Despite All Critique: World Politics and Western Reason Revisited

 Professor R. B. J Walker (University of Victoria/ PUC-Rio de Janeiro)

With responses from Professor Louise Amoore and Dr Martin Coward; Chair – Dr Angharad Closs Stephens

Monday 11 March, 3-5pm, Newcastle University, Research Beehive 2.20

Theories of international relations are interesting less for their substantive claims about contemporary politics than for their status as an expression of universalizing claims about the modern world that have been generated from one particular part of the world. As such, they must be understood first of all as an expression of a particular philosophy of history.

Despite many complaints about the hubris expressed in narratives of development and progress, and various attempts to situate theories of international relations as expressions of hegemony, colonialism, or imperialism, such theories have long been notoriously resistant to critique. There are some obvious reasons for this. This talk will explore the less obvious but especially disturbing possibility that theories of international relations are especially susceptible to dogmatic formulation and resistant to prevailing forms of critical analysis because they ultimately express the limits within which an opposition between dogma and critique, in the Kantian sense, remains intelligible.

Rob Walker is Professor of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada, where he teaches in the Graduate Program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought, and Professor of International Relations at PUC-Rio de Janeiro in Brasil. His most recent book is After the Globe, Before the World (2010). He is the long-term Editor of the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, and was the founding Co-Editor with Didier Bigo of the journal International Political Sociology.

For more information contact martin.coward@newcastle.ac.uk