Failure and Denial in World Politics
| Author | |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829816646862 |
| Published date | 01 June 2016 |
| Date | 01 June 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial Introduction |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2016, Vol. 44(3) 303 –304
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0305829816646862
mil.sagepub.com
Failure and Denial in World
Politics
2015 was a year marked by international turbulence. The visible effects of climate change,
and murmurs of an Anthropocene epoch, loomed over the UN’s COP21 conference on
climate change; terrorist attacks by ISIS shook Paris, testing the strength of European
unity and its multiculturalism; the collapse of Libya and Syria intensified a growing refu-
gee crisis and increased instability in the Middle East; global financial instability widened
socioeconomic disparities; and corporations and states strengthened their digital surveil-
lance powers. Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), these events emerged
in the context of longstanding discourses concerning world order and global governance
deficiencies, nuclear proliferation, the potentiality for global pandemics, inevitable envi-
ronmental catastrophe, global poverty, the erosion of international society, and the break-
down of neoliberal capitalist ‘modernity’ itself. The 2015 Millennium conference, held
17–18 October, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), sought
to explore these empirical and theoretical problematiques in a new way. Not by examining
each issue in turn, asking how ‘successful’ answers or solutions to these problems might
be reached or theorised. Instead, the conference problematised the background conditions
and epistemologies that bring these issues into being as thinkable concepts for IR and the
world. The conference called for IR to theorise – directly, explicitly, and for the first time
– what the concepts of failure and denial are, what it is that they do, and what they allow
us to think, in relation to world politics.
In the context of the practice turn and rise of conceptual analysis in IR, one theme of
scholarship this special issue raises is the study of the limits of political and moral pur-
poses. The successful use of a concept, and the successful performance of a practice, is
relative to its purpose or point. The features and contents of concepts and practices are
also contingent upon this purpose, point, or end goal. Beyond this, the failure of macro-
constellations of purposes and goals – be they spiritual, imperial, and civilisational,
Enlightenment philosophical, or modern rational – is coterminous with the ensuing denial
of their continued political desirability and appeal. These failures and denials play no
small role in the transformation of our concepts and practices, theories, and world order
imaginaries.
Another theme that cuts across the articles in this special issue is that of epistemologi-
cal failure and denial – the failure ever present between reason and experience, and the
ready and necessary denial thereof. Temporarily bridging this gap are the positives – the
givens or the a prioris – of modern culture, or the things which are taken for granted and
646862MIL0010.1177/0305829816646862Millennium: Journal of International Studies
research-article2016
Editorial Introduction
To continue reading
Request your trial