International Relations and States of Exception: Margins, Peripheries, and Excluded Bodies (Hardback)

"By focusing on how contemporary political communities and discourses of security are constituted by the movements of some of the world's most vulnerable people, this collection of essays not only adds significantly to theoretical and empirical debates about our post-9/11 world. It serves as a critical supplement to state-centric, territorial understandings of international politics, one that demands that we re-imagine what IR theory tells us about the relationships between sovereignty, subjectivity, and ethics." - Cynthia Weber, Lancaster University, UK"International Relations and States of Exception is a series of brilliant investigations into the simultaneous production of the legal and the illegal, citizen and terrorist, and states and the stateless. Deftly weaving the insights of Agamben, Said, Foucault, Schmitt, Mbembe and Ranciere through the experiences of refugees, migrants, the undocumented, guest workers, terrorists and the indigenous, this indispensable work illuminates the violent making and remaking of our world. From the displaced in northern Sri Lanka to the terrified Indonesian maid servant in a high-rise in Kuala Lumpur to the dispensable colored bodies in Bhopal, New Orleans, Guantanamo and Amazonia, the various chapters raise disturbing questions, and offer powerful new ways to resist the reduction of the international to the security of states and the interests of the rich." - Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, USA"This timely collection of essays ... make an important contribution to IR and international theory. In highlighting the oft-neglected or forgotten aspects of the complex world we inhabit today, the book reminds scholars and citizens alike that there is much more to IR than simply the study of powerful states and their state-to-state relationships." - Yee-Kuang Heng, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol 23, 4, December 2010

By focusing on how contemporary political communities and discourses of security are constituted by the movements of some of the world's most vulnerable people, this collection of essays not only adds significantly to theoretical and empirical debates about our post-9/11 world. It serves as a critical supplement to state-centric, territorial understandings of international politics, one that demands that we re-imagine what IR theory tells us about the relationships between sovereignty, subjectivity, and ethics. Cynthia Weber, Lancaster University, UKInternational Relations and States of Exception is a series of brilliant investigations into the simultaneous production of the legal and the illegal, citizen and terrorist, and states and the stateless. Deftly weaving the insights of Agamben, Said, Foucault, Schmitt, Mbembe and Ranciere through the experiences of refugees, migrants, the undocumented, guest workers, terrorists and the indigenous, this indispensable work illuminates the violent making and remaking of our world. From the displaced in northern Sri Lanka to the terrified Indonesian maid servant in a high-rise in Kuala Lumpur to the dispensable colored bodies in Bhopal, New Orleans, Guantanamo and Amazonia, the various chapters raise disturbing questions, and offer powerful new ways to resist the reduction of the international to the security of states and the interests of the rich. Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, USAThis timely collection of essays ... make an important contribution to IR and international theory. In highlighting the oft-neglected or forgotten aspects of the complex world we inhabit today, the book reminds scholars and citizens alike that there is much more to IR than simply the study of powerful states and their state-to-state relationships. Yee-Kuang Heng, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol 23, 4, December 2010