Table of Contents

Introduction Part I: Critique and the Discipline 1. Imperialism and the limits of critique 2. How to criticize without ever becoming a critic 3. The empty neighbourhood: Race and disciplinary silence Part II: Relations Beyond Humanity 3. Can International Relations confront the cosmos? 4. Relating to relational worlds: Critical theory, relational thought and relational cosmology 5. Confronting horror: International Relations beyond humanity Part III: Art and Narrative 6. For Alex: The art of International Relations 7. Ways of Seeing/Ways of Being in Critical IR 8. Narrative and inquiry in international politics Part IV: War, Religion, Security 9. Critical war studies 10. Being ‘Critical’ of/about/on ‘Religion’ in International Relations 11. Seeing radicalisation? The pedagogy of the Prevent strategy Part V: Otherness and Diplomacy 12. The politics of otherness: Illustrating the identity/alterity nexus and othering in IR 13. Abusive Fidelities: Diplomacy, Translation, and the Genres of Man 14. Why Octavio Paz matters: Lessons for critical International Relations Part VI: Spaces and Times 15. Racing to the bottom, squeezing through the cracks: Imagining unbordered space 16. Ethics, critique and post-sovereign spaces in International Politics 17. Critique and the international: Horizons, traces, finitude Part VII: Resistance 18. The permutations of ‘taking’ political action 19. The carnivalesque and resistance Part VIII: Intimacy and Embodiment 20. Bodies and embodiment in IR 21. The intimate and the international: love, sexuality, and queer feminist IR 22. Henri Lefebvre and the production of theory: A ghost story

About the Author

Jenny Edkins is Professor of Politics at The University of Manchester. She taught previously at Aberystwyth University and the Open University. Her monographs include Face Politics (2015), Missing: Persons and Politics (2011), Trauma and the Memory of Politics (2003) and Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (2000). Her most recent book, Change and the Politics of Certainty, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. In addition to her academic writing, she explores fiction, autobiography and other literary forms. She is engaged in several collaborative ventures, including the Gregynog Ideas Lab and the highly-regarded Routledge book series Interventions.

Reviews

"Jenny Edkins, whose research is in the vanguard of Critical International Relations scholarship, has assembled a remarkable and inspirational set of interventions; if you want a snapshot of both enduring and latest debates about what it might mean to be "critical" in the study of international politics then you need look no further than this tour de force." Nick Vaughan-Williams, Professor of International Security, University of Warwick, UK "This handbook is a rare and timely intervention to convey that IR cannot afford to be ‘business as usual’. At the heart of the critical project in IR is the desire to recover and reclaim the ‘human’ in the (un)making of political life. The chapters in this handbook achieve the same in the nuanced unfolding of their distinctive narratives. Edkins deserves special appreciation for the refreshingly different and perceptive set of authors she has managed to bring together for this volume. A must read for IR students and anyone interested in alternative visions of world politics. " Swati Parashar, Gothenburg University, Sweden"Placing criticality at center stage, this rousing volume oxygenates International Relations scholarship with its collection of excellent chapters that probe both the limits and the potential of Critical IR. It will be an indispensable resource for all students and scholars of IR who want to think creatively about the world(s) that we study, produce and inhabit." Maria Stern, Gothenburg University, Sweden