Poststructuralism in International Relations: Discourse and the Military

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter introduces the poststructuralist perspective on international relations (IR). It outlines the epistemological and ontological fundament of poststructuralist thinking and introduces key concepts, notably discourse.This chapter aims to show that the way we talk about the world, about ourselves and others matters. It employs a particular focus on issues and examples that relate to the military – a domain that for long has been dealt with from more traditional IR perspectives. It seeks to encourage to look at those issues from a different, more critical, angle. It touches upon questions like: Can we ever be fully secure or do we need threats? How did the Global War on Terror become thinkable? What is the relationship between humanitarian interventions and identity?By presenting key contributions to the poststructuralist body of literature in IR, this chapter traces a poststructuralist perspective on issues of international relations, notably the state and foreign policy, security and threats. It encourages to scrutinize them critically and gives an overview of how to employ this theoretical perspective for empirical discourse analyses in practice.