Abstract

In International Relations as in every other social science, we are busy dismantling our past frameworks of understanding. In IR we call it the critique of Realism, elsewhere the same dismantling goes on under the war on the 1950s and 1960s - on rational choice/behaviouralism and is seen as the 'return of the state', 'neo-institutionalism', the 'cultural'/'linguist'/'sociological' turn.
The object of our ire is 'liberalism' with its universalist, individualist, rationalist assumptions of human agency. Instead we want to socialise and historicise the human, revealing the social, ideological, institutional, discursive embeddedness of the human. 

Rather than structure and agency we realise that structures are social constructs - that materiality is ideational, that the world is human 'all the way down' and that there is no 'outside' to our social constructions. The liberal language of autonomy and rationality - the basis of the binaries of liberal framings of politics and law, inside/outside, public/private, state/citizen - dissolves under our sociological deconstructions. This lecture aims at opening a discussion of the discursive framings of our critique of rationalist assumptions in social/political/economic theorising - the critique of 'liberalism' - and consider the consequences for current discourses of security, development and governance in the international sphere. 

There are three areas in which this sociological and epistemological critique will be problematised: firstly, in relationship to ideational and material factors in understanding development; secondly, in suggesting that the disappearance or dissolving of structure into agency actually removes autonomy or freedom, responsibilising the choice-making human subject as the problem rather than the solution; thirdly, just as the external world becomes displaced by the internal world and structure becomes dissolved into agency, government becomes dissolved into society, the problems of development or security become matters of choice-shaping, capabilty-building and empowerment, reducing politics to administrative and technical measures designed to enable the subject to govern itself through reason - to be reflexive, autotelic, adaptive and resilient. In conclusion, we will discuss the internal problematic of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theorising of the subject and its self-production or self-realization and think about how and whether the human subject can again be constituted as the subject of policy rather than its object.

Bio

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster. He is a regular media commentator, editor of the 'Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding' and the editor of the Routledge book series Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding. Professor Chandler has published widely on topics related to Peace Studies.
For more information: http://www.davidchandler.org/

Organiztion: Phd "Política Internacional e Resolução de Conflitos"