Cambridge Books Online
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/
An Introduction to International Relations
Edited by Richard Devetak, Anthony Burke, Jim George
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598
Online ISBN: 9781139196598
Paperback ISBN: 9781107600003
Chapter
6 - Postmodernism pp. 91-102
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge University Press
6
Postmodernism
Roland Bleiker
Introduction
92
Postmodernity as a new historical period
92
Postmodernism as a critical way of understanding modernity
93
The emergence of the third debate in IR scholarship
97
The polemical nature of debates about postmodernism
Conclusion
99
100
Questions
101
Further reading
102
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
91
92
AN INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Introduction
This chapter offers an account of postmodernism. It begins by drawing a distinction
between two broad approaches to the postmodern: one that outlines the contours of a
new historical period (postmodernity), and another that places emphasis on finding new
ways of understanding modern practices of knowledge and politics (postmodernism).
The second part of the chapter examines how postmodern ideas entered international
relations scholarship, and how the ensuing debates often had a strong polemical
tone. Given the complexity of these debates and the limited space available here,
my engagement in no way claims to be comprehensive. My objective is limited to
identifying some of the key themes in postmodern thought so that interested readers
can then explore the issues at stake if they wish to do so.
Before starting off it is useful to acknowledge that defining postmodernism is
no easy task. Postmodern scholarship is characterised more by diversity than by a
common set of beliefs. Add to this that the postmodern has become a very contentious
label which is used less by its advocates and more by polemical critics who fear
that embracing postmodern values would throw us into a dangerous nihilist void. But
while the contours of the postmodern will always remain elusive and contested, the
substantial issues that the respective debates have brought to the fore are important
enough to warrant attention.
Postmodernity as a new historical period
The postmodern has become a stretched, widely used and highly controversial term.
It first achieved prominence in literary criticism and architecture, but eventually spread
into virtually all realms, including international relations. What the postmodern actually
means is highly disputed. The increasing sense of confusion in the proliferation of the
postmodern led Gianni Vattimo (1992: 1) to note that this term is so omnipresent and
faddish that it has become almost obligatory to distance oneself from it. But Vattimo, and
many others, nevertheless held on. He, alongside such diverse authors as Jean-François
Lyotard (1979), Jean Baudrillard (1983), David Harvey (1989), and Fredric Jameson
(1984), viewed the postmodern as both a changing attitude and a fundamentally novel
historical condition. They focused on cultural transformations that have taken place in
the Western world and assumed, as Andreas Huyssen (1984: 8) summarises, that we are
witnessing ‘a noticeable shift in sensibility, practices and discourse formations which
distinguishes a postmodern set of assumptions, experiences and propositions from that
of a preceding period’. Such shifts are recognised in various globalising tendencies,
such as the rapid evolution and global reach of mass media and other information and
communication tools.
There are two broad ways of conceptualising inquiries into the postmodern. The
first one revolves around attempts to demonstrate that we have entered a fundamentally
new historical epoch. Some scholars believe that the all-encompassing historical period
called modernity has given way to something else, a postmodernity (Vattimo 1988).
To understand postmodern approaches one must thus first investigate the modern
elements from which they try to distinguish themselves. No easy task, for modernity is
a highly ambiguous concept, an elusive set of complexities that defy single meanings.
Modernity is generally understood to be the historical period that followed the
Middle Ages. It emerged with the onset of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy and
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
CHAPTER 6: POSTMODERNISM
spanned the centuries that followed. The past 500 years have brought about changes
that are more radical and far-reaching than virtually anything that had happened in
previous human history. Countless dynamics started to unfold during the modern
period. They are linked to such features as industrialisation, advances in science and
technology and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The nation-state, with
all its disciplinary practices, emerged as the dominant political actor.
Postmodern approaches assume that changes over the past few decades have been
significant enough to suggest that we have entered a period that is fundamentally
different from the preceding modern one. The key features of this new postmodernity
are associated with processes of globalisation, such as the rapid evolution and spread
of mass media, computers and other communicative features. These processes, it is
said, have led to a ‘transparent society’ (Vattimo 1992); to an ‘ecstasy of communication’
(Baudrillard 1985); to a post-industrial phase whose main feature is knowledge production
(Lyotard 1984); or to the advance of new technologies and a consumer democracy
which provides capitalism with an inherently new cultural logic ( Jameson 1984). Paul
Virilio believes that these developments have fundamentally altered the relationship
between time and space. The centrality of the latter, he stresses, has decreased and
time has taken over as the criterion around which many global dynamics revolve. The
instantaneous character of communication and mass media has reduced the importance
of duration and locality. The ‘now’ of the emission is privileged to the detriment of the
‘here’, the space where things take place (Virilio 1986; see also Harvey 1989).
Some commentators portray this new postmodern period in rather gloomy terms,
stressing that our ability to influence political affairs is becoming increasingly elusive in
a world that is too complex and interdependent to be shaped by the will of people. We
hear of a nation-state that is no longer able to uphold its sovereignty and the spheres
of justice and civility that the corresponding boundaries were supposed to protect.
Disempowerment and disentitlement have become key features of globalisation. We
hear of a neoliberal world order that is increasingly run by a few powerful multilateral
institutions and multinational corporations. Jean Baudrillard even believes that we
have lost the ability to distinguish between reality and virtuality. Our media culture, he
says, has conditioned our minds such that we have lost the ability to penetrate beneath
the manifest levels of surface (Baudrillard 1983). Others view the postmodern period
more optimistically. They point out that increased trade opportunities have brought
prosperity to many parts of the world. Or they stress that new communicative tools
open up a range of positive opportunities, from better cross-cultural communication
to the possibilities of articulating cosmopolitan notions of democracy (see Connolly
2002: 178).
Postmodernism as a critical way of
understanding modernity
A second postmodern approach does not seek to identify the contours of a new
historical epoch. Instead, it searches for means by which we can understand and live
modernity in more reflective and inclusive ways. David Campbell (1998: 212–13) and
Jean-François Lyotard (1991: 24–35) are examples of presumably postmodern authors
who remind us that as modernity is already such an elusive phenomenon, the concept
of postmodernity becomes nothing but a parody of the phantom it seeks to distance
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
93
94
AN INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
itself from. Instead of looking at modernity as a historical period or a set of institutions,
these authors follow Michel Foucault’s (1984: 39) advice and treat it primarily as an
attitude, ‘a way of thinking and feeling’, ‘a mode of relating to contemporary reality’.
Modernity, then, is the broad common theme that runs through a set of diverse practices
which, superseding and intersecting with each other, have come to constitute our
contemporary consciousness.
Here too, the key task is to distinguish a modern set of assumptions about the world
from a superseding, postmodern way of conceptualising socio-political issues. One
could say that the modern political consciousness issued to a considerable extent from
the tension between Romanticism and the Enlightenment. What has been retained
from the romantic ideal is the autonomy of the self, the quest for independence and
self-determination, the belief that people can shape history. This form of modern
idealism was then supplemented with the scientific heritage of the Enlightenment,
with the desire to systematise, to search for rational foundations and certainty in a
world of turmoil and constant flux.
The romantic element of our contemporary consciousness is epitomised in Hegel.
What makes modernity different, in Hegel’s view, is its attempt at self-understanding,
the desire to establish norms and values on their own terms, rather than by way of
borrowing from or rejecting the ideas of a surpassed epoch. The keystone of this
process of self-grounding is the principle of subjectivity, which – at least in Habermas’s
reading of Hegel – is linked to a perception of freedom that recognises an individual’s
autonomy and responsibility in the realms of action and reflection (Habermas 1987:
16–44). The legacy of the Enlightenment then provides this subjectivity-oriented
approach with stable and scientific foundations. Charles Baudelaire (1961: 1163),
in a much-cited passage, draws attention to the recurring quest for certainty in a
world of turbulence and chaos. While describing modernity as ‘the transient, the
fleeting, the contingent’, Baudelaire points towards the constant attempts to discover
underlying patterns behind these ephemeral features. He describes the recurring
quest for essences as a desire to ‘extract the eternal out of the transient’.
Within such modern attempts to fuse subjectivity and science there is ample
room for discussion and diversity, more than in any preceding period. Indeed, Hegel
considers the right to criticism precisely as one of modernity’s key characteristics
(Habermas 1987: 17). The breathing space necessary for criticism was provided by
the emergence of a public sphere in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.
Passionate debates were waged about all aspects of modern life. Virtually every
opinion, every thought, every theory was attacked, refuted or at least submitted to
intense and sustained scrutiny.
While the waging of fierce intellectual debates emerged as a key feature of modernity,
the range of these debates was not as boundless as it appears at first sight. William
Connolly (1993) emphasises that modern debates all have a distinctive character: they
are all well framed. The contours of the modern framing process have to a large extent
been drawn by the recurring unwillingness to deal with what Nietzsche (see Box
6.1) called the death of God: the disappearance, at the end of the medieval period,
of a generally accepted worldview that provided a stable ground from which it was
possible to assess nature, knowledge, common values, truth, politics – in short, life
itself. When the old theocentric world crumbled, when the one and only commonly
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
CHAPTER 6: POSTMODERNISM
accepted point of reference vanished, the death of God became the key dilemma
around which modern debates were waged. Yet, instead of accepting the absence
of stable foundations and dealing with the ensuing responsibilities, many prominent
modern approaches embarked on attempts to find replacements for the fallen God.
They desperately searched for stable foundations that could offer the type of order
and certainty that was once provided by the Catholic Church. This is how Nietzsche
famously put it:
God is dead; but given the way people are there may still be caves for thousands of years in which
his shadow will be shown. – And we – we still have to vanquish his shadow, too. (Nietzsche,
1974: 167. Translation altered).
The quest to replace God and search for new ultimate foundations has taken different
shapes in various stages of the modern project. For Renaissance humanists it centred
around a sceptical and rhetorical belief in human agency and the virtue of ‘men’.
During the Enlightenment it was trust in science and universal reason. For Romantics
it was the belief in aesthetics and a deified self. For Marxists it consisted of faith in
history’s teleological dimension.
BOX 6.1: KEY FIGURES
Friedrich Nietzsche: the ‘postmodern’ philosopher
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is often said to have influenced
postmodern thought. He held many views on numerous topics, but his most influential legacy
might relate to the manner in which he approached fundamental questions of knowledge.
Nietzsche questioned the deeply entrenched modern search for universal forms of truth,
whether they be based in Christian morals or on scientific foundations. He believed that
the search for truth always contained a will to power. This is why critics accused him of
nihilism: that is, of advocating a world in which we no longer have moral values. Postmodern
proponents of Nietzsche strongly disagree with such a view. They believe Nietzsche can
provide us with crucial insights into political dynamics: he makes us realise why we need to
pay attention to processes of inclusion and exclusion, and to how knowledge and power are
always intertwined.
The well-bounded nature of modern debates is perfectly epitomised in international
relations scholarship. Here, too, everything has been debated fiercely. Seemingly
nothing was spared criticism. And yet these debates have all been well framed. They
have been framed by the urge to impose order upon a complex and elusive modern
world. Steve Smith has drawn attention to this framing process. For him, positivism
is the common theme that runs through a diverse set of mainstream approaches to
international relations. At its most elementary level, positivism is based on an attempt
to separate subject and object. It implies that the social scientist, as detached observer
(subject), can produce value-free knowledge of an independent reality (object); that
our comprehension of facts can be separated from our relationship with them (S. Smith
1996: 11–44; see also 2004: 499–515; see Chapter 1).
For a postmodern scholar the key task is thus to accept the death of God: to
recognise that there are no underlying foundations that can absolve us of taking
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
95
96
AN INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Figure 6.1
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882, by Gustave Schultze
Source: Wikimedia commons.
responsibility for political decisions. Thinking and acting inevitably express a ‘will to
truth’, a desire to control and impose order upon random and idiosyncratic events.
‘To think’, Adorno (1992: 17) says, ‘is to identify’. When we think we identify choices,
privilege one interpretation over others and, often without knowing it, exclude what
does not fit into the way we want to see things. There is no escape from this process,
no possibility of extracting pure facts from observation. To disrespect these limits to
cognition is to endow one particular and necessarily subjective form of knowledge with
the power to determine the nature of factual evidence. It is from such a theoretical
vantage point that scholars like Jim George (1994) or Richard Ashley (1984) have tried
to show how positivist approaches have transformed one specific interpretation of
world political realities, the dominant realist one, into reality per se. As a result, realist
perceptions of the international have gradually become accepted as ‘common sense’,
to the point that any critique against them has to be evaluated in terms of an already
existing and largely naturalised (realist) worldview. Smith detects powerful mechanisms
of control precisely in this ability to determine meaning and rationality, to decide which
issues are or are not legitimate concerns for international theorists. ‘Defining common
sense’, he argues, ‘is the ultimate act of political power’ (Smith 1996: 13). It separates
the possible from the impossible and directs the theory and practice of world politics
on a particular path.
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
CHAPTER 6: POSTMODERNISM
BOX 6.2: DISCUSSION POINTS
The politics of representation I: René Magritte’s ‘This is not a pipe’
We have seen in this chapter that postmodern authors believe that interpretation and
representation are inevitable aspects of politics; that facts are not pre-given but depend on
how we view and intellectualise them.
Nowhere do we find a more compelling illustration of this position than in a famous
painting by the surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967). The painting features a carefully
drawn pipe placed above an equally carefully hand-written line that reads ‘Ceci n’est pas
une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). On the one hand, this statement seems silly: of course this
is a pipe. But at a closer look we realise that Magritte is right. This is not a pipe but only
a drawing of a pipe, a representation. In everyday life we use such representations and
others to make sense of the world around us. In this painting Magritte playfully highlights the
complex relationship between representations and objects, words and things.
Michel Foucault wrote a little book on the subject called This is not a pipe ([1973] 1983).
The emergence of the third debate in IR scholarship
Postmodern approaches entered IR scholarship during the mid to late 1980s in the
context of what is usually called the ‘third debate’ (see Chapter 1). The first great debate
is said to have taken place during the inter-war period, when liberalism and realism
(see Chapters 2 and 3) disagreed fundamentally about how to oppose the spectre of
Nazi Germany. The second great debate was followed by post-war methodological
disputes between behaviouralism and traditionalism. Various versions of these debates
have emerged since, and so have disputes about the adequacy of representing IR
scholarship as a series of great debates (see Introduction).
The third debate was waged around so-called epistemological questions, that
is, questions about how we can know the realities of world politics. An increasing
number of scholars identified themselves as ‘dissidents’. They expressed a growing
dissatisfaction with prevailing realist, positivist, state-centric and masculine approaches
to the study of international relations (Ashley and Walker 1990: 263). Common to these
dissident approaches was a strong opposition to what Lyotard (1979: 7–9) famously
described as a modern tendency to ground and legitimise knowledge in reference to
a grand narrative, that is, a universalising framework which seeks to emancipate the
individual by mastering the conditions of life. Postmodern approaches, by contrast, try
to understand processes of exclusion and inclusion that are inevitably entailed in the
articulation of knowledge and political positions. They seek to challenge and uproot
entrenched thinking patterns, such that we can see the world from more than one
perspective and marginalised voices can be brought into the realm of dialogue.
Important early contributions to postmodern international relations scholarship can
be found in the work of such authors as Richard Ashley, David Campbell (1992; 1998),
William Connolly, Costas Constantinou, Simon Dalby, James Der Derian, Jenny Edkins,
Jim George (1994), Michael Shapiro, R. B. J. Walker and Cynthia Weber (see Ashley and
Walker 1990; Constantinou, 1996b; Der Derian and Shapiro 1989; Edkins, 1999; R. B. J.
Walker 1993; Cynthia Weber 1995).
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
97
98
AN INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
BOX 6.3: DISCUSSION POINTS
The politics of representation II: Remembering and forgetting
Here is a little political experiment you can do yourself to see why questions of representation
are both inevitable and political:
Next time you sit in a restaurant, try to remember one minute of what you read, see,
sense, smell, feel and rationalise during this short time span: everything, from all the items
on the menu and their prices to the size, shape and colour of the objects you see, or the way
they project shadows onto other objects. Remember all the details about all the people, how
they look, the way they move, what they say, in all their different accents and languages.
Remember all the smells and sounds, all your emotional and rational reactions to these
impressions, and how you compared them, directly or subconsciously, to impressions from
previous experiences.
Try to remember all the ‘facts’ during this one minute of your life. Of course, it is impossible
to remember all of this. The only way to remember anything about these sixty seconds is to
forget at least 99.99 per cent of what you have experienced.
If we cannot retrace a single minute of our mundane life, how could we possibly remember
something as monumental as, say, World War I, the Cuban missile crisis, the collapse of the
Berlin Wall or any other event in world politics? Again, the only way is to forget virtually
everything about it, except for the few facts, impressions and interpretations that have been
deemed memorable.
That is precisely what IR scholarship is doing: selecting what is to be remembered and
separating it from the overwhelming rest. This is a process of representation and it is both
selective, subjective and highly political.
Next time you read an account of a political event ask yourself: what kind of politics of
representation is involved here? Which facts are remembered and which are forgotten? Why
is this the case? What are the political consequences?
There are, meanwhile, several concise and highly convincing summaries of
postmodern approaches to international relations. Three stand out. The first such study is
by Richard Devetak (2009b). He identifies four common features: 1) a key concern with
the relationship between power and knowledge; 2) the employment of post-positivist
methodologies, such as deconstruction and genealogy; 3) a critical engagement with
the role of the state and related questions of boundaries, violence and identity; and 4)
the resulting need to fundamentally rethink the relationship between politics and ethics.
A second study is an equally compelling chapter by David Campbell (2007: 203–28). He
prefers the term poststructuralism over postmodernism. He speaks not of a paradigm or
a theory, but of a critical attitude to understanding how certain forms of politics become
possible and are seen as legitimate and rational. While conventional scholarly inquiries
often take such factors as pre-given, poststructural approaches consider processes of
interpretation and representation as both inevitable and as inherently political in nature.
The respective scholars study the power relationships involved and help us understand
how global politics is produced, conducted and understood. Finally, the most recent
summary of postmodern approaches to international relations is authored by Anthony
Burke (2008: 359–77). He too does an excellent job in crystallising the key issues at
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
CHAPTER 6: POSTMODERNISM
stake, focusing on the need to expose how prevailing approaches have imposed one
particular version of ‘reality’ upon a far more diverse, complex world. Burke reveals
how postmodern attempts to break free of such constraints are not only sophisticated
and complex, but also of direct practical relevance.
These summaries already make clear that postmodern approaches are highly
diverse. They also employ a range of different methods to study political phenomena.
Among the most prominent ones are, as Devetak has pointed out, genealogy and
deconstruction. The former is associated with Nietzsche and the French philosopher
Michel Foucault. The latter is linked to Jacques Derrida and poststructuralism. Both
genealogy and deconstruction recognise that we cannot represent the world as it is. Our
understanding of political and social phenomena is intrinsically linked to the cultural
environment we are embedded in, the values we hold and the language we use to
express them. The term ‘discourse’ is often used to express how this intertwinement of
political practices, cultural values and linguistic representations makes up the world as
we know it.
The key objective for postmodern scholars is not to arrive at some objective truth
about political events or phenomena. Such an endeavour would be as problematic as
it is futile. The point, rather, is to increase understanding of how power and knowledge
are intertwined in all representations of politics. Genealogy is an alternative form
of history: an effort to illuminate how particular historical evolutions created the
type of world we live in today. Deconstruction, by contrast, is a scholarly method
designed to expose values and power relations that are entailed – either explicitly
or implicitly – in particular texts, ranging anywhere from political speeches to legal
documents and popular magazines. Both of these methods are an integral part of
postmodern inquiries into the modern practices that make up our contemporary
world.
The polemical nature of debates
about postmodernism
Postmodern contributions to international relations soon became highly controversial.
They triggered a number of heated debates and often very polemical attacks. Defenders
of the postmodern presented it as a necessary critique of modern thought-forms and
their problematic impact on political practices. Opponents justified the modern project
at all cost, for they feared that postmodern alternatives would induce an endless fall into
a relativist abyss. Many established scholars believed that a postmodern celebration of
difference would undermine the search for coherent visions of world politics. And such
visions, the argument went, were badly needed at a time when violent conflicts and
economic insecurities haunted the post-Cold War system. Some went as far as fearing
that heeding postmodern approaches would open up the floodgates to relativistic
ravings according to which ‘anything goes’ and ‘any narrative is as valid as another’
(Østerud 1996: 386).
The polemical nature of the debate about the potentials and problems of
postmodernism is well epitomised by the contribution of Darryl Jarvis. He edited one
of the few collections that explicitly engage postmodern approaches to international
relations ( Jarvis 2002). The volume contains summaries of postmodern approaches
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
99
100
AN INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
followed by critical engagements with them. Jarvis himself is particularly sceptical of
postmodernism. Taking on scholars such as Richard Ashley, James Der Derian and
Cynthia Enloe, Jarvis (2000: xi) believes that postmodern approaches are ‘taking the
discipline down an ideologically destructive road’. He writes of postmodernism’s
‘radical rejectionism’ and of ‘a compendium of the visual arts, science fiction, identities,
personal stories, and research whims whose intellectual agendas are so disparate as to
be meaningless’. Without clear disciplinary boundaries, Jarvis believes, we ‘lose sight
of the subject we once used to study’ and thus end up in a ‘vacuous activity, facile and
devoid of meaning’ ( Jarvis 2000: xi, 5, 7).
At stake is nothing less than the practical relevance of IR scholarship. Postmodernism
is seen by its critics as a mere meta-theory: a scholarly endeavour that is concerned
only with theory, thus lacking any meaning in the real world ( Jarvis 2000: 21, 170,
197). This is not the point at which to engage and evaluate the debates between
proponents and opponents of postmodernism. Nor is it the place to summarise, in
detail, all postmodern contributions to international relations scholarship. Quite a few of
them, including the present author, would refuse labelling practices altogether. Indeed,
labelling and surveying, a postmodernist would say, is a typically modern attempt to
bring order and certainty into a world of chaos and flux. It is a desire to squeeze freely
floating and thus somewhat worrisome ideas into surveyable categories, to cut off and
smooth the various overlapping edges so that each piece neatly fits into its assigned
place. This is why the positive potential of postmodern approaches can be appreciated
and realised in practice only once we move beyond the current polemic that surrounds
the term postmodernism.
Conclusion
By challenging the modern assumptions of dominant approaches to international
relations, postmodernists have tried to open up various possibilities for rethinking not
only the relationship between theory and evidence, fact and value, but also the very
nature of the dilemmas that have haunted world politics for decades.
Summarising the nature of postmodern approaches is not easy, for if they have a
unifying point it is precisely the acceptance of difference, the refusal to uphold one
position as the correct and desirable one. ‘The postmodern begins’, Wolfgang Welsch
(1988: 29–30) says, ‘where totality ends’. Its vision is the vision of plurality, a positive
attempt to secure and explore multiple dimensions of the processes that legitimise and
ground social and political practices. Once the end of totalising thought is accepted, it
becomes, of course, very difficult to talk about the postmodern without descending into
clichés or doing grave injustice to individual authors who explore various terrains of
difference. Jane Flax (1990: 188) recognised this difficulty and admits that by speaking
about postmodernism one already runs ‘the risk of violating some of its central values –
heterogeneity, multiplicity, and difference’.
This diversity is evident when we look at the postmodern approaches to international
relations. Related authors have embarked on a great variety of projects. They have
exposed numerous problematic features, including the state-centrism of realist and
liberal approaches to international relations, as well as their narrow perceptions of
what the international is and where its relations take place. They have challenged the
masculine and Eurocentric values of existing approaches or re-examined such notions
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
CHAPTER 6: POSTMODERNISM
as security, identity, agency, sovereignty, diplomacy, geopolitics and ethics. And
they have used a multitude of post-positivist methodologies to do so: genealogies and
deconstruction, for instance.
Postmodern scholars express a deep scepticism towards totalising and universalising
forms of knowledge. Although this form of scepticism is characterised more by the
search for tolerance and diversity than by a common political agenda, one can still
identify several broad postmodern features that are of direct practical relevance to both
the theory and practice of world politics. Of particular political importance are the
following three interrelated features.
First, postmodern approaches stress that order, security, peace and justice cannot
be imposed by a preconceived universal model, be it of a communist, neoliberal
or any other nature. There is no inherent model for peace, no grand plan that could
free us of violence and deliver perpetual peace. Every political model, no matter how
sensitive, is based on a system of exclusion. Such exclusion is as desirable as it is
necessary. But in order to stay valid and fair, political foundations need to be submitted
to periodic scrutiny. Extending William Connolly’s approach, the search for peace
should thus be linked to a certain attitude, an ‘ethos’, which is based not on a set of
fundamental principles but on the very need to periodically disturb such principles
(Connolly 1995).
Second, the search for peace, security and justice must pay key attention to questions
of inclusion and exclusion, which lie at the heart of violence. No order can be just and
promote peace unless it is sensitive to the power relations it upholds. Maintaining
sensitivity to this process entails, as with the first factor outlined above, an ongoing selfcritical engagement with the type of political project that is being advanced in the name
of peace. Expressed in other words, the task is to expose the power–knowledge nexus
entailed in all political projects, thereby opening up opportunities for marginalised
voices to be heard and brought into the realm of dialogue.
Third, peace, security and justice can only be established and maintained through
an empathetic engagement with and respect for difference, be it related to sexual,
cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, political or any other form of identity. The challenge
then consists of not letting difference deteriorate into violence, but making it part of a
worldview that is tolerant of multiple political and moral sources.
QUESTIONS
1. Postmodern approaches to knowledge are said to be different from modern ones. How
exactly are they different? What are the key components of each tradition of thought?
And what are the concrete political consequences of these different ways of knowing
world politics?
2. Postmodern approaches are said to display an inherent scepticism towards so-called
grand narratives: forms of knowledge that proclaim ‘true’ insight into the world and then
universalise the ensuing political positions. What are the reasons for this scepticism? Is it
justified?
3. Postmodern approaches are often associated with pessimism and relativism, with positions
that can no longer separate right from wrong, good from evil. Do you believe that this
accusation is warranted? Defend your conclusion by juxtaposing arguments advanced by
proponents and opponents of postmodernism.
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014
101
102
AN INTRODUCTION TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
FURTHER READING
Campbell, David 2007, ‘Poststructuralism,’ in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki and Steve Smith (eds),
International relations theories: discipline and diversity, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007. Excellent summary chapter stressing the need to view poststructuralism not as a
theory, but as a critical attitude to understanding issues such as power, knowledge and
identity in world politics.
Der Derian, James and Shapiro, Michael J. (eds) 1989, International/intertextual relations:
postmodern readings of world politics, Lexington: Lexington Books. One of the first
comprehensive collections to deal with postmodern contributions to international relations
scholarship.
Devetak, Richard 2009b, ‘Postmodernism’, in Scott Burchill, Andrew Linklater, Richard Devetak,
Terry Nardin, Jack Donnelly, Matthew Paterson, Christian Reus-Smit and Jacqui True (eds),
Theories of international relations, 3rd edition, London: Macmillan. The most concise –
and compelling – analysis of postmodern contributions to international relations.
George, Jim 1994, Discourses of global politics: a critical (re)introduction to international
relations, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. An early contribution to postmodern debates,
written by an Australian scholar, but still one of the most interesting single-authored
treatments of postmodernism.
Lyotard, Jean-François 1984, The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Perhaps the most influential and authoritative statement on postmodernism.
Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 130.102.42.98 on Fri Apr 25 07:23:25 BST 2014.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139196598.009
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014