Knock It Down? Unmaking, Deconstruction, and Destruction as/in Politics Research

Abstract

Unmaking, deconstruction, and destruction are part of the everyday life of politics. This article makes an initial case for the plausibility of the argument that International Relations (IR) should expand its gaze and scholarly practice not only into material-aesthetic making, as suggested by the International Political Design (IPD) project, but also into material-aesthetic unmaking and destruction. If making is thinking, as Austin and Leander (2021) suggest, unmaking is also a scholarly enterprise, one that might be as intellectually significant as making, and have important implications for the project specifically and IR scholarship more generally. While I am not arguing that unmaking or destruction is always or even usually normatively good, I am arguing that it is intellectually important to understand and engage, and that thinking about unmaking has important normative implications for making. The first section of this article introduces the IPD project, and suggests that it is operationally and necessarily positive in its current instantiations, despite its criticality. The second section, drawing on inspirations as divergent as queer theory and realist IR, sets out an onto-epistemologically negative approach to IR/the world and uses that approach to problematize the positivity of the IPD project. The following three sections engage with potential negative approaches to making-as-scholarship: negative design, deconstruction, and destruction, engaging with the potential implications for both disciplinary inquiry in IR and the practices of IR scholars in the “world” as such. A conclusion talks about the importance of including deconstruction, demolition, destruction, tearing down, and unmaking in IR scholarship.