Strategies of critique in International Relations: From Foucault and Latour towards Marx

Abstract

Critique is back on the scholarly agenda. Since the financial crisis, critique has been debated in philosophy and sociology with renewed rigour. International Relations is currently picking up on these developments. Yet, the critique of capitalism is largely absent in International Relations. This article argues that the theoretical resources deployed among 'radical' International Relations help explain this phenomenon. In order to rectify this, the article aims to resituate Marx at the centre of the debate about critique. Based on a discussion of the understandings of critique by Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, the article shows that their conscious focus on the small and the contingent has prevented a more totalizing strategy of critique from taking hold. The article illustrates this unwillingness to situate social life in our capitalist social whole by zooming in on 'resistant' intervention scholarship. Speaking to the nature of International Relations more broadly, in a second step, the article shows that this lack of 'totalizing' analysis has been present in International Relations and International Political Economy since their inception. Taking into account Marxian and Critical Theoretical understandings of totality, the article outlines a totalizing strategy of critique. This strategy has two components: it takes capitalism as such seriously; and it offers a methodology to implement this substantial shift using Marx's dynamic method of 'concretization'.

Doing and mediating critique: An invitation to practice companionship

“…Critical security studies is also worrying about the status of its nomenclature. Reflections on the success of critical approaches to studying (in)security (Huysmans and Pontes Nogueira, 2016), their political dimensions (Koddenbrock, 2014), and their methodological commitments (Aradau et al, 2015) are multiplying. Indeed, as Debbie Lisle writes, critical security studies is among the ‘scholarly traditions’ that share ‘the urgent need to do something’ about the state of the world.…”

The poverty of Critical Theory in International Relations: Habermas, Linklater and the failings of cosmopolitan critique

“…In practice, this means that the bifurcating strategy of critique that underlies the communicative-cosmopolitan paradigm must be replaced by a new totalising strategy that aims at reintegrating the anticipatory-utopian and explanatory-diagnostic dimensions of critical theorising by way of a concretisation of the former and a politicisation of the latter. As others have argued (Fluck, 2014; Koddenbrock, 2015), the conceptual resources by which CT can accomplish such a renewal while avoiding the pitfalls of deterministic thinking already exist within the Marxian tradition. Moreover, critical literatures, such as Marxist IR theory and historical sociology, as well as neo-Gramscian International Political Economy, have long been dealing with the issue of how to theorise in non-reductionist ways the relation between capitalism, ‘the international’, social agents and ideational structures, and it is in dialogue with those approaches that CT’s reconstruction as an analytically cutting-edge and politically vibrant project is most likely to succeed.…”

How can we criticize international practices?

“…This excessive mistrust is a problem that can be revealed through pragmatic critique. Conversely, the pragmatic agenda of looking at everything in symmetrical terms can also become excessive (see Koddenbrock 2015). The trust it places in practitioners' common sense risks becoming naïve when it simply takes every statement and every opinion at face value and thus loses the ability to distinguish between more or less appropriate forms of knowledge.…”