The two forms of nonviolent political action; civil resistance and transformative nonviolence, have different attitudes towards the state. Civil resistance enhances state institutions whilst transformative nonviolence aims for new forms of social and political organisation.
The technocratic turn may sideline politics in a way that ignores the tensions between actors, individuals, and structures of power that are vital to making the science both work and available to those who need it most.
Agonistic theory teaches us that politics is not out there set, fixed and closed, calling for institutional blueprints that would give solutions to ‘real’ problems. But it is collectively constructed, contingent, and incomplete.
The notion of political feasibility is a complex one and has a sharp contrast with the fundamental idea of ideal theory – which tends to sideline all issues of feasibility in order to focus on the question of desirability.
While IR has grown far beyond its boundaries, the plurality of what we refer to as “international relations” has changed so dramatically that it is difficult for students to decide exactly where they should fall on the spectrum.
It can’t be that everyone once considered political theory relevant and now finds it irrelevant, based on mysterious facts about today’s world. Practical men and women have always favoured action over thought. Long ago, Aristotle said that political activists find philosophers contemptible. So these questions are hardly innocent: they put political theory on the defensive. How should political theorists respond?
This is a hectic season for IR junkies – another American-led war, several new African catastrophes, another crisis over the Euro, and (perhaps, best of all) the return of the nuclear issue. As these have arisen I’ve been wondering what kind of a creature IR is in the aftermath of […]
The principal reason for taking political philosophy seriously is not its possible relevance to contingent events in the world but simply its capacity to open up intellectual space for human beings to do something that’s part and parcel of their humanity, reflecting on what actually defines a fully human existence.
Politicians rarely talk about progress as if they had been infected by the postmodern critique of Enlightenment but they do talk about “moving forward” without any indication of the meaning of forward or backward. Political theory attempts to clarify the reasons conservatives wish to conserve some practice or institution and radicals wish to reform some practices and “move forward.”
Hartmut Behr’s recent book is a fascinating critical reconsideration of how generations of political thinkers have appraised the interplay between universal and particular interests among the relations of states in their understandings of “the world” from Western antiquity through the present-day
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