The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations

Jessica Auchter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317962465
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology to consider the politics of life and death, Auchter traces the story of how life and death and a clear division between the two is summoned in the project of statecraft. She argues that by letting ourselves be haunted, or looking for ghosts, it is possible to trace how statecraft relies on the construction of such a dichotomy.

Three empirical cases offer fertile ground for complicating the picture often painted of memorialization: Rwandan genocide memorials, the underexplored case of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border, and the body/ruins nexus in 9/11 memorialization.

Focusing on the role of dead bodies and the construction of particular spaces as the appropriate sites for memory to be situated, it offers an alternative take on the new materialisms movement in international relations by asking after the questions that arise from an ethnographic approach to the subject: viewing things from the perspective of dead bodies, who occupy the shadowy world of post-conflict international politics. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, security studies, statecraft and memory studies.

Interventions

Edited by:

Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick

‘As Michel Foucault has famously stated, “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” In this spirit the Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post-disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.’

Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa, United States

The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics.

Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.

Critical Theorists and International Relations

Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams

Ethics as Foreign Policy

Britain, the EU and the other

Dan Bulley

Universality, Ethics and International Relations

A grammatical reading

Véronique Pin-Fat

The Time of the City

Politics, philosophy, and genre

Michael J. Shapiro

Governing Sustainable Development

Partnership, protest and power at the world summit

Carl Death

Insuring Security

Biopolitics, security and risk

Luis Lobo-Guerrero

Foucault and International Relations

New critical engagements

Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Doug Stokes

International Relations and Non-Western Thought

Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity

Edited by Robbie Shilliam

Autobiographical International Relations

I, IR

Edited by Naeem Inayatullah

War and Rape

Law, memory and justice

Nicola Henry

Madness in International Relations

Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health

Alison Howell

Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt

Geographies of the nomos

Edited by Stephen Legg

Politics of Urbanism

Seeing like a city

Warren Magnusson

Beyond Biopolitics

Theory, violence and horror in world politics

François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder

The Politics of Speed

Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world

Simon Glezos

Politics and the Art of Commemoration

Memorials to struggle in Latin America and Spain

Katherine Hite

Indian Foreign Policy

The politics of postcolonial identity

Priya Chacko

Politics of the Event

Time, movement, becoming

Tom Lundborg

Theorising Post-Conflict Reconciliation

Agonism, restitution and repair

Edited by Alexander Keller Hirsch

Europe’s Encounter with Islam

The secular and the postsecular

Luca Mavelli

Re-Thinking International Relations Theory via Deconstruction

Badredine Arfi

The New Violent Cartography

Geo-analysis after the aesthetic turn

Edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro

Insuring War

Sovereignty, security and risk

Luis Lobo-Guerrero

International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis

Necati Polat

The Postcolonial Subject

Claiming politics/governing others in late modernity

Vivienne Jabri

Foucault and the Politics of Hearing

Lauri Siisiäinen

Volunteer Tourism in the Global South

Giving back in neoliberal times

Wanda Vrasti

Cosmopolitan Government in Europe

Citizens and entrepreneurs in postnational politics

Owen Parker

Studies in the Trans-Disciplinary Method

After the aesthetic turn

Michael J. Shapiro

Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics

The scars of violence

Brent J. Steele

Celebrity Humanitarianism

The ideo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter 1
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Ghostly politics: an introduction
• 2 ‘We’re All of Us Haunted and Haunting’
• 3 Bones in a brown bag: haunting and the place of the body in Rwandan genocide memorialisation
• 4 Border monuments: memory, counter-memory, and (b)ordering practices along the US–exico border
• 5 Vanishing monuments: absence and 9/11 memorialisation
• 6 After ghostly politics: some conclusions
• Index