ABSTRACT
Poststructuralism now comprises a substantial body of work within International Relations (IR) that has developed rapidly over the past three decades. There are disputes and disagreements between poststructuralists, of course, but in recent years the emphasis has moved away from a critique of the mainstream of IR theory toward a more direct and practical engagement with a wide range of specific questions and issues. There are many scholars in IR using approaches that might be described as ‘poststructuralist’, even though some of them might prefer not to be subsumed under this label. Their work examines the full diversity of topics that come under the rubric of IR; for example, security (Dillon 1996; Stern 2005), war and militarization (Dalby 1990; Shapiro 1997; Zehfuss 2002), political economy (De Goede 2005), international ethics (Campbell and Shapiro 1999), diplomacy (Der Derian 1992), international institutions (Debrix 1999), popular dissent (Bleiker 2000), humanitarian intervention (Orford 2003), development (Escobar 1995, Ferguson 1994), postcolonial politics (Doty 1996), famine (Edkins 2000), environmental politics (Dalby 2002; Kuehls 1996; Bennett and Chaloupka 1993), foreign policy (Campbell 1992), conflict resolution (Bleiker 2005), borders (Shapiro and Alker 1996), refugees (Soguk 1999), nationalism (Campbell 1998; Shapiro 2004), identity (Connolly 1991) and citizenship (Cruikshank 1999). Poststructuralism is probably best described as a worldview (or even an antiworldview). Scholars working within this worldview are skeptical of the possibility of overarching theoretical explanations for things that happen in the world. They prefer not to look for grand theories but rather to examine in detail how the world comes to be seen and thought of in particular ways at specific historical junctures and to study how particular social practices – things people do – work in terms of the relations of power and the ways of thinking that such practices produce or support. Formulating grand theory is seen as a social practice among other social practices: theories of how the world works are regarded as part of the world, not detached from it, and are studied by poststructuralists alongside other practices. A starting assumption of poststructuralist thought is that there is no point outside the world from which the world can be observed: all observations and all theoretical systems, in physical theory or natural science as well as social theory, are part of the world they seek to describe or account for, and have an effect in that world. For example, theories are not and cannot be politically neutral, but rather inevitably have a social and political impact. In this picture of the world, then, the theorist of IR is not a detached observer of world politics but inevitably a participant in it. As well as being skeptical of theoretical explanation, poststructuralist thinkers tend to be
unconvinced by a number of other assumptions that were taken for granted in most social
and political theory up until the first part of the twentieth century – as well as in the natural sciences up to the end of the Newtonian era – and that are still unquestioned in much thinking in IR theory today. The assumptions that poststructuralist thinkers are doubtful of remain part of everyday common sense, and because poststructuralism challenges these assumptions, it can be difficult to grasp. Understanding poststructuralist ways of analyzing global politics requires the reader new to this way of thinking to be willing, if only temporarily, to relax deeply held convictions about the nature of the world and of politics. It asks those interested in understanding what poststructuralism is trying to say to think about what it would mean to begin from new and rather uncomfortable or counterintuitive assumptions about ‘life, the universe and everything’. Of course, there are many people unfamiliar with poststructuralist thought who have already in their own thinking found much of what is often assumed to be obviously commonsense disturbing and unconvincing: to them the encounter with poststructuralist writing often brings relief and a feeling of finally having found an approach that they can work with. For those who are content with their current assumptions, understanding poststructuralism calls for a willingness to be adventurous and to imagine, just for a while, what it might be like to think in a completely different way. What are these assumptions that poststructuralist scholars are unconvinced by? One of
them has already been discussed: the assumption that it is possible to step outside the world and observe it or, to express the same thing differently, that the scholar can adopt a God-like detachment or otherworldliness. If there is no possibility of observing from outside, then the goals of academic inquiry have to be seen very differently. The other assumptions are all linked with each other: traditional, modernist approaches assume a world that comprises distinct entities (such as individuals, material objects, processes, events and structures) that can be said to possess some form of essence or nature and that exist unproblematically in time. The job of political and social theory then becomes to describe and account for the relations and interactions that take place between objects and/or structures, and the job of normative theory to consider how we might decide what form those relations and interactions should take. Poststructuralist ways of thinking, in contrast, do not start from this point. Rather, they are interested in the processes and practices that produce entities as distinct in the first place. For example, rather than starting from the individual human being and asking how these individuals come together to form social groups, they ask how it is that we come to think in terms of people as separate and distinct individuals in the first place. The idea of the individual can be shown to be geographically and historically located. ‘The individual’ has not existed in all places and in all periods. The question ‘what is a human?’ or ‘what is an individual?’ is not one that makes sense outside specific historically and geographically situated ways of thinking. And thinking in terms of already distinct individuals as a starting point limits the questions that can be asked about social and political life, and the answers that will make sense. Poststructuralist thinkers want to ask why we think in terms of entities or beings that are distinct one from another – why we see the world as made up of such entities existing against the background of a neutral flow of time – but they also want to dislodge this view, and suggest the possibility of thinking differently. The latter is a more radical move, one that requires a taking apart of commonsense notions of time and existence and replacing them with new ways of thinking. This is all rather abstract. To give some sense of how it translates into poststructur-
alist writings in IR, this chapter begins by tracing a series of themes that run through poststructuralist work. The themes that are chosen here, all of them closely interrelated,
are subjectivity, language and discourse, power relations and biopolitics and the notion of excess or lack. The discussion of themes is then followed by a review of two of the research ‘methods’ or tools that are used in poststructuralist analysis: genealogy and deconstruction. This is not so much a ‘how to’ section as an outline of these two approaches in very general terms, with examples. Finally, the chapter concludes with an overview of work in IR that has used poststructuralist approaches, and a discussion of the relation of this work to other traditions in the study of IR.
