Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities(2 Borderlines)

Reveals how the traditional theoretical frameworks of international relations, with their emphasis on bi-polar politics and great-power relations, are themselves implicated in the power structure they claim to describe with disinterest. The authors suggest that these old models say little about today's world, not purely because things have changed, but because new realities from Bosnia and NAFTA have exposed their inadequacies. These essays are concerned with the growing global instabilities that are putting pressure on the bordered world of states and with the increasing "postnational mobilizations" that result. The authors then explore modes of political expression and action that challenge this framework, and that recognize the inherently political nature of any analysis of global politics.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Refiguring "international relations": introduction, Michael J. Shapiro; political prosaics, transversal politics and the anarchical world, David Campbell; understanding international relations after the Cold War - probing beyond the realist reality, Jim George. Part 2 Realisms: introduction, Michael J. Shapiro; rewriting the Caribbean - identity crisis as literature, Folke Lindahl; the politics of totality in magic realism, Bruno Bosteel et al. Part 3 Boundary anxieties: introduction, Michael J. Shapiro; Tocqueville, territory and violence, William E. Connolly; unmapping and remapping the world - foreign policy as aesthetic practice, Kennan Ferguson; cartographic anxiety - mapping the body politic in India, Sankaran Krishna. Part 4 Modernity's identity spaces: introduction, Michael J. Shapiro; narratives of modernity - perspective of an oriental despot, Abbas Milani; refugees - the modern political condition, Nicholas Xenos; the implosion of modernity, Jonathan Friedman. Part 5 Transversal flows: introduction, Michael J. Shapiro; border crossings/shifting identities - minorities, gender and the state in international perspective, Jan Jindy Pettman; transnational/transborder bodies - resistance, accommodation and exile in refugee and migration movements on the US-Mexican border, Nevzat Soguk; technologies of national desire, Richard Maxwell. Part 6 Gay diasporas: introduction, Michael J. Shapiro; queer peregrinations, Cindy Patton; the displacement of Cuban homosexuality in the fiction and autobiography of Reinaldo Arenas, Benigno Sanchez-Eppler. Part 7 War and identity: introduction, Michael J. Shapiro; remembering Pearl Harbour - the semiotics of the "Arizona" Museum, Phyllis Turnbull; from a kibbutz journal - reflections on gender, race and militarism in Israel, Kathy Ferguson; warring bodies and bodies politic - tribal warriors versus state soldiers, Michael J. Shapiro.