-strategic interest. It suggests that while international changes may have provided the opportunity to present foreign policy in ethical terms, an important impetus behind ethical foreign policy interventions may lie in the domestic sphere and the search for new mechanisms of enhanc- ing political legitimacy. Ethical foreign policy is ideally suited to buttressing the moral authority of governments, often under question in the domestic context, because policy-makers are less accountable for matching ambitious policy aims with final policy outcomes in the international sphere. The gap between rhetoric and responsibility lies in the fact that policy can be declared a success with little regard for policy outcomes, as there is no formal accountability to non-citizens abroad, while problems can be blamed on the actions of other people or their governments. The freedom of manoeuvre provided by the ethical agenda of foreign policy activism allows governments to cohere a sense of purpose and mission through the projection of their power abroad when they find it increasingly difficult to act decisively at home.

18. ‘New Rights for Old? Cosmopolitan Citizenship and the Critique of State Sovereignty’, Political Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2, 2003, pp.339-356

Cosmopolitan international relations theorists envisage a process of expanding cosmopolitan democracy and global governance, in which for the first time there is the possibility of global issues being addressed on the basis of new forms of democracy, derived from the universal rights of global citizens. They suggest that, rather than focus attention on the territorially limited rights of the citizen at the level of the nation-state, more emphasis should be placed on extending democracy and human rights to the international sphere. This paper raises problems with extending the concept of rights beyond the bounds of the sovereign state, without a mechanism of making these new rights accountable to their subject. The emerging gap, between holders of cosmopolitan rights and those with duties, tends to create dependency rather than to empower. So while the new rights remain tenuous, there is a danger that the cosmopolitan framework can legitimise the abrogation of the existing rights of democracy and self-government preserved in the UN Charter framework.

17. ‘The Domestic Dynamic behind Humanitarian Intervention’, WeltTrends: Zeitschrift für internationale Politik, No. 38, Spring 2003, pp.120-134

16. ‘The Dynamics of Empire: Why We Need a New Analysis of Imperialism’, Global Dialogue, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2003, pp.105-115

There is little disagreement that, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the United States is the leading international power. There is also little dispute that it is increasingly willing to assert its power and influence internationally. Those who agree with US interventionist foreign policy tend to see this as a potentially progressive or “post-imperial” use of power. Those who resent US dominance and its unilateral capabilities tend to view the assertion of American power as “imperialism”. This essay starts with Hardt and Negri’s study of empire as a way into considering the problems with both sides of the argument and suggests that we need to have a more nuanced approach to change and continuity at the international level.

15. ‘Expanding the Research Agenda of Human Rights: A Reply to Bellamy’, International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2003, pp.128-140

I welcome Alex Bellamy’s desire to engage in a dialogue about the legitimacy of international human rights and attempts by states and international organisations to uphold them (IJHR 6/4). In response to my book From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention he raises three issues: the changing nature of humanitarianism; the problematic relationship between human rights and democratic processes; and the dynamic behind ethical foreign policy. These questions are dealt with in specific chapters in the book and I will reprise the core arguments below to engage with his central remarks. Prior to that I wish to briefly restate the rationale behind the book and put this dialogue in a broader context of current research approaches to the international human rights agenda.

14. ‘The Cosmopolitan Paradox’, Radical Philosophy, No. 118, March/April 2003, pp.25-30

2002

13. ‘Kosovo and the Remaking of International Relations’ (review article), Global Review of Ethno-Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2002, pp.110-118

The books reviewed here argue that the international intervention in Kosovo lays down important markers or guideposts for the future of international relations. As the editors of Kosovo: The Politics of Delusion note: ‘NATO’s decision to launch air strikes against Yugoslavia in response to a perceived Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was a cardinal defining moment in the development of the international order since the end of the Cold War’. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair famously declared the conflict to be a war ‘fought not for territory but for values’. The edited collections under review all analyse the relative importance of ‘ethical principles’ in the policy-making of the states involved. Apart from being seen as the first post-modern ‘humanitarian’ war, NATO intervention bypassed the UN Security Council, indicating an important shift in the structure of international security. The war over Kosovo has been generally recognised as a crucial point in the gradual evolution of a new set of international norms and accompanying reform of international security arrangements.

12. ‘Anti-Corruption Strategies and Democratization in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Democratization, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2002, pp.101-120

There is an international consensus that corruption undermines the democratic process and the legitimacy of government. Anti-corruption strategies are increasingly becoming an integral part of democratization programmes in non-western states. Where there are doubts over the effectiveness of these programmes they have tended to be expressed in relation to the level of social and economic development necessary to ensure a separation between private and public spheres. The experience of extensive international anti-corruption policies in Bosnia provides an opportunity to assess the relationship between anti-corruption initiatives and democratization in the European context. Taking a broad systemic approach to tackling political corruption, it was assumed that international policy in this area could strengthen the authority of democratic political institutions, encourage public participation and rebuild relations of trust within and between communities. This study of the impact of systemic anti- corruption strategies focuses on the effectiveness of these initiatives in meeting democratization goals. The results have been disappointing. The reasons for this may lie in the initial assumptions, not because they assume a higher level of social and economic development than Bosnian society has attained but because they have a narrow reductive view of the political process.

2001

11. ‘Democracy versus Dictatorship? The 2001 Belarus Presidential Elections’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, No. 69, 2001, pp.54-70

The Western media coverage of the September 9th presidential elections in Belarus posed the poll, in stark terms, as the struggle for democracy against the current leader, Alexander Lukashenka, billed as ‘the continent’s last hardline Communist dictator’. The press attention focused on the ‘reign of terror in a Soviet time warp’ with lurid allegations of mysterious ‘disappearances’ and the repression of the opposition, united for democracy behind Vladimir Goncharik. The Wall Street Journal Europe described the contest as ‘one of the last battles of the Cold War’. The Cold War rhetoric has been particularly played upon by leading United States politicians, US Secretary of State, Colin Powell describing the Belarus regime as ‘the lone remaining outlaw in Europe’. American ambassador to Belarus, Michael Kozak, was happy to draw parallels between his work there and his Cold War job under president Reagan, providing advice and assistance to the Contra opposition to the left-leaning Sandinista regime in Nicaragua: ‘As regards parallels between Nicaragua… and Belarus today, I plead guilty… Our objective and to some degree methodology are the same’.

10. ‘Universal Ethics and Elite Politics: the Limits of Normative Human Rights Theory’, International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2001, pp.72-89

This article draws out the strengths and weaknesses of normative international relations theory, which places human rights at the centre of a critique of international society. The attractive and radical nature of the critique of international society, based on the ‘human wrongs’ committed or acquiesced in by governments and international bodies, is weighed against the conceptual difficulties involved in replacing the classical liberal rights subject with a new universal subject. These issues are discussed with particular regard to the problems confronted in defining the substance of universal rights, their conceptual and theoretical justification, possible institutional alternatives to the existing international system and the crucial question of agency. The article highlights why the radical nature of normative theorising tends to establish rights independently of, or in inverse relationship to, the capacity of rights-holders and the problematic consequences of this both in theory and practice. It is suggested that it is this gap between claim and capacity which inevitably leads to a more critical approach to democratic mechanisms of decision-making, and to the political sphere itself, while privileging new forms of ‘ethical’ elite paternalism manifested in new Western-dominated international regimes of human rights protection and implementation.

9. ‘The Road to Military Humanitarianism: How the Human Rights NGOs Shaped a New Humanitarian Agenda’, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2001, pp.678-700

8. ‘The People-Centred Approach to Peace Operations: The New UN Agenda’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2001, pp.1-19

The September 2000 UN Millennium Assembly confirmed the need for a fundamental reform of UN peacekeeping operations. This reform is shaped by the need for a new ‘people-centred’ approach to conflict situations, no longer strictly bound by traditional ‘state-centred’ principles, such as non-intervention and state sovereignty. This article considers the impact of the proposals for UN peace negotiations, peacekeeping, peacebuilding and long-term conflict prevention. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of these reforms for the external management of post-conflict states and the changing roles of both the UN and NATO. It appears that there is a growing division of responsibility, with the authorization of military intervention and peacekeeping tasks increasingly falling to ‘coalitions of the willing’ while the UN develops its peacebuilding responsibilities with a coordinating role in post-conflict political and development activities.

7. ‘Bosnia: The Democracy Paradox’, Current History, Vol. 100, No. 644, March 2001, pp.114-119

6. ‘Active Citizens and the Therapeutic State: The Role of Democratic Participation in Local Government Reform’, Policy and Politics, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2001, pp.3-14

The Local Government Bill and the White and Green Papers informing it claim to deliver an agenda of democratic renewal. The reforms promise to reconnect local councils with local communities through a process of political renewal, a new statutory duty of community-wide consultation and the encouragement of active citizenship.This article assesses whether the plans for increased popular engagement in consultation processes actually develop democratic accountability, and suggests that, although the current proposals may institutionalise new links between government and community groups and individuals, they will provide little local control over policy making.

2000

5. ‘International Justice’, New Left Review, Vol. 2, No. 6, Nov/Dec 2000, pp.55-66

The nato bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 has been saluted as a triumph for ‘international justice’ over the traditional claims of state sovereignty. The war was in clear breach of international law: waged without UN Security Council authorization, against an elected, civilian government which had not violated any external treaty, justifiable neither as a threat to peace and security, nor in terms of any NATO country’s self-defence. It has been welcomed instead as a ‘humanitarian’ crusade, explicitly setting individual rights above the territorial rights of nation-states. But if the sovereignty of some states—Yugoslavia, Iraq—is to be limited, that of others—the NATO powers—is to be increased under the new order: they are to be given the right to intervene at will. It is, in other words, not sovereignty itself but sovereign equality—the recognition of the legal parity of nation-states, regardless of their wealth or power—which is being targeted by the new interventionists. Yet such equality has been the constitutive principle of the entire framework of existing international law and of all attempts, fragile as they may be, to establish the rule of ‘right’ over ‘might’ in regulating inter-state affairs. ‘Humanitarian intervention’, Daniele Archibugi has written, in his discussion of ‘Cosmopolitical Democracy’, ‘is too precious a concept to be decided on the hoof or, worse still, invoked to mask special interests or designs on power.’ This article will examine the implications of such a right to ‘humanitarian’ military intervention for the future of inter-state regulation and international law.

1999

4. ‘The Limits of Peace-Building: International Regulation and Civil Society Development in Bosnia’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999, pp.109-25

This article questions the assumption that solutions to ‘complex political emergencies’ necessitate extended long-term international regulation over the civil and political reconstruction process. One example where international peacekeeping has extended beyond the traditional remit of disarmament and the separation of combatants to civilian democratization and civil society development is that of Bosnia. The limited success of civil society development suggests that the extension of international supervision over the Bosnian state may risk institutionalizing division and political fragmentation. The comprehensive nature of new international peacebuilding mandates could become counter-productive if they result in the marginalization of locally accountable solutions.

3. ‘The Bosnian Protectorate and the Implications for Kosovo’, New Left Review, Vol. 1, No. 235, May/June 1999, pp.124-34

The international Contact Group proposals for the future of Kosovo, put forward at the Paris/Rambouillet talks, in February 1999—- advocating an international Implementations Mission in Kosovo—- were based on the provisions of the Dayton Peace Agreement of November 1995, which ended the Bosnian conflict. If NATO gets its way, these plans are likely to be re-proposed. Dayton instituted the division of powers between military implementation of the peace agreement, under NATO authority, and civilian implementation, under an international High Representative, including election and media control under the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Where Dayton specified a one-year transitional remit for the civilian powers of the High Representative and the OSCE, the plans for Kosovo, ostensibly for three years, were open- ended. The shift at Rambouillet from limited powers of transitional administration to an international protectorate reflected the powerful dynamic extending international involvement in the Balkans. While international armies of monitors, peacekeepers and administrators appear to be ever more necessary for Balkan stability, there is less and less of a role for the people of the region in deciding their own futures.

1998

2. ‘Democratization in Bosnia: The Limits of Civil Society Building Strategies’, Democratization, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1998, pp.78-102

For many commentators, the construction of civil society in East European states is considered a precondition for the development of consolidated democratic institutions. Nowhere is this more the case than within Bosnia-Herzegovina, where ethnic and nationalist identification indicate a deeply politically segmented society. To challenge this segmentation international institutions are providing financial and technical support to a growing civil society sector based on non-governmental organizations. Research into the civil society support work of the Democratization Branch of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe indicates that the predominantly middle-class constituency of these groups reflects the extensive external international regulation of the new state under the Dayton Peace Agreement. However, the extension of autonomy and self-government may well create more fruitful conditions for the growth of civil society alternatives.

1997

1. ‘Globalisation and Minority Rights: How Ethical Foreign Policy Recreates the East/West Divide’, Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, No. 58, 1997, Autumn, pp.15-34