Abstract:
This short intervention peruses new movements in the discipline of International Relations with a particular emphasis on the “post-western” turn in IR theory which promises to usher into better concepts for the analysis of world politics.
Machine summary:
Abstract This short intervention peruses new movements in the discipline ofInternational Relations with a particular emphasis on the “post-western” turn in IR theory which promises to usher into better concepts for the analysis of world politics.
Recent scholarship has made great strides toward appreciating the zones of convergence and conflict between local developments and global factors, specific ideational trends and general trans-identitarian movements, between sub-national divergence, national disintegration and transnational loyalty (Chen, Hwang and Ling 2009).
The particular merit of Gilroy’s analysis lies in its emphasis on inter- cultural empirical examples for the lamentable politics of exclusion, which can be linked back to the concern of this analysis with local difference and global comparability.
At a basic analytical level members of al-Qaeda and neo-Nazi movements operate on the premise of a closely related political rationale and logic: Identity is assumed to be fixed and primordial (rather than socially constructed); the fortified in-group is thought to be on an inevitable collision course with the equally homogenized out-group; us and them are presented as essentially different; there is no room for negotiation with the other side; hence the strategy of terrorism is justified in order to bring about total change.
Trans-Central Thoughts The short examples mentioned above indicate that particular political constellations such as the protests in the Arab world and Europe always reveal both universalized marks and local signs, symbols and relations of dissociation.