Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory

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Cambridge University Press, 1993 - Political Science - 233 pages
In this book Rob Walker offers an original analysis of the relationship between twentieth-century theories of international relations, and the political theory of civil society since the early modern period. He views theories of international relations both as an ideological expression of the modern state, and as a clear indication of the difficulties of thinking about a world politics characterized by profound spatiotemporal accelerations. International relations theories should be seen, the author argues, more as aspects of contemporary world politics than as explanations of contemporary world politics. These theories are examined in the light of recent debates about modernity and post-modernity, sovereignty and political identity, and the limits of modern social and political theory. This book is a major contribution to the field of critical international relations, and will be of interest to social and political theorists and political scientists, as well as students and scholars of international relations.

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Contents

International relations as political theory
1
Historicity spatiality and the theory of international relations
6
Horizons of modern political theory
15
Meditations on the disciplinary practices of a discipline
21
The Prince and the pauper
26
three variations
31
Machiavelli and political community
34
Machiavelli and temporality
38
Realisms histories structures
113
Structuralism and neorealism
115
The ambivalences of historicism
121
The territorial state and the theme of Gulliver
125
Spaces and hierarchies
130
Oscillations and continuities
135
On the spatiotemporal conditions of democratic practice
141
Democracy and political community
144

Machiavelli and the politics of displacement
41
Thinking with and against Machiavelli
43
From origins to disjunctions
47
Ethics modernity community
50
Temporality and the dialectics of enlightenment
52
Spatiality sovereignty and the ethics of exclusion
60
The society of states and the ethics of cooperation
67
Sovereignty modernity and political community
74
History structure reification
81
Historical departures
88
Structural proliferations
92
From international relations to world politics
99
Realism and change
104
Affirming and challenging state sovereignty
153
Sovereign identities and the politics of forgetting
159
Sovereignty and historicity
162
Sovereignty from the inside
169
Sovereignty from the outside
171
Sovereignty deferred
174
Sovereignty identity difference
176
Rearticulations of political spacetime
179
Notes
184
Bibliography
213
Index
231
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