ABSTRACT
I have chosen to focus on the body in a new line of research, which explores various aspects of embodied resistance. My research responds to the question posed by Campbell and Dillon: “where is the body in international relations?” (1993: 12). This highlights the absence of a sustained theoretical focus on the body which is, after all, quite puzzling since international relations is fundamentally about bodies, i.e., bodies marked as citizens, terrorists, refugees, illegal immigrants, enemy combatants, and so forth.1 Burke identifies security “as an interlocking system of knowledges, representations, practices and institutional forms that imagine, direct and act upon bodies, spaces and flows” (2007: 28, emphasis added). Thus it is not a question of bringing the body back into International Relations (IR) so much as it is a recognition that the body has been the unacknowledged site on which and through which international politics has been conducted.
