ABSTRACT
This chapter explores productive tension between international relations (IRs) debate about empire and this separate, but related, debate about Hardt and Negris Empire. However, both sides of the debate equivocated to some extent in their use of the term empire. For the neoconservatives, the goal was not simply to use US military power as shield for globalization but also to reinforce what they took to be certain pedagogical aspects of already existing liberal order. The study of imperialism is necessarily thus the study of the various and changing relationships between the political and economic elements of expansion in any particular region and time. Anti-imperial scholars, for their part, received these sentiments with some cynicism. Driven by the quite understandable desire to escape the territorial trap of more traditional disciplinary imaginings, this Critical IR theorist's framed American unilateralism as further evidence of the imperious verticality of actually existing world politics.
