Political Succession in the Middle East

The following briefs were presented in a workshop on "Political Succession in the Middle East" at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1, 2001, in San Francisco. Louis J. Cantori, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University, were the conveners of the Conference Group on the Middle East, which issued this report.     

From Critique to Affirmation in International Relations

This article explores the ongoing shift in IR and beyond, where critical perspectives are increasingly adopting more affirmative dispositions. The starting point is that some successors to critical theories and deconstruction are becoming more appreciative of how entanglements of human and nonhuman populations have creative potential. That is, today critique ceases to be about contesting the inner contradictions or limits of a given order and instead embraces existing multiple assemblages and feedback loops as enabling forces. The article serves as an introduction to the Special Issue ‘Critique and Affirmation in IR’, in which authors reflect on the unforeseen trajectory of critiques and problematise the risks and shadows of affirmation.     

Learning to Be Postmodern in an All Too Modern World: “Whatever Action” in International Climate Change Imaginaries

Recent contributions in International Relations focus either on a shift from modernity towards postmodernity in approaches to address climate change, or underline the permanencies and continuities of modern thought and power hierarchies. In contrast, we suggest that there is a contradictory simultaneity of both of these framings through which the world is continuously decomposed and recomposed. Today climate change programmes seem to be driven by a key contradiction, which lies at the heart of the Anthropocene: the environment is ours to manipulate and yet is out of reach. Based on this framing, and thinking through Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour’s writings on political ecology, we argue that “whatever action” best captures current policy thinking: multiple initiatives are taken without a telos; rather they are designed to avoid that opportunities for adaptation and climate mitigation are foreclosed.