Latest Book
(published by Pluto Press, July 2009)
Philip Hammond, Spiked Review of Books, Issue 27, September 2009. Demystifying the ‘global ideology’ David Chandler’s new book Hollow Hegemony draws on the work of Marx and Engels to explain how the political class’s embrace of ethics and ‘global politics’ springs from their political weakness and isolation.
Peter Hitchcock, Radical Philosophy, Issue 162, July/August 2010: "Globality is not the battleground of the political but is the hollow metonym of sovereignty as the true site of political contestation and purposeful acts. I like this formulation not because it endorses sovereignty as a norm but because it continues to question its insinuation in otherwise value-laden discourses of the global with a concomitant persistence of territoriality in its suasion...In contrast to [R. B. J.] Walker's hobbling hesitation, Chandler offers the heurisic of the hollow that...is a call for reflexive theoretical clarification in the study of international relations."
Other Publications
'Flouting International Law: International pressure on Serbia not to start a new debate about the status of Kosovo and the possible diplomatic strategy of Serbia after the ICJ decision’ (interview in Serbian), NIN (Belgrade), 1 July 2010.
* 'Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault...', International Political Sociology, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2010), pp.205-207. ISSN 1749-5687.
Abstract: 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.
'Globalizing Foucault: From Critique to Apologia - Reply to Kiersey and Rosenow', Global Society, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2010), pp.135-142. To read 'Response to Chandler' from Kiersey, Wiedner and Rosenow, click here.
* 'Risk and the Biopolitics of Global Insecurity' (review article), Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2010), pp.287-297.
Abstract: Review of Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009) and Christopher Coker, War in an Age of Risk (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
'Liberal War and Foucaultian Metaphysics' (review article), Journal of International Cooperation Studies, Vol. 18, No.1 (2010), pp.85-94.
'The Paradox of the Responsibility to Protect' (review article), Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 45, No. 1 (2010), pp.128-134.
'R2P or Not R2P? More Statebuilding, Less Responsibility', Global Responsibility to Protect, Vol. 2, Nos. 1-2 (2010), pp.161-166.
Abstract: 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. In 2009, it appears that the UN has successfully weathered the challenge of demands for humanitarian intervention. This short contribution to the discussion of the Secretary General’s Report seeks to highlight how the concept of ‘the responsibility to protect’ has been transformed from constituting a powerful normative challenge to the UN’s status to one which it hopes will enforce its international authority.
Comments in Rebecca Attwood and Sarah Cunnane, ‘#loveHE: A big step into the grown-up world’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 March 2010, pp.34-41.
'No Communicating Left', Radical Philosophy, No. 160 (March/April 2010), pp.53-55. Review of Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
'Fragile States and the International Community', panel discussion from Chatham House conference 'Fragile States and the International Community', for BBC Radio 4, The World Tonight programme, with Robin Lustig, Francesc Vendrell, former UN and EU Special Representative in Afghanistan and Ginny Hill who runs the Yemen Forum at Chatham House. BBC Radio 4, The World Tonight, 22 February 2010. Also available as audio file here.
'The EU and Southeastern Europe: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance', Third World Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010), pp. 69-85.
Abstract: 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 regulative 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.
* 'The Global Ideology: Rethinking the Politics of the "Global Turn" in IR', International Relations, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2009), pp. 530-547.
Abstract: Many commentators appear to take for granted that 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.
'Crisis - What Crisis? Launching What is Radical Politics Today', panel discussion with Doreen Massey and Saskia Sassen followed by interview with Catherine Fieschi, Director of British Council think tank Counterpoint, 25 November 2009. All audio and video material available from Counterpoint here.
'Global Civil Society', in G. Honor Fagan and Ronaldo Munck (eds) Globalization and Security An Encyclopedia, Vol. 2, Social and Cultural Aspects (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), pp. 177-194.
'"Good Governance" and the Limits to Statebuilding in Bosnia', World Politics Review, Features section: 'The Practices and Policies of Nationbuilding', 8 December 2009.
'Unravelling the Paradox of ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 20 (2009), pp.27-39. Full issue available here.
Abstract: 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 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. It traces the shifting discourse away from the 1990s ‘right to intervene’, through the 2001 ICISS report’s reposing of military intervention in the vague terms of ‘the responsibility to protect’, to the 2005 World Summit and 2009 follow up document which delink military intervention from R2P, focusing instead upon non-Western state and regional ‘responsibilities’. Through the reworking 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.
Comments in Nick Collins, 'Karadzic appeals for trial delay', The Telegraph, 30 September 2009.
'Conflito Ético: Escândalo britânico reabre a polêmica sobre os parâmetros morais das relações entre países', interview in O Globo (Brazil daily), 13 September 2009.
* 'Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault, Forget Foucault...', draft paper prepared for ‘The Uses and Limits of Critical Foucaultian Perspectives in IR’, seminar sponsored by the Japanese International Studies Association, Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan, 27 June 2009.
* 'War without End(s): Grounding Global War’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 3 (2009).
Abstract: This article seeks to explain the limits of critical discourses of ‘global war’ and biopolitical framings of ‘global conflict’, which have arisen in response to the globalisation 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 of the global war on terror are distinguished precisely by the fact that they cannot be grasped as strategically-framed political conflicts.
Book Review, 'The Contradictions of R2P'. Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2008), International Peacekeeping, Vol. 16, No.3, (2009), pp.439-441.
'A Dialogue on International Interventions: when are they a Right or an Obligation?' (with Daniele Archibugi'), Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2009). ISSN 1654-4951 Full issue available here.
'The Politics of the Environment and the 'Radicalisation' of State Institutions', Radical Politics Today, May 2009.
* 'This matters greatly to our public opinion’, Spiked-Online, 6 April 2009.
Widespread opposition to a proposed Afghan law is less about liberating women than shoring up Western authority.
'Great Power Responsibility and "Failed States": Strengthening Sovereignty?' in Julia Raue and Patrick Sutter (eds) Facets and Practices of State Building (Amsterdam: Brill/Martinus Nijhoff, 2009), pp.15-30. ISBN 978-90-04-17430-0
Book Synopsis: Drawing on a mix of international academic and field expert work, this book presents and analyses contemporary state-building efforts. It offers studies on the theoretical and practical foundations and causes of state-building, identifies the role and responsibilities of key actors and points to vital issues which merit specific attention in state-building undertakings. The book offers lessons for the future of state-building relevant to both practitioners and the academic community.
Abstract: 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.
'Blaming Karzai for the West’s failures’, Spiked-Online, 25 March 2009. It is not the Afghan PM’s corruption that has wrecked Afghanistan, but the disarray of the invading powers.
* 'Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism?: The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach', International Political Sociology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (March 2009), pp.53-70.
Abstract: Today there is a widespread recognition of the erosion of political community on the territorial basis of the nation state. Instead, alternative 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 paper seeks to analyse 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 recognise the existence of a post-territorial political community, a community of broader humanity, has been articulated in liberal terms as cosmopolitanism 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 paper 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.
Book Synopsis: Human Rights: Politics and Practice is the first comprehensive textbook for politics students. It offers an unparalleled breadth and depth of coverage, with 20 chapters written by international experts. Seven chapters introduce the main theoretical issues and challenges in the study of human rights as a political phenomenon, addressing normative foundations, international law, measurement, international relations, comparative politics, sociological and anthropological approaches, and the ideological (mis)use of human rights. Thirteen thematic chapters then offer detailed analysis and case studies of key issues in the politics and practice of human rights, such as economic globalization, genocide, the environment, and humanitarian intervention. These chapters allow students to deepen their theoretical understanding while learning about important contemporary developments. The book is accompanied by an extensive Online Resource Centre, enhancing student learning and providing valuable support for lecturers. For Students: Monthly updates Links to key documents Web links Flashcard glossary For Lecturers: Test Bank PowerPoint slides
'The Global Ideology: Rethinking the Politics of the "Global Turn" in IR', draft paper for University of Westminster, Department of Politics and International Relations, Residential Weekend, ‘Democracy and the International’, Austwick, Yorkshire Dales, 16-18 January 2009.
Abstract: 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 paper 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.
'Between the Headlines', Press TV, 16 January 2009. Discussion on major newspaper's headlines with Alyssa McDonald, New Statesman, and Joseph Harker, Guardian.
'Introduction: Beyond Managing Contradictions' in David Chandler (ed.) Statebuilding and Intervention: Policies, Practices and Paradigms (London: Routledge, 2009), pp.1-14. ISBN 978-0-415-45204-5 View draft
Book Synopsis: This edited book sets out and engages with some of the key policies, practices and paradigms of external intervention in the case of state support and reconstruction. Many assumptions about statebuilding have been reconsidered in the wake of Iraq, and ongoing problems in other states such as Afghanistan, Bosnia and Kosovo. Rather than being a regional survey or a policy-orientated ‘lessons learned’ book, this collection explores the broader framing of policy goals, statebuilding practices and the consensus on the need for Western states and international institutions to be engaged in this policy area. The volume is divided into three parts: the first engages with some of the key policy frameworks and conceptual issues raised by recent statebuilding interventions; the second considers core statebuilding practices; and the third reconsiders statebuilding paradigms more broadly. The essays open up debate and critical discussion in the field at a time when many advocates of extending statebuilding intervention suggest that the complex nature of the problems of non-Western states and societies mean that it will inevitably be contradictory and limited in its results.
‘Bosnian War Crimes Chamber may fail to encourage postwar reconciliation’, Jurist, 12 January 2009.
2008
* '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. ISSN 0305-8298
Abstract: Odysseos and Petito forward a highly problematic approach to textual interpretation, one which explicitly seeks to take theorists, in this case Schmitt, out of their historical and political context. The consequences of taking Schmitt out of context are a degraded or superficial treatment of his work on the development of international legal order, a lack of attention to the historical differences between our context and Schmitt’s, and a downplaying of the importance of his masterpiece of international political theory,
'Post-Conflict Statebuilding: Governance without Government', in Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner (eds) Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp.337-355. ISBN 978-0-230-57335-2 View draft
Book Synopsis: This book examines the much-neglected question of what constitutes a political economy of peace after civil conflicts and who controls it.The advent of the UN's Peacebuilding Commission signals a growing international interest in reconstruction during and after conflict. It is original in that it tackles the question of what constitutes a political economy of peace. Currently, how it might be constructed is either assumed to be self-evident and unproblematic or simply ignored. It examines key cross-cutting issues, themes and cases that will provide a more holistic and comprehensive approach to peacebuilding. It provides critical perspectives on peacebuilding that reach beyond the technicist approach of international financial institutions and the liberal peace formulae of cadres of international capital.The book provides critical perspectives that reach beyond the technical approaches of international financial institutions and proponents of the liberal peace formula. It investigates political economies characterized by the legacies of disruption to production and exchange, by population displacement, poverty, and by 'criminality'.
'British forces: a token army of occupation’, Spiked-Online, 14 October 2008. The Iraqi PM’s attack on Britain’s lack of commitment in Basra has shot a hole in the government’s ‘Iraq Story’.
* 'Normative Power and the Liberal Peace: A Rejoinder to John O’Brennan', Global Society, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2008), pp.519-529. ISSN 1360-0826
Abstract: 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 response seek to clarify that the more ‘muscular’ use of conditionality and direct management of policy reforms inevitably limit the possibilities for public and political debate and consensus-making and distance political elites from their societies. In particular, the use of political conditionality is highlighted, 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 imposition than to the EU itself, which has attempted to distance itself from its use of executive powers in the region.
* '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. ISSN 0305-8298
Abstract: This paper 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 idealised understanding of Schmitt, focusing on his contingent political conclusions, using his work descriptively rather than analytically. It is argued that the idealist 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 theorising than the relevance of Schmitt’s analysis to today’s world.
'The "Bosnian model" is no model for Georgia', Spiked-Online, 15 September 2008. Turning sections of the Caucasus into international protectorates will not deliver anything like democracy.
'Georgia: Russia’s first "Western-style" war', Spiked-Online, 28 August 2008. Far from the Russian Bear reasserting its Great Power, its foreign policy, like Britain and America’s, is uncertain and erratic.
'Human Security: The Dog that Didn't Bark', Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 4 (August 2008), pp.427-438. ISSN 0967-0106
Abstract: This review article, suggests that thirteen years after human security was first taken up by the United Nations, its integration into the policy-making and policy-practices of leading Western states and international institutions, has revealed that talk of two different ‘paradigms’ - the radical counter-position of ‘individual’ and ‘state-based’ approaches, or between ‘critical theory’ and ‘problem-solving’ frameworks – has been much exaggerated.
* 'Human Security II: Waiting for the Tail to Wag the Dog: Rejoinder to Ambrosetti, Owen and Wibben', Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 4 (August 2008), pp.463-469. ISSN 0967-0106
Abstract: In my original review article, ‘Human Security: The Dog that Didn’t Bark’ (2008), 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 marginalised. The three respondents suggest that human security frameworks could play a more useful radical and critical role than I allow and wished to investigate the potential of human security frameworks to critique and challenge power relations. In this rejoinder, I wish to explain why this is the wrong starting point for a critical appraisal of human security theorising. In posing the questions of what human security can achieve, these critical advocates of human security argue that the tail of human security can wag the dog of international policy practice. They fall into the idealist trap of seeing allegedly critical speech acts and radical academic theories as having agency and doing the work of transforming the world.
'"Svet" ne može da se nadoknadi globalizacijom', Plave Strane, Danas (Belgrade), 12-13 July 2008. Kostas Duzinas i Dejvid Čendler o "svetskoj vlasti", EU, Balkanu, vanzemaljcima.
‘G8 summit: a global displacement activity’, Spiked-Online, 8 July 2008. Western governments’ desire to globalise big issues - from poverty to climate change - is an attempt to escape real responsibility for policymaking.
Comments in Michał Potocki, 'Serbia o krok od Europy', Dziennik (Poland), 13 May 2008.
Review article: 'From Security to Insecurity: Kaldor, Duffield and Furedi’, Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.265-276. ISSN 1467-8802.
'The Rise and Limits of Biopolitical Critiques of Human Rights Regimes' draft paper for the international conference, 'The International Human Rights Regime Since 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives', University of Pittsburgh, 17-19 April 2008.
'Iraq and the Problematic Discourse of Defeat', draft presentation for the Roundtable 'Globalization, Statebuilding and the Occupation of Iraq II', 49th International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Francisco, 28 March 2008.
'Humanising Haditha', Spiked-Online, 18 March 2008. By showing all sides as victims of war, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha can only find ‘common humanity’ in our ability to suffer.
* 'IA Forum Interview: Professor David Chandler', International Affairs Forum, Centre for International Relations, Washington D.C., 17 March 2008. IA-Forum speaks with Professor Chandler about Western interventions in the name of democracy promotion. By Katharine Slocombe.
'The Human Security Paradox: How Nation States Grew to Love Cosmopolitan Ethics', keynote at the international conference, 'Globalization, Difference, and Human Securities', Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Japan, 12 March 2008.
'What's Next for Kosovo and Serbia?', studio interview (view programme), CNN, 22 February 2008.
'After the Serbian elections', studio interview (view programme), Four Corners, Press TV, 4 February 2008.
'After the Serbian elections', interview with Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 4 February 2008. Interview comments in Perro de Jong, 'Serbs vote for Europe', Radio Netherlands Worldwide, 4 February 2008.
'Why Karzai was right to reject Ashdown', Spiked-Online, 29 January 2008. He relished his role as colonial overlord in Bosnia, so it's not surprising the Afghans don’t want Paternalistic Paddy anywhere near their country.
‘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. ISSN 1304-768S
'Keeping humanity secure?', Spiked Review of Books, Issue No.9, January 2008. The new focus on ‘human security’ in the debate about international relations suggests there should be an even more meddlesome form of policing of other states’ affairs. No thanks.
'The EU’s Promotion of Democracy in the Balkans', in Zaki Laïdi (ed.) EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World: Normative Power and Social Preferences (London: Routledge, 2008), pp.68-82. ISBN 978-0-415-43363-1
Book Synopsis:
Written by leading experts in the field, this volume identifies European collective preferences and analyzes to what extent these preferences inform and shape EU foreign policy and are shared by other actors in the international system. While studies of the EU's foreign policy are not new, this book takes a very different tack from previous research. Specifically it leaves aside the institutional and bureaucratic dimensions of the European Union's behaviour as an international actor in order to concentrate on the meanings and outcomes of its foreign policy taken in the broadest sense. Two outcomes are possible: Either Europe succeeds in imposing a norms-based international system and thus, in this case, its soft power capacity will not only have been demonstrated but will be enhanced Or, on the contrary, it does not succeed and the global system will become one where realpolitik reigns; especially once China, India and Russia attain a preponderant influence on the international scene. "EU Foreign Policy in a Globalized World" will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union politics, foreign policy and politics and international relations in general.
'Is the UN a Waste of Time?', panel debate, hosted by Andrew Gilligan (view programme), with Hazel Smith, programme advisor to the UN World Food Programme (North Korea) and professor in international relations at Warwick University and Sarah Lesniewski, senior project officer for the Women's Budget Group and member of the Fawcett Society. Forum, Press TV, 20 January 2008.
'Kosovo’s Declaration of Dependence', Spiked-Online, 15 January 2008. Hashim Thaci, one-time guerrilla turned PM of Kosovo, has promised to break away from Serbia. It's independence, Jim, but not as we know it.
'Britain’s key weapon in Afghanistan: the bribe', Spiked-Online, 3 January 2008.
In allegedly trying to buy off a local Taliban leader, British officials have shown a haughty and colonial disregard for the Afghan government.
2007
'The EU’s Promotion of Democracy in the Balkans: The Power of Simulation and the Simulation of Power'. Draft paper prepared for the British International Studies Association Annual Conference,
Cambridge, 17-19 December 2007.
Abstract: This paper seeks to investigate the EU’s democracy promotion and statebuilding policies in the Balkans through the use of Jean Baudrillard’s conceptions of ‘simulation’ and ‘hyperreality’ as a response to the crisis of representation. It does this to suggest that the assertion of the power of the EU in the Balkans cannot be fully understood in traditional terms of imperial hegemony. Rather, it is suggested that the EU seeks to simulate its own position of power through the use of foreign policy issues, particularly that of ‘member state-building’ in the Balkans. It further argues that, in the process, the EU exports forms of non-representative governance - the simulation of government - in the states that are being externally built and integrated into the European Union. This framework is also used to raise some broader questions over Baudrillard’s view of ‘simulation’ as blurring the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ – Does it make any difference to the people of Bosnia whether the EU’s semi-protectorate regime is a product of simulation or of representation?
* '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. ISSN 1408-6980.
Abstract: 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 paper 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.
