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A picture of sovereignty holds the study of politics captive. Captives of Sovereignty looks at the historical origins of this picture of politics, critiques its philosophical assumptions and offers a way to move contemporary critiques of sovereignty beyond their current impasse. The first part of the book is diagnostic. Why, despite their best efforts to critique sovereignty, do political scientists who are dissatisfied with the concept continue to reproduce the logic of sovereignty in their thinking? Havercroft draws on the writings of Hobbes and Spinoza to argue that theories of sovereignty are produced and reproduced in response to skepticism. The second part of the book draws on contemporary critiques of skeptical arguments by Wittgenstein and Cavell to argue that their alternative way of responding to skepticism avoids the need to invoke a sovereign as the final arbiter of all political disputes.
This innovative new work suggests that The Wire reflects, not simply a cultural take on contemporary America, but a structural critique of the conditions of late-modernity and global capitalism. As such, it is a visual text worth investigating and exploring for its nuanced examination of power, difference and inequality. Deylami & Havercroft bring together nine essays addressing issues of interest to a range of academic fields in order to engage with this important cultural intervention that has transfixed audiences and sparked debate within the social scientific community. While the TV show is primarily focused upon the urban politics of Baltimore, the contributors to this volume read Balti...
The challenges that space poses for political theory are profound. Yet until now, the exploration and utilization of space has generally reflected – but not challenged – the political patterns and impulses which characterized twentieth-century politics and International Relations. This edited volume analyses a number of controversial policies, and contentious strategies which have promoted space activities under the rubric of exploration and innovation, militarization and weaponization, colonization and commercialization. It places these policies and strategies in broader theoretical perspective in two key ways. Firstly, it engages in a reading of the discourses of space activities: expo...
Draws on the writings of Stanley Cavell to diagnose post-truth politics and offer philosophical resources to respond to its challenges.
An acclaimed political theorist offers a fresh, interdisciplinary analysis of the politics of refusal, highlighting the promise of a feminist politics that does not simply withdraw from the status quo but also transforms it. The Bacchae, Euripides’s fifth-century tragedy, famously depicts the wine god Dionysus and the women who follow him as indolent, drunken, mad. But Bonnie Honig sees the women differently. They reject work, not out of laziness, but because they have had enough of women’s routine obedience. Later they escape prison, leave the city of Thebes, explore alternative lifestyles, kill the king, and then return to claim the city. Their “arc of refusal,” Honig argues, can i...
Sparked by the brutal police murder of George Floyd, the second wave of the #blacklivesmatter protest movement has surged across more than 100 US cities, spilling into Brazil, South Africa, Paris and London - to name a few of the primary sites of active resistance. This is a new movement, international in scope, with a disproportionately large section of young people - black and white - using their own language and tactics to fundamentally challenge the whole range of racist institutions governing today’s globalised world. Matt Clement’s No Justice, No Police? The Politics of Protest and Social Change chronicles this movement as it continues to deepen and broaden.
The practices of world politics are now scrutinised in a way that is unprecedented, with even those previously – or conventionally assumed to be – disengaged from international affairs being drawn into world politics by social media. Interactive websites allow users to follow election results in real-time from the other side of the world, and online mapping means that the world ‘out there’ is now available on your mobile phone. Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age engages these themes in contemporary world politics, to better understand how digital communication through new media technologies changes our encounters with the world. Whether the focus is d...
This book explains how leaders in the Caribbean and Pacific regions balance the autonomy-viability dilemma of postcolonial statehood - that political self-determination is a hollow achievement unless it is accompanied by economic development - by practising statehood à la carte. Previous research has focused on the pursuit of decolonial self-determination through and above the nation state, via regionalism and internationalism, or by creating non-sovereign alternatives to it. This book looks at how communities have sought the same goals below the state, including via secession and devolution. Downsizing is typically portrayed as the antithesis of progressive, cosmopolitan internationalism a...
Ludwig Wittgenstein's work has been widely interpreted and appropriated by subsequent philosophers, as well as by scholars from areas as diverse as anthropology, cultural studies, literary theory, sociology, law, and medicine. The Grammar of Politics demonstrates the variety of ways political philosophers understand Wittgenstein's importance to their discipline and apply Wittgensteinian methods to their own projects. In her introduction, Cressida J. Heyes notes that Wittgenstein himself was skeptical of political theory, and that his philosophy does not lead naturally or inexorably toward any particular political position. Instead, she says, his ideas motivate certain attitudes toward the "g...
A critical and insightful exploration of arguably the greatest television show of the twenty-first century. In the two decades since The Wire first aired, the show has only continued to grow in cultural relevance as America has seen domestic terrorism increase, race relations become ever tenser, political populism become increasingly sectarian, health inequalities worsen, incarceration rates for Black Americans skyrocket, and grassroots racial activism grow. In The Wire: A Cultural History, Ben Lamb explores how the twenty-first century’s greatest television show changed international perceptions of American policing, drug laws, and race relations forever, and instigated our obsessive stre...