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.