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Language matters in international relations. Constructivists have contributed the insight that global politics is shaped by the way agents narrate history and produce discourses about themselves and about the world. This insight has induced a profound reexamination of assumptions in the study of international relations. The contributors to this volume examine (Part I) the critical linguistic/discursive techniques of postmodernists and constructivists, and apply them (Part II) to international relations. Introduction, Francois Debrix; Part I. The Linguistic Turn: Theories and Concepts; 1. Language, Non-Foundationalism, International Relations, Francois Debrix; 2. Parsing Personal Identity: Self, Other, Agent, Nicholas Onuf; 3. Constructivist International Relations Theory and the Semantics of Performative Language, Harry Gould; 4. Breaking the Silence: Language and Method in International Relations, K. M. Fierke; 5. Three Ways of Spilling Blood, Kennan Ferguson; Part II. Language, Agency and Politics: Cases and Applications; 6. Real Interdependence: Discursivity and Concursivity in International Politics, Timothy W. Luke; 7. Criticism and Form: Speech Acts, Normativity, and the Postcolonial Gaze, Siba Grovogui; 8. The Difference that Language-Power Makes: Solving the Puzzle of the Suez Crisis, Janice Bially Mattern; 9. Conflicting Narratives, Conflicting Moralities: The United Nations and the Failure of Humanitarian Intervention, Anthony F. Lang, Jr.; 10. Language, Rules and Order: Westpolitik Debate of Adenauer and Schumacher, Katja Weber and Paul Kowert; 11. \"Ce n'est pas une Guerre\"/This is not War: The International Language and Practice of Political Violence, Franke Wilmer

From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life in configurations of geopolitical power has often involved the putting to death of populations. While, following Foucault's work, we can argue that late modern political power has been concerned with the management of people's lives or with the 'health' of a population, this capacity to 'make live and let die' (as Foucault put it) is never separate from a modality of force premised upon a right to put to death. Thus, the distinction between biopolitics and what has been called thanatopolitics or necropolitics can no longer be guaranteed. The goal of this essay is to push further the biopolitical/ necropolitical argument by showing that, in key contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction, the life and/or death of populations and individual bodies is not a primary concern. What is of concern, rather, is what I have called the pulverization of the human. I consider this targeting of the human, or of humanity itself, to be a matter of horror. Horror's aim, when it enters the domain of geopolitical destruction, appears to be to put bodies to death. But, more crucially, its aim is to render human bodies, beyond the fact of life and death, unrecognizable, unidentifiable, and sometimes undistinguishable from non-human matter. Horror does not care to recompose human life or humanity. This essay briefly details the argument about horror and horror's 'objectives' beyond death. It also takes issue with recent theories that have argued that traces of human life can be recovered from contemporary instances of geopolitical violence and destruction. Finally, this essay offers two contemporary illustrations of horror's targeting of the human by examining the role and place of horror in suicide bombings and in drone attacks.

“Confronting the violence that ‘pulverizes being’ Debrix and Barder invite us to expand our attachment to biopolitics and to take in the ‘horror’ of contemporary violence, understanding that what is at stake is not the end of human life itself but the end of the human condition. Mobilizing a host of philosophers from Butler, Agamben and Mbembe to Esposito and Cavarero, they urge us to reckon with power as something that kills. This is a valuable, provocative and passionate intervention.” Sherene H. Razack, University of Toronto, Canada. “Why must we move beyond biopolitics? Debrix and Barder assail the foundations of biopolitical critique, showing how such approaches remain wedded to a liberal model of life-affirmation which blinds them to central aspects of death and destruction. Pushing their analysis beyond the limits of human life, Debrix and Barder show how ‘agonal sovereignty’ mobilizes fear, flesh, and failure to erase those modes of being whose singularity resists the logics of contemporary international politics. Drawing on such diverse sites of terror as Mexican nacro killings, the Guantanamo concentration camp, and the transmission of transnational disease, Beyond Biopolitics identifies the complex economies of horror underpinning international relations, while also providing an accessible and critical reading of Arendt, Schmitt, Mbembe, Agamben, and Foucault.” Kennan Ferguson, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, USA. Beyond Biopolitics exposes the conceptual limits of critical biopolitical approaches to violence, war, and terror in the post-9/11–War on Terror era. This volume shows that such popular international political theories rely upon frames of representation that leave out of focus a series of extreme forms of gruesome violence, which have no concern for the preservation of life, a crucial biopolitical theme. Debrix and Barder mobilize different concepts—horror, agonal sovereignty, the pulverization of the flesh, or the notion of an inhumanity-to-come—to shed light on past and present ghastly scenes and events of violence that seek to undo the very idea of humanity. To highlight the capacity of horror to be in excess of both violence and the meaning of humanity, Beyond Biopolitics provides a series of engagements with issues much debated in contemporary critical theory circles, in particular war and terror, the production of fear, states and spaces of exception, and alterity as enmity. This work will be of great interest to scholars of critical international relations theory, critical security studies, and international relations. Interventions Edited by: Jenny Edkins Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick ‘As Michel Foucault has famously stated: “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” In this spirit The Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.’Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, US The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.

Time and again the United Nations has deployed peacekeeping missions in trouble spots around the globe: Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda. Has peace ensued? Have these missions, in fact, made any difference in the disorder and destruction they are purported to forestall? Or are they, as François Debrix contends in this critical revisiting of UN interventions, an illusion-more virtual peacekeeping than actual interventions in international affairs?

'Beyond Biopolitics constitutes a truly serious attempt to think about the unthinkable.' Guy Lancaster, Political Studies Review: 2014 VOL 12, 93. Beyond Biopolitics exposes the conceptual limits of critical biopolitical approaches to violence, war, and terror in the post-9/11-War on Terror era. This volume shows that such popular international political theories rely upon frames of representation that leave out of focus a series of extreme forms of gruesome violence that have no concern for the preservation of life, a crucial biopolitical theme. Debrix and Barder mobilize different concepts-horror, agonal sovereignty, the pulverization of the flesh, or the notion of an inhumanity-to-come-to shed light on past and present ghastly scenes and events of violence that seek to undo the very idea of humanity. To highlight the capacity of horror to be in excess of both violence and the meaning of humanity, Beyond Biopolitics provides a series of engagements with issues much debated in contemporary critical theoretical circles, in particular war and terror, the production of fear, states and spaces of exception, and alterity as enmity. This work will be of great interest to scholars of critical international relations theory, critical security studies and international relations.

This article critically details the strategies and ideologies that inform three key post-9/11 volumes on the politics of terror, war making and national security in the USA. These texts, by renowned American 'masters of statecraft' Robert Kaplan, Victor Davis Hanson and Michael Ledeen, encourage the USA's political and military leadership to embrace terror and violence and to be continuously at war against alleged American enemies. The article argues that these writings are representative of what French post-structuralist and gender scholar Julia Kristeva has called abjection. Indeed, these literatures require their readers to be one with hatred and destruction, and to violently reject anything that appears to be un-American. Their ideologies-which have been immensely influential in post-9/11 American national security circles-aim to prepare and condition American citizens for years of ongoing violence, war and possibly terror. They encourage hatred towards enemies that may not even have been named yet. By openly propagating these kinds of discourse, these scholars' texts render the prospect for peace (in Iraq, the Middle-East and everywhere else) in the 21st century ever more difficult to achieve.

This article examines the phenomenon of international medical assistance to populations in distress from the perspective of the new spatial strategies deployed by medical humanitarian organisations. Taking seriously the 'borderlessness' of movements such as Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders, or MSF), the article argues that transnational medical organisations participate in the practice of deterritorialisation. Deterritorialisation means that certain transnational actors now have the ability to intervene below, across and beyond state boundaries. In the case of MSF, going beyond state boundaries is creative of new territorial structures. One such structure is what may be called the 'space of victimhood'. Under the guise of reaching 'victims' the world over, MSF constructs new spaces-humanitarian zones-inside which individuals in distress are identified as 'victims', are sorted out, and become recognisable as generalised examples of human drama. This construction of a space of victimhood opens up the possibility for re-appropriations and manipulations by other non-humanitarian actors. Among such actors, one finds global media networks which avidly search for images of victims. By pointing out the potentially non-humanitarian effects of the new spatial arrangements deployed by transnational medical organisations (a phenomenon referred to as 'transversality'), this article urges international scholars and practitioners to keep a close eye on questions of space and, specifically, on the sociopolitical processes of inclusion and exclusion that such territorial delineations often produce.

The authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on to the Internet, and spinning news stories. Contributors: Robin Brown, David Campbell, Michael Dillon, Debbie Lisle, Moya Lloyd, Timothy W. Luke, Patricia L. Price, Jayne Rodgers, Marysia Zalewski._x000B_