IRTD - Chapter 12: Post-Structuralism §

(F) Day of the week: Monday Class: IS310 Created Time: May 3, 2021 2:44 PM Database: Class Notes Database Date: May 3, 2021 2:44 PM Days Till Date: Passed Is Reference for: Positivism, Post-Structuralism Last Edited Time: October 14, 2021 9:22 PM Tags: (NEED PROCESS), (NEED RESEARCH) Type: Reading Notes

Rather than setting out a paradigm through which everything is understood, Post-Structuralism is a critical attitude, approach, or ethos that calls attention to the importance of representation, the relationship of power and knowledge, and the politics of identity in an understanding of global affairs

• Studies ontology and epistemology of theories

🏦 Discourse: communications and debates

Assumption: Men are by nature political animal

→ all actions are political

• The words they speak/write
• Their behavior
• They know what they’re doing and have a political purpose

Example: Political actors use discourses like maps to push a political motive

• Mercader: puts Europe as the center of the world
• ????: puts Asia as the center of the world

Case study is important (Page 239)

Poststructuralism Relations with IR §

• Criticizes traditional theories (realism & liberalism) as shaping what could be said about international politics
  • dominant approaches to IR were unaware, uninterested, or hostile to how knowledge of the world was constructed

Criticize Realism §

poststructuralism began by questioning how the state came to be regarded as the most important actor in world politics, and how the state came to be understood as a unitary in Realism

• still focuses on states, but criticize Realist’s use of states’ superiority as the foundation of the theory
• poststructuralism is concerned with the state’s historical and conceptual production, and its political formation, economic constitution, and social exclusions

Inter-disciplinary Context of Post-structuralism §

• Positivism started from the Enlightenment Period where church’s power switched to state’s power making knowledge = power
• PS says Positivism itself only accepted scientific reasons
  • addressing human, social, and political issues became questions of order and efficiency

Post-positivist Criticism of Positivism §

In support of Post-structuralist thinking

• Post-positivists criticizes positivist’s understanding of the subject/object relations in the theories of knowledge
• Subject & Object construct one another and not of any pre-given entities

Lecture Notes §

• Poststructuralism → Deconstructionism (Post-Modernism)
• Postcolonialism (Liberal internationalism, constructivism, Humanism, Neo-Marxism/Neo-Gramscianism)
  • A new form of politics: Multilateralism (# Unilateralism), ethical/political possibilities for egalitarianism, social justice & solidarity (# Antagonism)
    • A broad commentary on present models of politics, economy & ethics: consistent positions on politics that not distinguish domestic, national & international spheres à Postcolonial antipathy toward imperial desire for hegemony (unilaterally set terms/rules of politics & culture, singly adjudicate international outcomes, management of knowledge & memory of international relations)
  • A new form of universalism based on deliberation & contestation, different from one resulting from universal injunction by self-assured subjects → Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism …
  • Confront anxieties of survival? → Solidarity/Fraternity
    • Embraces hybridity of culture/identity & transculturation as inevitable historical processes → rethink boundaries between self & others
  • Emancipation (Declarations of Faith): Non-violence, problematic legacies of class hegemony, gendered exclusion, colonial domination & capitalist exploitation)
  • Postcolonial order: inclusive, solicitous, based on tolerance toward self-criticisms & criticisms of the self by others, reverence for contingency & historical flows → empathetic/nuanced understanding of trajectories of human societies (values, ethics & common good)
  Knowledge is power