This edited volume brings together leading scholars to debate the promises of poststructural politics within the study of the International Political Economy (IPE). The volume offers a sustained theoretical dialogue on the meaning of discourse, identity, and representation for practices of political economy.

Poststructural research in International Political Economy (IPE) is a relatively young and growing field of studies that includes a variety of in part very diverse theories and approaches. These approaches to IPE emphasize the contingency of structures and meanings, and the struggles within the processes in which structures and objectivities are constructed. Poststructuralists argue that the subject is an inherent part of the structure. However, the fact that the structure itself is dislocated means that it is unable to completely determine the subject. From a poststructuralist perspective, it is not the absent structural identity, but the failed structural identity that renders the subject possible. Far from being relativist, the concept of contingency points to a structured uncertainty, that is, chance backed by force. Poststructural approaches aim at deconstructing ahistorical truth claims by exploring the processes of meaning-making and the various struggles for objectivity. They accordingly characterize the relation between state, economy, and society as a product of sedimentations arising from a series of social and political struggles. Relying on postpositivist methodology, poststructural approaches proceed on the assumption that meaning, truth, and facts are socially and politically constructed. For this reason, poststructural research has a special interest in studying the conflictual processes in which some meanings and truth claims prevail while others are rejected.

Offering an introduction to the major poststructuralist thinkers, this text shows how Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Zizek expose the depoliticization found in conventional international relations theory. poststructuralists are concerned with the big questions of international politics: it is precisely their work that analyzes the political and explains the processes of depoliticization and technologization.

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.

Critical Approaches to International Relations: Philosophical Foundations and Current Debates covers the most influential approaches within critical IR scholarship with a particular focus on historical heritage and philosophical roots they built upon and current directions of research they propose.

This book offers a novel, refreshing and politically engaged way to think about public policy. Instead of treating policy as simply the government’s best efforts to address problems, it offers a way to question critically how policies produce “problems” as particular sorts of problems, with important political implications. Governing, it is argued, takes place through these problematizations. According to the authors, interrogating policies and policy proposals as problematizations involves asking questions about the assumptions they rely upon, how they have been made, what their effects are, as well as how they could be unmade. To enable this form of critical analysis, this book introduces an analytic strategy, the “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) approach. It features examples of applications of the approach with topics as diverse as obesity, economic policy, migration, drug and alcohol policy, and gender equality to illustrate the growing popularity of this way of thinking and to provide clear and useful examples of poststructural policy analysis in practice.

Amidst the continued debate surrounding the foundations of IPE, coupled with recent methodological and theoretical divides this book argues that an attempt should be made to re-visit the notion of the 'critical'. The challenge posed by contributors to this volume is to assess the development of so-called critical IPE and interrogate whether the theoretical foundations it was built upon have reached their potential. The essays in this volume take up this challenge in a number of different ways but all share a common concern - to re-assess the purpose of critical approaches, reflect on why certain social theorists have been favoured as a point of departure, yet others have largely been ignored. In light of recent debates on the notion of a 'trans-Atlantic divide' within IPE the collection the contributors aim demonstrates how the distinction between the 'critical' and the 'orthodox' (or 'empirical') is only significant if the 'critical' is geared towards a larger, more substantial body of critical social enquiry and engages with what it means to conduct such enquiry.