Abstract
2015 was a year marked by international turbulence. The visible effects of climate change, and murmurs of an Anthropocene epoch, loomed over the UN’s COP21 conference on climate change; terrorist attacks by ISIS shook Paris, testing the strength of European unity and its multiculturalism; the collapse of Libya and Syria intensified a growing refugee crisis and increased instability in the Middle East; global financial instability widened socioeconomic disparities; and corporations and states strengthened their digital surveillance powers. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), these events emerged in the context of longstanding discourses concerning world order and global governance deficiencies, nuclear proliferation, the potentiality for global pandemics, inevitable environmental catastrophe, global poverty, the erosion of international society, and the breakdown of neoliberal capitalist ‘modernity’ itself. The 2015 Millennium conference, held 17–18 October, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), sought to explore these empirical and theoretical problematiques in a new way. Not by examining each issue in turn, asking how ‘successful’ answers or solutions to these problems might be reached or theorised. Instead, the conference problematised the background conditions and epistemologies that bring these issues into being as thinkable concepts for IR and the world. The conference called for IR to theorise – directly, explicitly, and for the first time – what the concepts of failure and denial are, what it is that they do, and what they allow us to think, in relation to world politics.
In the context of the practice turn and rise of conceptual analysis in IR, one theme of scholarship this special issue raises is the study of the limits of political and moral purposes. The successful use of a concept, and the successful performance of a practice, is relative to its purpose or point. The features and contents of concepts and practices are also contingent upon this purpose, point, or end goal. Beyond this, the failure of macro-constellations of purposes and goals – be they spiritual, imperial, and civilisational, Enlightenment philosophical, or modern rational – is coterminous with the ensuing denial of their continued political desirability and appeal. These failures and denials play no small role in the transformation of our concepts and practices, theories, and world order imaginaries.
Another theme that cuts across the articles in this special issue is that of epistemological failure and denial – the failure ever present between reason and experience, and the ready and necessary denial thereof. Temporarily bridging this gap are the positives – the givens or the a prioris – of modern culture, or the things which are taken for granted and which form the basis of our knowledge of the world. For instance, the history of science is in this way the failure (or error) of knowledge – it is how we discovered that we knew falsely – and the ensuing confrontation with the denial of constituting new positives or givens. This theme of discontinuity has long been known in IR theory (in a limited way, through IR’s so-called ‘great debates’ and ‘paradigms’), and these new positives are continuously constituted as they face similar challenges: what are the givens or positives that IR is transitioning or breaking away from? The state, anarchy, the human? And, to what extent can such an epistemological break be facilitated in a straightforwardly conscious way, by the mere desire to do so by IR scholars? Is the explicit theorisation of failure and denial such a break, or is it a reflection of IR’s present (and engrained) epistemological practices?
With limited printing space, it was difficult to select these articles from the 67 excellent papers presented at the 2015 conference. We feel the articles contained in this special issue best represent IR’s theoretical breadth and creativity in relation to the conference theme, and offer new and critical perspectives for IR theory more generally. We thank everyone who attended the conference and submitted a paper to this special issue, our Deputy Editors, the peer-reviewers, and of course, the authors. A special thank you also goes out to the countless individuals who assisted us throughout, and most especially to our Conference Organising Team and their ‘Steward Army’ for their dedication and professionalism.
With the contributions collected here, the aim of this special issue is to open new spaces and grounds for critical debate and discussion in IR. We hope that it is as enjoyable and rewarding to read, as it was for us to edit.