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Article (Published Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Odysseos, Louiza (2002) Dangerous ontologies: the ethos of survival and ethical theorising in international relations. Review of International Studies, 28 (2). pp. 403-418. ISSN 0260-2105 This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/12604/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. 'We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about how our thinking is framed'. ‫ۧۙۘ۩ۨۑڷ۠ٷۣۢۨٷۢۦۙۨۢٲڷۣۚڷ۪۫ۙۙې‬ 2The discipline of International Relations (IR) has recently witnessed an incitement to ethical discourse. This incitement can be attributed, at least in part, to the end of the Cold War which has left the discipline devoid of the structural certainties by which actions were deemed appropriate in the past. Within this new international context, moreover, IR scholars increasingly attempt to understand the motivations underlying state action where no direct link to the 'national interest' can be made, as is sometimes the case, for example, with external intervention in conflicts. Similarly, catastrophes such as the genocide in Rwanda compel IR ethicists to understand the inaction by states in the 'international system' in the face of what are termed humanitarian crises. 3 Finally, current interest in ethical theories within IR is also sometimes motivated by the need to effect a change in the meaning and intention of 'ethics', or, in a similar vein, as a response to a perceived change in the meaning of the term. Recently, such a need to effect a change in the meaning of 'ethics' has arisen with the realization that ethics and IR are still understood in a dichotomous manner. 4 The separateness, in other words, of ethics from 'international' concerns is now seen as problematic and has brought about an eagerness among scholars of ethics in IR to examine what factors might have sustained it. It is within this latter context that the present article is situated.In particular, this...

This article explores the theme of 'disciplining dissent' by examining how dissenting conduct is channelled into 'acceptable' and 'productive' practices. To this end, it uses Michel Foucault's framework of 'government' in order to highlight the operations of a diffuse and generalized form of 'disciplining', where this refers to the directing or 'structur[ing of] the field of action of others'. Through this framework, the article illuminates that subjects do not cease to be governed when they undertake certain practices customarily categorized as 'resistance' or 'dissent'. On the contrary, the article explores how dissenting practice itself 'disciplines' the conduct of subjects. The article analyzes the pivotal role played in this by processes of subjectification, highlighting how 'governing' (dissenting) behavior may well require the incitation of forms of subjectivity, and ways of being, that are open to such acceptable forms of dissenting and resisting. The article examines the case of Botswana's Bushmen and their attempts to resist and revoke their relocation by the Government of Botswana from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve since 2002 as an important contemporary site illustrative of the interplay of governing, dissent, and subjectification.

Decolonial thought has wrought a devastating critique on the Academy and wide-ranging fields within it. Decolonial critique entails undeniable and multiple ethico-political orientations arising from concrete struggles within the ‘unfinished project of decolonization’ (Maldonado-Torres), as well as recent articulations of decolonial ethics. This article argues that, as decolonial critique, and calls for decolonial ethics, begin to find their way into broader theoretical discussions in the social sciences and humanities, it may be more fruitful to insist on the question of decolonial ethics. It encourages retaining the disruptive potential of decolonial critique by resisting its immediate translations into available ethical registers and traditions that unwittingly reassert, and remain bound to, forms of ethical expression dependent on generalised narratives, which occlude their histories of violent and racialised exclusion and masterful figurations of ethical subjectivity. Outlining Sylvia Wynter’s excavation of prominent figurations of the human as ‘Man’, I argue that our conceptions of ethical subjects too rest on such figurations. The article, therefore, discusses three prolegomena to any future decolonial ethics: the decolonial critique and displacement of the figure of ‘Man’ as ethical subject within racialised coloniality; the development of a decolonising poetics, whose ethos of irreverence seeks forms of poetic revolt that draw on struggles to question systems of ethical thought and knowledge; finally, a discussion of the contours of a praxis of being hybridly human through the development of ‘education’ as an incessant and ‘unfinished’ project.

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