Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations ─ (De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives

This work brings together critical theorists, artists, and poets using time and temporality as the conceptual framework for investigating a diverse array of experiences and structures of oppression and exploitation in International Relations, focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization, disrupting dominant modes of understanding our present times.

This book argues the present as a vulnerable space through which radically different temporal experiences appear. Defatalizing the present, or thinking of the present as self-interrupting, irrevocably ruptured, and discontinuous, requires multiple forms of struggle that articulate multiple figures for projects without a telos. It calls for an interruption of final ends and final meanings. The scholars look at different parts of the world to consider the ways people participate in shaping their societies while disrupting the violent strategies of expediency, including laws and democratic institutions that abstract their everyday struggles and, consequently, betray them. Starting with an examination of these shattering experiences of betrayal provides a way to trace how imaginations become captive and how the "everyday politics of expediency" re-animate a faith that takes people towards a revolution that is neither about redemption or erasure but about a new writing.

These authors and artists examine the logics of violence: wars, imprisonments, slaughtering, and increasing levels of unemployment and poverty. They engage with slavery, social death, revolutions, and the temporal transformations wrought by neoliberalism, to analyze how people and things are transformed. They look at global uprisings and shattering experiences that have led people to organize against and intervene in repressive mechanisms. If the project of radical transformation demands this disruption and unruliness, and if we are to avoid repeating the expedient institutionalization and appropriations of relations, then defatalizing the present demands an aesthetic politics, including creative theorizations that sustain alternative fragments of imaginations other than the dominant ones.

This groundbreaking new work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory and postcolonial studies.

Anna M. Agathangelou, Ph.D. is Associate Professor in Political Science and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, and co-director of Global Change Institute, Nicosia. Her academic interests include postcolonial and Marxist theory; transnational feminisms; critical theories of empire, colonization and slavery, race, sex and bodies; militarization of global relations; Marxist epistemologies and poetics of transformation; global political economy of the Middle East and European peripheries (i.e., Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey). Her work focuses on the production of global power and the role of radical practices in movements of transformation. She is author of Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and co-author (with L.H.M. Ling) of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Routledge, 2009).

Kyle D. Killian is Research Faculty at the Centre for Refugee Studies, York University. A clinical supervisor and licensed couple and family therapist with 25 years of experience. Dr. Killian has published articles and book chapters on multiracial, immigrant, refugee families, trauma and resilience, and factors associated with burnout in health care professionals. His co-edited volume Intercultural Couples: Exploring Diversity in Intimate Relationships (2008) was published by Routledge, and he is author of Crossing Racial Borders: Interracial Couples, Intimacy, and Therapy forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Dr. Killian enjoys teaching qualitative and quantitative research methods, developing measures of emotional intelligence, post-traumatic stress, and critical thinking, and writing film reviews.