Jack Amoureux

In this paper I turn to Foucault’s essays and lectures on ‘technologies of the self’ and ‘self writing’ along with how Foucault situated his own ‘self’ in his writing to explore a particular tension in autoethnography and autobiography in International Relations—that between transparency and opacity. In doing so, I review some possible benefits of the narrative form as a means of self-reflexivity and explore the relationship between writer and reader. If complexity is one such benefit, how does the narrative form enact or portray complexity? Is complexity at odds with the impulse and the expectation that self-writing somehow reveals the self?

Considering a recent ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations (IR) scholarship, this article seeks to make a significant contribution by proposing that space and time be considered as concepts that ‘thicken’ one another in several ways. In the discourse of security and governance, for example, frames of time and space work together to facilitate and legitimize certain policies, actions, and reactions, and they also imply distinct perspectives on ethics in world politics. Drawing on the examples of United States (US) drone use, reactions to the event that has become known as ‘Benghazi’, and fears of the global spread of disease, this study investigates how temporal and spatial framings conceptualize effective and ethical security and governance. Arguing that space-time frames take shape from the resonance of political, theoretical and cultural texts, four frames are elaborated including ‘space-time liberations’, ‘space-time oppressions’, ‘space-time strategics’, and ‘space-time reflexivities’. The article concludes by suggesting that contradictions and tensions between the frames along with postcolonial and decolonial perspectives can be leveraged to interrogate and displace dominant notions of pace and space in the practice and study of security and governance.

A central problem for practices of reflexivity consists in meaningfully and thoroughly challenging individual and collective perspectives. In the field of International Relations (IR), reflexivity has thus often been conceived as a kind of diversification or pluralizing, if not also decentering, of dominant theories and ways of knowing. Yet, if some scholars who engage in sociologies of knowledge are correct that beliefs and practices can only be challenged from outside the (Western) field of IR, the prospect of seeking to understand and theorize world politics self-reflexively is grim indeed, let alone the promise of theorizing practices of ethics for global politics. While not disagreeing with the potential of scholars from the ‘periphery’ to transform IR, this article argues that the concept of marginality most satisfactorily captures the potential and the potency of the resources available for a reflexive IR, a possibility that becomes apparent with the rejection of a simple social, political or institutional division between insider and outsider. This article advances this project with the exemplar of attitudes and metaphors from queer thought and practice that, in alliance with postcolonial approaches emphasizing multiple worlds and subaltern agencies, can critique, perform and produce alternative ethico-political practices of world politics. While unfamiliar or uncomfortable to many IR theorists, deviance, marginality and melancholy as a reflexive ethos can facilitate surprising, intriguing and even hopeful possibilities for thinking and doing world politics. A queer/IR encounter generates novel readings of the subjects, sentiments, temporalities, spaces and ethics of politics.

Considering a recent ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations (IR) scholarship, this article seeks to make a significant contribution by proposing that space and time be considered as concepts that ‘thicken’ one another in several ways. In the discourse of security and governance, for example, frames of time and space work together to facilitate and legitimize certain policies, actions, and reactions, and they also imply distinct perspectives on ethics in world politics. Drawing on the examples of United States (US) drone use, reactions to the event that has become known as ‘Benghazi’, and fears of the global spread of disease, this study investigates how temporal and spatial framings conceptualize effective and ethical security and governance. Arguing that space-time frames take shape from the resonance of political, theoretical and cultural texts, four frames are elaborated including ‘space-time liberations’, ‘space-time oppressions’, ‘space-time strategics’, and ‘space-time reflexivities’. The article concludes by suggesting that contradictions and tensions between the frames along with postcolonial and decolonial perspectives can be leveraged to interrogate and displace dominant notions of pace and space in the practice and study of security and governance.