Dangerous ontologies: the ethos of survival and ethical theorising in international relations

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the ‘agenda’ of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the ‘agenda of IR’ and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy ‘ethics and IR’ and towards ‘an ethical International Relations’. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the ‘dangerous ontology’ of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an ‘ethos of survival’ has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR

Human rights, self-formation and resistance in struggles against disposability: grounding Foucault’s ‘theorizing practice’ of counter-conduct in Bhopal

Theorising how human rights function as a liberal governing technology has undoubtedly been an important contribution of “governmentality studies”. Such theorisation, however, has largely eschewed concerted examination of the mobilisation and impact of human rights in historically specific struggles. This has tended to divorce the theoretical concerns of critical rights scholarship from the specificity of political struggles, reifying rights and obscuring the agency of “the governed” in struggles against socio-economic disposability. Calling for greater attention to human rights' potential destabilisations of conduct, the article examines Foucault's work into forms of resistance to “power that conducts”—“counter-conduct”—which is increasingly inspiring wide-ranging analyses of resistances to conducting power. Bringing together the “theorising practice” of counter-conduct and the enduring campaigns for justice by survivors and activists of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, the article examines how human rights enable forms of self-formation that interrupt the subjectification of those constructed as disposable subjects. Illuminating survivors' intervention in their ethical self-transfiguration mitigates against the occlusion of the agency of the governed. Moreover, the article argues, the thinking of counter-conduct recalibrates Foucault's own methodological orientations away from an overwhelming focus on mechanisms of governmental power, towards the study of the counter-conductive practices of co-governing subjects

Humanité, hostilité et ouverture de l’ordre politique dans la pensée internationale de Carl Schmitt

Nous examinons ici la critique de l’éthique universelle que Carl Schmitt aborde en tant qu’aspect politique de l’ordre planétaire. L’article porte sur les mutations du discours humanitariste, dans un contexte de gouvernementalité globale. Il ne s’agit pas d’adopter une perspective éthique différente, mais de reconnaître que l’éthique universelle alimente des discours et des pratiques politiques qui génèrent un monde politique (ou plus exactement biopolitique) unipolaire. Nous appuyant sur les « iconographies » de l’ennemi propres à Schmitt et sur la pensée de Foucault, nous esquissons un concept de devoir politique planétaire qui se pose à la fois envers l’Autre et à l’égard de l’ouverture du monde politique.This article examines Carl Schmitt’s critique of universal ethics made in his indictment of the discourse of humanity and addressed as a political concern of world order. It extends this critique further to include the ways in which the discourse of humanity transforms itself in the era of global governmentality. This kind of interrogation requires an almost ‘anti-ethical’ awareness that universal ethics fuels political discourses and practices that instantiate a political, indeed a biopolitical, universe. Schmitt’s discussion offers, it is argued, two iconographies of enmity, significant for mapping the contemporary world order. Together with Foucault, Schmitt helps articulate a notion of world-political obligation which is both for the other and for the openness of the political as a pluriverse

Interrogating Michel Foucault’s counter-conduct: theorising the subjects and practices of resistance in global politics

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise: visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty ad economic exploitation, such as protesting, agitating and occupying have received increased analytical attention in the past decade. This special issue provides much needed systematic attention to less visible practices of resistance or those not manifested in expressly political registers. It focuses on attempts to inventively modify, resist or escape the ways in which we are governed by interrogating critically the politics and ethics of resistance to ‘power that conducts’, expressed through Foucault’s notion of ‘counter- conduct.’ The contributions first, theoretically interrogate, develop, and refine the concept of ‘counter-conduct(s)’, offering a major statement its importance for both the study of resistance and also its place in Foucault’s work. Second, they provide inter/multi-disciplinary empirical investigations of counter-conduct in numerous thematic areas and spaces of global politics. Third, they explicitly reflect on variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power. Finally, the special issue concertedly considers issues of methodology and method emerging from the study of counter-conduct and how these also recalibrate the study of governing power itself

Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt's reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt's international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler's ‘spatial revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe's geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany's wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitt's elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitt's defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory

An Unusual Michael-Induced Skeletal Rearrangement of a Bicyclo[3.3.1]nonane Framework of Phloroglucinols to a Novel Bioactive Bicyclo[3.3.0]octane

A novel skeletal rearrangement of bicyclo[3.3.1]nonane-2,4,9-trione (16) to an unprecedented highly functionalized bicyclo[3.3.0]octane system (17), induced by an intramolecular Michael addition, is presented. This novel framework was found to be similarly active to hyperforin (1), against PC-3 cell lines. A mechanistic study was examined in detail, proposing a number of cascade transformations. Also, reactivity of the Δ7,10-double bond was examined under several conditions to explain the above results

Weight Management for Athletes: Important Things to be Considered

Weight management is difficult for most individuals, as indicated by the high numbers of obesity around the world. Obesity has increased dramatically over the past decades. Unfortunately, this epidemic is not limited to adults but also to children in both globally and Cyprus. Developing a weight management plan is essential for everyone. Regarding to an athlete, weight management is an increasingly integral part, as consuming the right kind of food can lead them in success or failure. The special nutritional needs of athletes are depending on the sport. The most important priority for them is to establish a well-chosen nutrition program based on the type of the sport; the training load and the competitions needs. Health professionals and sport nutritionists need to understand dynamic energy balance and be prepared with effective and evidence-based dietary approaches to help athletes and active individuals achieve their body-weight goals. Therefore, the following review aiming to examine the most recent published data for weight-management both elite and recreational athletes of all ages, and to set out the most appropriate weight-management guidelines and dietary strategies to help them apply this knowledge to the practicalities of their own sport and individual situation

Toward critical pedagogies of the international? Student resistance, other-regardedness and self-formation in the neoliberal university

Anxieties regarding colonial and neoliberal education have generated multiple calls for critical international pedagogies. Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose ethos and economic imperatives aim to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens. Such calls, this article argues, articulate a concern about other-regardedness, critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the cultivation of student values and relations toward politics, society, and others. How can we articulate a critical international pedagogy informed by, and enhancing, students’ and future citizens’ other-regardedness toward those “superfluous” and “disposable” others outside the classroom and the formal curriculum? To this end, we mobilize Michel Foucault’s thinking of “counter-conduct” to illuminate how students resist being conducted as self-interested and apolitical consumers. Such practices remain largely unexplored in examinations of recent student protests and occupations. Examining the 2005 student occupation of a French university against the local government’s abandonment of asylum-seekers, we discuss students’ own processes of social participation and self-formation, thus exploring the possibilities and tensions for advancing a critical and other-regarding pedagogy. Greater attention to students resisting the historically blind and market-driven rationalities and techniques of governing—inside and outside classrooms and curricula—marks an important point of departure for critical pedagogies of the international

Saving friends or saving strangers? Critical humanitarianism and the geopolitics of international law

What can critical geopolitics contribute to an understanding of the political dynamics of humanitarianism within International Relations? This article demands a reconsideration of the concept of humanitarianism by examining the spatial ordering of international society and the geopolitics of international law that condition our understanding of humanitarian agency and conduct within IR. The focus on critical geopolitics seeks to identify the normative structure of humanitarianism and how humanitarian claims – which are seemingly universal – are constituted through specific geopolitical discourses that structure agency and conduct within international life. Considering how humanitarianism is discursively structured as a geopolitical concept involves taking humanitarianism beyond its methodological privileging of impartiality, neutrality, and universality in making sense of humanitarianism. Critical humanitarianism does not accept the grounding of humanitarianism within an intuitive moral framework but instead locates humanitarian agency and conduct within a spatialised understanding of the international system. Such a spatialised ordering of humanitarianism takes the analytical focus away from ‘saving strangers’ (Wheeler) and ‘global conscience’ (Linklater) towards a consideration of the ways in which international law is the product of historical particulars that reflect a complex political sociology of the state (Schmitt)