ABSTRACT
Post-structuralism is a second wing of the critical front that has focused on interrogating, undermining, and moving beyond the positivist and rationalist theoretical frameworks2 that had dominated orthodox approaches to IR in the Western academy and policy world. Its attack is more concerted than that of critical theory, given its anti-foundationalist stance against Enlightenment metanarratives of progress, structural determinism, or tragedy. Orthodox theories are ontologically and methodologically flawed, as Foucault himself argued.3 While critical theory extends the well-known Enlightenment search for an emancipatory peace, post-structuralism opens upon radically new possibilities for an ontology, or ontologies, of peace, for methodology, and towards an understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power. These, post-structuralism indicates, are merely confirmed by orthodox ‘re-search’, which repeats and tests the narrow parameters of reductionist and parsimonious orthodoxies in liberal institutional settings, rather than exploring new areas of understanding not determined by pre-existing conventions. Thus, a post-structural understanding of peace negotiates with the powerful criticism of the discipline that rational theory effectively reifies a ‘liberal empire’ that rests upon the residue of liberal imperialism by offering meta-narratives and grounded facts or truths which are in effect simply the interests of the powerful. In effect, this is an attempt to escape the illiberalism that is inherent in the liberal-realist imaginary of the Leviathan, or the determinism of structures, through which hegemony is expressed (perhaps through ‘foreign policy’, ‘international trade’, peacebuilding and state-building, through governance and liberal institutions, and through the orthodox discourses
and assumptions of the discipline).4 Though this raises the question of whether peace is a concept or framework that can have any currency at all in poststructural theory, it clearly points to the inadequacies of theory developed to explain IR and the world (let alone peace) via white, Western, male, Christian, developed, liberal and neo-liberal political settings. Given its resistance to metanarratives, post-structuralism does not offer a theory, approach, or concept of peace.
