This article investigates the political significance of the orientation of Western security relations around critical infrastructure (CI) and resilience planning. While the analysis is located in the International Political Sociology literature, it departs from recent biopolitical accounts of CIs and resilience. These accounts tend to present such apparatuses as closed, totalizing, and inevitably “successful” modes of governance. Rather, we argue that resilient CIs are open, vulnerable, and often absurd systems that continually falter, backfire, and often undermine themselves according to their own logic. By developing what we call a “molecular security” approach, we draw attention to the way in which life constantly evades capture. In this sense, we suggest, there is always an excess of “life” in biopolitics.

This article investigates the recent ‘New Materialisms’ turn in social and political thought and asks what the potential theoretical and methodological significance might be for the study of International Relations (IR). To do so we return to debates about the theoretical status of discourse in IR as it is in this context that the question of materiality – particularly as it relates to language – has featured prominently in recent years. While the concept of discourse is increasingly narrow in IR, the ‘New Materialisms’ literature emphasises the political force of materiality beyond language and representation. However, a move to reprioritise the politics of materiality over that of language and representation is equally problematic since it perpetuates rather than challenges the notion of a prior distinction between language and materiality. In response, we draw on earlier poststructural thought in order to displace this dichotomy and articulate an extended understanding of what analysing ‘discourse’ might mean in the study of IR.

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This article develops a poststructuralist critique of the historical sociology of International Relations project. While the historical sociology of International Relations project claims to offer a more nuanced understanding of the state and the international, this article argues that it lacks critical reflection on the notion of a common ground on which 'history' and 'sociology' can successfully be combined. In order to problematize this 'ground', the article turns to Jacques Derrida's critique of attempts to solve the history-structure dichotomy by finding a perfect combination of historicist and structuralist modes of explanation. Exploring the implications of Derrida's critique, the article considers how the combination of 'history' and 'sociology' can be linked to a sovereign politics of time, which reaffirms rather than challenges the limits of the 'modern' political present and its relationship to the past, as well as the future. In response, it is suggested that a more radical critique is needed, one that seeks to disrupt the 'modern' political present and the contingent ground on which it rests.

The virtual has during the last couple of decades emerged as a forceful conceptual tool in security studies. While used primarily in order to question assumptions about an objective truth concerning the meaning and value of security and different forms of insecurity, the implications of drawing on this concept vary considerably depending on how the virtual is conceptualized, and specifically how the potentiality of the virtual is linked to the process of actualization. Turning to the philosophies of Baudrillard, Agamben and Deleuze, as well as key thinkers in contemporary security studies, this article delineates three different approaches to analysing the virtualization of security.Focusing in particular on how these approaches point to contending views of 'capture' and 'resistance', it is argued that the choice of approach has serious implications for grasping what is at stake politically in the process of virtualization. These implications relate, more precisely, to how the virtual opens up and/or closes down the spaces of resistance that the modern subject of security traditionally has relied upon. In this way, the virtualization of security is not only important for thinking about capture and resistance, but challenges the very ground on which the modern subject of security rests.

This article addresses the question of what it means to think of a distinctly international ethics by developing a radical reinterpretation of Waltzian neorealism from a Derridean deconstructive perspective. The core argument of the article is that Derridean deconstruction effectively explains why there is an ethics of neorealism in the first place, and why this ethics cannot be easily overcome. Underpinning this argument is a notion in Derrida’s philosophy of survival as an unconditional affirmation of life, which finds an equivalent in Waltz’s theory of international life in the anarchic system. On this basis, I claim that Waltz’s theory is ethical, not despite its focus on the structural conditions of survival, but precisely because of it. Moreover, the article shows how this notion of ethics renders universal ethical ideals, beyond relations of violence, not only impossible, but undesirable. They are undesirable because to actually fulfil them would be to undermine the conditions that make international life possible in the first place. In this way, various attempts to theorize the meaning and implications of international ethics that hold on to the notion of ethical ideals beyond relations of violence become untenable. Instead of aspiring towards such ideals, the article concludes, international ethics should be thought of as an unconditional affirmation of the incalculable future that structures international life and inevitably exposes it to the worst forms of destruction, but also enables the making of responsible decisions.

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