This article aims to show the theoretical added value of focussing on discourse to study identity in international relations (IR). I argue that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. My starting point is a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically borrowed from psychology. Jacques Lacan’s ‘speaking subject’ offers instead a non-essentialist basis for theorizing about identity that has been largely overlooked. To tailor these insights to concerns specific to the discipline I then flesh out the distinction between subject-positions and subjectivities. This crucial distinction is what enables the discourse approach to travel the different levels of analyses, from the individual to the state, in a way that steers clear of the field’s fallacy of composition, which has been perpetuated by the assumption that what applies to individuals applies to states as well. Discourse thus offers a way of studying state identities without presuming that the state has a self. I illustrate this empirically with regards to the international politics of whaling.

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International Studies Perspectives (2012) 13, 135-145.

This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental state, orchestrated by the security function, which ultimately strengthens the state. It is associated with the rise of a new governmentality discourse, which operates on a binary logic of productive/destructive, and where, in fact, the very distinctions between private and public, guilty, and innocent—classic categories of sovereignty—find decreasing currency. However, biometric borders reveal a complicated game of renegotiations between sovereignty and governmentality, whereby sovereignty is colonized by governmentality on the one hand, but still functions as a counterweight to it on the other. Furthermore, they bring out a particular function of the “destructive body” for the governmental state: it is both the key figure ruling the whole design of security management, and the blind spot, the inconceivable, for a form of power geared toward producing productive bodies.

In this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, to misrecognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Our point of departure is not only that the desire for recognition is key social dynamic, but that the failure to obtain this recognition is built into this very desire. It is a crucial factor for understanding how international actors behave, including, but not only, states.Thus understood, the desire for recognition is not simply a desire for social goods, for status or for statehood, but for more agency – more capacity to act. We explore the logic of misrecognition and show how the international system is a symbolic structure that is ordained by an unrealisable ideal of what we call ‘sovereign agency’.

The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations~IR! revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist "self+" In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics+ I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agency that were first incarnated in the discipline's self-understandings by Hobbes's natural individual+ Despite its turn to social theory, this persistent individualism has hampered constructivism's ability to appraise the ways in which the actors and structures of international politics mutually constitute one another "all the way down+" My purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonindividualist, adequately relational, social theory of international politics+ To this end I propose a third model of agency, Lacan's split speaking subject+ Through a Lacanian reading of the Leviathan, I show how the speaking subject has in fact laid buried away in the discipline's Hobbesian legacy all along+The most notable inventions of all was that of speech + + + without which, there had been amongst men @sic# neither common wealth, no society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears or wolves+ -Thomas Hobbes 1 Like the words uttered by God in Genesis, speech is a symbolic invocation which creates, ex nihilo, a new order of being in the relations between men @sic#+ -Jacques Lacan 2 For helpful and encouraging comments on earlier versions of this article, I am grateful to Badredine

Endangered species protection represents one of the most enduring paradigms of global environmental governance. From a localized concept rooted in North American conceptions of nature, it evolved over the first half of the 20th century into a norm shaping inter-state behavior. This article analyzes the making of endangered species protection as the first global environmental norm, within a broadly constructivist framework. The central concern is how the "making of" the norm impacted its becoming; and how it continues to determine the current orientation of global environmental policy-making. Three enduring legacies are explored. First, the norm was essentially "made in the North" and for the North. A genealogy of the norm thus brings into sharp relief the North-South tensions that have developed as the norm was extended onto a global level. Second, the article highlights the divide between conservationists and preservationists, which continues to plague much policy-making today, as it leads to conflicting visions of global environmental well-being. In a genealogical perspective, this split appears constitutive of the norm itself, and no closer to being resolved. Third, the article examines the targeted single-species approach that was first ushered in by the norm, and has become entrenched as a template for global environmental policy-making at large. There the article asks whether the norm has in fact precluded the passage to more comprehensive, ecosystemic approaches in the making of global environmental policies. Throughout the discussion the whaling issue takes center stage, because of its role in the emergence of the norm, and because of the way it continues to capture recent developments in global environmental politics. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social structures (Wendt, 1999). I then revisit the origins of poststructuralism via the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to bring its founding moves to bear directly on International Relations constructivism. Engaging with constructivism’s founding fathers, Nicholas Onuf, Alexander Wendt and Friedrich Kratochwil, I show that the search for unconstructed universals, grounded in an innate ‘human nature’, persistently haunts International Relations constructivism, even when it foregrounds language as the medium of social construction, and notably when it engages the question of gender. Just as language provided the original site for orchestrating the ‘moving beyond’ (the ‘post’ of poststructuralism) fixed, naturalized structures, I argue that a return to language holds the promise of renewal, and of constructivism’s being able to fulfil its founding promise to theorize constitutivity and the constructed-ness of International Relations’ world.