Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations

Critical international relations is both firmly established and rapidly expanding, and this Handbook offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary research. It affords insights into exciting developments, more challenging issues and less prominent topics, examining debates around questions of imperialism, race, gender, ethics and aesthetics, and offering both an overview of the existing state of critical international politics and an agenda-setting collection that highlights emerging areas and fosters future research. Sections cover: critique and the discipline; relations beyond humanity; art and narrative; war, religion and security; otherness and diplomacy; spaces and times; resistance; and embodiment and intimacy. An international group of expert scholars, whose contributions are commissioned for the volume, provide chapters that facilitate teaching at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level, inspire new generations of researchers in the field and promote collaboration, cross-fertilisation and inspiration across sub-fields often treated separately, such as feminism, postcolonialism and poststructuralism. The volume sees these strands as complementary not contradictory, and emphasises their shared political goals, shared theoretical resources and complementary empirical practices. Each chapter offers specific, focused, in-depth analysis that complements and exemplifies the broader coverage, making this Routledge Handbook of Critical International Relations essential reading for all students and scholars of international relations.

Jenny Edkins is Professor of Politics at The University of Manchester. She taught previously at Aberystwyth University and the Open University. Her monographs include Face Politics (2015), Missing: Persons and Politics (2011), Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003) and Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (2000). Her most recent book, Change and the Politics of Certainty, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. In addition to her academic writing, she explores fiction, autobiography and other literary forms. She is engaged in several collaborative ventures, including the Gregynog Ideas Lab and the highly-regarded Routledge book series Interventions.

Introduction Part I: Critique and the Discipline 1. Imperialism and the limits of critique 2. How to criticize without ever becoming a critic 3. The empty neighbourhood: Race and disciplinary silence Part II: Relations Beyond Humanity 3. Can International Relations confront the cosmos? 4. Relating to relational worlds: Critical theory, relational thought and relational cosmology 5. Confronting horror: International Relations beyond humanity Part III: Art and Narrative 6. For Alex: The art of International Relations 7. Ways of Seeing/Ways of Being in Critical IR 8. Narrative and inquiry in international politics Part IV: War, Religion, Security 9. Critical war studies 10. Being 'Critical' of/about/on 'Religion' in International Relations 11. Seeing radicalisation? The pedagogy of the Prevent strategy Part V: Otherness and Diplomacy 12. The politics of otherness: Illustrating the identity/alterity nexus and othering in IR 13. Abusive Fidelities: Diplomacy, Translation, and the Genres of Man 14. Why Octavio Paz matters: Lessons for critical International Relations Part VI: Spaces and Times 15. Racing to the bottom, squeezing through the cracks: Imagining unbordered space 16. Ethics, critique and post-sovereign spaces in International Politics 17. Critique and the international: Horizons, traces, finitude Part VII: Resistance 18. The permutations of 'taking' political action 19. The carnivalesque and resistance Part VIII: Intimacy and Embodiment 20. Bodies and embodiment in IR 21. The intimate and the international: love, sexuality, and queer feminist IR 22. Henri Lefebvre and the production of theory: A ghost story