Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains that the reflexivity as a form of agency for ethics takes seriously the agent's capacity to dialectically and continuously treat thought and action where each can iteratively, critically, and creatively be invoked to alter the other. Reflexivity is a process and practice of world politics, one that is implicated in a variety of problematic phenomena centralized by International Relations scholars, including diasporas, neoliberal technocratic assumptions, diplomacy, and human terrain systems. The scope for reflexive practice depends on a social psychological context and features a great deal of uncertainty and unpredictability. A more satisfactory call for reflexivity foregrounds epistemological uncertainty: the hunch that uncertainty, complexity and/or contingency confront scholars with the need for some kind of self-consciousness, self-interrogation, and even self-transformation.