Theorizing Contemporary International Relations - Complexities and Perplexities
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Responsible: Rune Saugmann, CAST, Centre for Advanced Security Theory Uni of Copenhagen
From: 2012/12/08 to: 2012/12/09
Registration Deadline: 2012/11/15
Place: CAST, University of Copenhagen. Øster Farimagsgade 5, opg. E, DK-1353 Copenhagen
Fee: 30 Euro
ECTS (Get approval from your own department!!!): 2
Short description: The workshop will focus on the (western) practices that make up war and IR in an era in which dichotomies such as war/peace, security/insecurity, rationality/irrationality and global/local are breaking down - symbolized by a decade of western-led wars in the Middle East, in which the logics of exceptionality expanded from battlefields to domestic societies - yet during which the major crisis to be registered in western societies was not war or the erosion of civil liberties, but the financial meltdown post-2008. Drawing on the eminent scholarship of James Der Derian and Carsten Bagge Laustsen, it engages the cultural and psychological dynamics as well as institutional and material practices that make up and make possible such seemingly discjuncted and contradictory states of affairs.
The workshop Complexities and Perplexities of 21st Century IR explores theoretical frameworks that can enable IR to grasp a contemporary world in which both states, societies and flows of interaction and communication are radically different from when most IR theories were developed (cf. the end of IR Theory debate). Firstly, the workshop draws on James Der Derian's work on interconnectivity, inspired by the philosophy of Virilio and Derrida to explore how developments related to visual communication challenge traditional understandings of and borders between war, peace and diplomacy. Secondly, it introduces students to Carsten Bagge Laustsen's influential use of psychoanalysis (Lacan), and explores non-rational thinking of state behavior.
The course is targeted at phd's with an interest in and knowledge of post-structural social theory, and introduces the students some of the key intellectual frameworks and analytics in which phd-projects analyzing contemporary themes such as security, statehood, military, media.
Lecturers: James Der Derian, Professor of International Studies (Research), Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
Further information: rsa@ifs.ku.dk
This workshop is aimed at engaging the interplays between
different ‘spheres’ of IR that are too often studied as separate
and un-connected realms. It draws on James Der Derian’s pioneering
work on how military, media, education, research and entertainment
intertwine (2001, 2009) and asks the question of what IR will look
like when post-modern states act in a world characterized by new,
complex networked forms of power. The workshop will focus on the (western) practices that make up
war and IR in an era in which the war/peace dichotomy is breaking
down – symbolized by a decade of western-led wars in the Middle
East during which the major ‘crisis’ to be registered in western
societies is not war, but the global financial meltdown post-2008.
Drawing on the eminent scholarship of James Der Derian and Carsten
Bagge Laustsen, it engages the cultural as well as institutional and
material practices that make up and make possible such a state of
affairs. Participants will benefit from three lectures (two from JDD and
one from CBL), and of a thorough discussion of their own work. The
course will make participants better equipped to assess complex
cultural/institutional/material practices in IR and pose questions to
traditional understandings of power, influence and the state. It will
help participants in the difficult task of situating a detailed
ph.d.-project in such complex interplays, making their analysis
relevant for pushing the boundaries of contemporary IR scholarship. At once a road-trip,
detective story, and zombie flic, Project
Z gives a history of the military-industrial-media-entertainment
network (‘MIME-NET’) in cinematic form, combining firsthand
videography about the military, political and technological
transformations of the era with a corrosive intellectual critique of
the events that resulted. Set
in the present, the film begins in the Mojave Desert as a virtual
revolution in military affairs is being developed to test new models
of information-based, televisual warfare. As the U.S. seeks to
restore a sense of certainty lost with the end of Cold War,
experiments in high-tech war become entangled with actual global
events, producing media feedback-loops, virtual worst-case scenarios,
and self-fulfilling prophesies of terror. Networked, proliferated, and accelerated by
multi-platform transmedia, images of war and diplomacy are
instanteously googled, wikied, youtubed and twittered into branded
identities and virtual realities. We have seen,
from the perspective of the satellite, smart-bomb, gun-cameras,
mobile phone and various other optical systems how moving images, no
matter how degraded, night-scoped, or pixelated, grab more eyeballs,
engender more controversy, and trigger more violence than static
words. The results often resemble what Einstein disparagingly called
‘spooky action at a distance’, in which the credible parameters
of cause and effect and linear demarcations of space appear to be
exceeded by strange sub-atomic entanglements. As global
politics phase-shifts at light speed from states to sub-states, local
to global, public to private, organized to chaotic, virtual to real -
and back again – both ‘Copenhagen
Schools’ must be engaged to understand the quantization of war and
diplomacy Literature: Online: A lecture by Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Department of Political
Science, Aarhus University States are unlike units, it has been claimed by social
constructivist and post structural IR research since the beginning of
the 1980s. We need to understand a state's history, its culture, the
habits and traditions of its population, the design of its political
system and much more in order to adequately understand how it
behaves. But no matter how long the list of things we need to
consider has been, one thing seems to have been missing. The factors
needing to be considered have only been aspects relevant to explain a
state's identity and culture. But what about the psychic life of a
state? Can states be anxious, nervous, paranoid or fearful? In this lecture, we will focus one a twofold meaning of "mental
states." A focus on mental states can be seen as the
continuation of a focus on modes of consciousness, degrees of
risk-awareness and catastrophe-thinking, threat perception and the
like; that is, how the way we mentally approach our surroundings in a
patterned way. But we can also take mental states to refer to the way
states as units behave which, it is often claimed, differs from the
way individuals behave. Or, to put it more broadly: The central
question addressed is, how do these understandings of mental states
link? That is, can there be something like a macro-psychological or
macro-psychoanalytical analysis of a state? We answer in the affirmative by showing how psychological and
psychoanalytical insights on anxiety, fear, trauma, shame,
humiliation, acting out and the like can be productive for IR. In
doing so, we make two claims. The first claim is that the very
distinction between the individual and the social is a false start,
at least if the point of departure is some sort of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. The kind of psychology and psychoanalysis that is
relevant to IR is one that thematises the social bond, focusing on
intersubjective processes and relations. The second claim is that
social constructivist and poststructuralist IR is implicitly grounded
in thinking about the human subject and how it organizes its psychic
life, no matter how macro it conceives its analysis to be. We will
illustrate this by focusing on the implicit assumptions that underpin
the Copenhagen School's thinking about security. Concepts of
security/fear and audience will in particular benefit from an
extended and explicit focus on mental states. Readings December 8th,
14-18 (Includes screening of James Der Derian’s movie ‘Project Z’
in Cinemateket) 14.00 - 14.30: Welcome, registration and practical info. 14.30 – 16.00: ‘Project Z’ lecture (James Der Derian) Coffee break 16.30 – 18.00: Student paper session #1 December 9th,
9 – 18 9.00 – 10.30: ’Mental States’ lecture (Carsten Bagge
Laustsen) 10.45 – 12.15: Student paper session #2 12.15 – 13.30: Lunch 13:30 – 15.00: ‘The Other Copenhagen School’ lecture (James
Der Derian) 15.00 – 15.15: Coffee break 15.15 – 16.45: Student paper session #3 Deadline for submission of papers: December
1st,
2012. Papers should not exceed 10.000 words Applicants with papers be preferred!
Workshop participants will be invited to participate (as audience)
in the Visual Aspects of Security workshop taking place immediately
before the ph.d-workshop.James Der Derian - Lecture #1: 'Visualizing Security: From
MIME-NET to Project Z'
James Der Derian – Lecture #2: 'The Other Copenhagen
School: The Quantization of War and Diplomacy'
“The Question of Information Technology in International Relations”, Millennium Journal of International Studies (vol. 32, no. 3, 2003), pp. 441-456.
Carsten Bagge Laustsen – Lecture #1: Mental
States
Program
Papers
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