Critical Theory

Against Mystification, or What Went Wrong with Critical IR

Alexander Stoffel and Ida Roland Birkvad • Aug 25 2023 • Articles

A project of demystification would reorient critical IR scholars away from the fetishization of oppressed groups as vectors for abstract theorizing.

Interview – Adam B. Lerner

E-International Relations • Apr 4 2023 • Features

Adam Lerner outlines the role of collective trauma in international politics and how to challenge some of the problematic assumptions of mainstream IR.

Whatever Happened to the Frankfurt School in International Relations?

Davide Schmid • Mar 27 2023 • Articles

What lies behind the Frankfurt School’s decline in IR theory and what does it say about broader changes in the discipline today?

Towards a Critical History of ‘Critical IR’

Philip Conway • Mar 16 2023 • Articles

We will never know precisely what impact ‘critical’ forms of scholarly practice have had on the world as we have no ‘planet B’ to act as a control group.

Interview – Charlotte Heath-Kelly

E-International Relations • Jun 9 2022 • Features

Charlotte Heath-Kelly discusses crime prevention, and the role of counter-radicalisation in combatting terrorism.

Latin American Critical Economic Thinking and the Labor Market

Rocio Arredondo and Javier Castellon • Apr 12 2022 • Articles

Latin American critical thinking addresses problems intrinsic to Latin American countries and provides policy makers with the analytical arguments for implementing a different development strategy. 

Why Is There No Minor International Theory?

Nicholas Michelsen • Feb 22 2022 • Articles

It is time to let ‘Critical IR’ go as a term. It gives succour to some of the least admirable of academic impulses and undermines the very conditions for critique.

Alienation and Marxism: An Alternative Starting Point for Critical IR Theory 

Faruk Yalvaç • Jan 27 2022 • Articles

When discussing anxiety as the constitutive feature of society, we should be talking about something social and historical, rather than transhistorical and ontological, for a politically relevant approach.

Rethinking Critical IR: Towards a Plurilogue of Cosmologies

Hartmut Behr and Giorgio Shani • Jan 5 2022 • Articles

Critical IR began as a strongly emancipatory and normative project, however, it seems to have lost its initial focus and risks forgoing its emancipatory potential.

The ‘Failure of Critical Theory’ as an Ideological Discourse

Beate Jahn • Dec 18 2021 • Articles

The pressures of neoliberalism generate a discourse that challenges critical theory’s core principles and thus undermines its ability keep alive the theoretical possibility of a just and humane society.

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