American Katechon:When Political Theology Became International Relations Theory

Rethinking the Logic of Security: Liberal Realism and the Recovery of American Political Thought

“…50 Yet whereas Guilhot reads the postwar realist project as primarily conservative-a self-conscious and risky attempt to found a realist theory of international politics to oppose facile Lockean liberalism, crusading Wilsonianism, and the depoliticized liberal-rationalist political science that they saw in America-we believe that their gambit went even further. What we have tried to argue here is that the most important actors and agendas of postwar realism were marked by the desire to revive a realistic liberal politics by drawing on, not rejecting, skeptical intellectual and cultural resources found in American political thought.…”

Threads and Boundaries: Rethinking the Intellectual History of International Relations

“…Over the past twenty years, a prominent stream of scholarship about the history of IR sought to reconstruct the institutional structures of the discipline to explain its academic and intellectual identity (Long 2006;Dunne 1998). Recent histories of IR highlighted the importance of academic departments, international conferences and think tanks to shaping the academic discipline in the United States and Britain (Guilhot 2010;Guilhot 2011;Parmar 2012). These studies suggest that is worth exploring the history of international relations through not only theoretical constructions and geopolitical spheres but also concrete physical and intellectual loci: institutional sites, research groups, think tanks, private associations, international conferences and personal encounters.…”

Political theology and sovereignty: Sayyid Qutb in our times

“…The rediscovery of political theology in recent International Relations (IR) discourses underscores both the infirmity of secularist renditions of the international as well as the difficulty, if not impossibility, of disentangling the mystical and the political (Paipais, 2015;Guilhot, 2010;Troy 2013). Received interventions challenge mainstream IR's long standing and inescapable reliance on notions of secularization (Philpott 2002;Fitzgerald 2011), conceived either as an emancipatory rupture from the prison-house of religion promised in classic accounts (Blumenberg 1983), or as a reworked Protestant spatio-temporal resolution of the problem of reconciling universality with particularity (Walker 1993).…”