A project of demystification would reorient critical IR scholars away from the fetishization of oppressed groups as vectors for abstract theorizing.
Adam Lerner outlines the role of collective trauma in international politics and how to challenge some of the problematic assumptions of mainstream IR.
What lies behind the Frankfurt School’s decline in IR theory and what does it say about broader changes in the discipline today?
We will never know precisely what impact ‘critical’ forms of scholarly practice have had on the world as we have no ‘planet B’ to act as a control group.
Charlotte Heath-Kelly discusses crime prevention, and the role of counter-radicalisation in combatting terrorism.
Latin American critical thinking addresses problems intrinsic to Latin American countries and provides policy makers with the analytical arguments for implementing a different development strategy.
It is time to let ‘Critical IR’ go as a term. It gives succour to some of the least admirable of academic impulses and undermines the very conditions for critique.
When discussing anxiety as the constitutive feature of society, we should be talking about something social and historical, rather than transhistorical and ontological, for a politically relevant approach.
Critical IR began as a strongly emancipatory and normative project, however, it seems to have lost its initial focus and risks forgoing its emancipatory potential.
The pressures of neoliberalism generate a discourse that challenges critical theory’s core principles and thus undermines its ability keep alive the theoretical possibility of a just and humane society.
