A Poststructuralist Discourse Theory of Global Politics: (Palgrave Studies in International Relations)

This book develops a discourse theory of crisis and change in global politics. Crisis is conceptualized as structural dislocation, resting on difference and incompleteness.  Change is seen as the continuous but ultimately futile effort to gain a full identity. The incompleteness and contingent character of the social represents the most important condition for democratic politics to become possible and for a theory of crisis and change to become conceivable. In this new understanding, crisis loses its everyday meaning of a periodically occurring event. Instead, crisis becomes an omnipresent feature of the social fabric. It represents the absence of ground, of social foundation, and it rests within the subject as well as within the social whole.

Table of Contents:
Introduction .- 1. Crisis .- 2. Change .- 3. Reality .- 4. Difference .- 5. Hegemony .- 6. Discourse Analysis .- 7. Dislocation .- 8. Hegemony: Towards a discourse theory of crisis and change.

About the Author :
Dirk Nabers is Professor of International Political Sociology at the University of Kiel, Germany. He has been Academic Director of the Hamburg International Graduate School for the Study of Regional Powers, and Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies. He specializes in poststructuralism and sociology in IR.

Review :
"For anyone interested in a deeper appreciation of crisis discourses, this thought-provoking book is a must-read. Nabers meticulously challenges established notions of crisis and change in International Relations and illustrates how the current limits of the field restrict IR scholars' grasp of the fundamental relationship between crisis and change. Without understanding their interrelationship, argues Nabers, IR scholars cannot help but fail to address pressing issues in today's world. Drawing on insights from Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, he develops a discourse of crisis and change that emphasizes contingency and process. As such, those invested in exploring the limits of IR to make room for alternative global politics will also find plenty of insights here." - Annick T.R. Wibben, Associate Professor of Politics, University of San Francisco and the author of Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (2011) "Many of us believe the social is in a permanentcrisis and is dissolving. Dirk Nabers' book urges us instead to understand differently the relation between social change, politics, and democracy by introducing the key notions of contingency, dislocation, antagonism, and heterogeneity. By confronting International Relations with political theorists like Habermas, Derrida, and Laclau, this book, with great success, permits us to reconnect the question of the social with the one of the international" Didier Bigo, Professor of War Studies, King's College London, UK "Nabers has perfected a rigorous quantitative method of analyzing political speeches and other official narratives....This is a theoretically sophisticated book, which has the potential to be a canonical work in IR theory" - David B. MacDonald, Professor of Political Science, University of Guelph, Canada