Critical Exchange on R.B.J. Walker’s After the Globe, Before the World (2010)

Is world politics a world away? Contemporary Political Theory (2011) 10, 286–310. doi:10.1057/cpt.2011.5

After the Globe, Before the World is a very difficult book to read, not because it is badly written, but because difficulty is what this book is about: the difficulty of any move from what we know as international relations (IR) to what we hope to be world politics. Difficulty is therefore the central theme of the book, and this is reflected in the style of presentation that meticulously demonstrates this difficulty, eliciting in the reader a sense of frustration and entrapment as every opening is revealed to be a dead end. After the Globe develops the argument of Walker’s earlier Inside/Outside (1993), demonstrating that any move from IR to world politics is extremely complicated, putting at stake our very understanding of the fundamental spatiotemporal categories of modern politics. Walker addresses various ways in which numerous attempts to take us from IR to world politics remain caught up in what they try to transcend, that is, the ontopolitical tradition of modernity, which is itself already an attempt at resolving the antinomies whose happy resolution we associate with the promise of world politics (for example, universalism/particularism, nature/culture, individual/community and so on). The ‘seduction’ and ‘temptation’ of world politics belong to the very tradition of the ‘international’ as its inherent transgression, something simultaneously desired and held impossible or rather desired as impossible. Insofar as it is understood as ‘post-international’, world politics is always already enfolded in the horizon of the international, so that the more we affirm the escape from the international, the deeper we fall into its trap. For Walker, the question of world politics is always more difficult than it seems and the task of critical discourse is, in full accordance with Kant’s critical project, to guard its object against the illegitimate application of the powers of reason. Having read After the Globe, one arguably knows less about what world politics is than before, although of course learning a lot about why such knowledge is impossible. Wherever we are, we are always ‘before’ the world, facing it as distant and inappropriable. Universalist claims are always ‘(enabled) within a particular array of boundaries, borders and limits’ and a ‘politics of the world’ that promises to do away with those remains ‘necessarily beyond reach’. Thus, ‘anyone seeking to reimagine the possibilities of political r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave-journals.com/cpt/

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life under contemporary conditions would be wise to resist ambitions expressed as a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world, and to pay far greater attention to what goes on at the boundaries, borders and limits of a politics orchestrated within the international’. Although there are numerous possibilities for political experimentation at these liminal sites, we would do well to remember that this experimentation always takes place on this side of the borderline. It would be instructive to compare Walker’s work with Jens Bartelson’s recent Visions of World Community (2009), which addresses very similar issues. In his book Bartelson seeks to ‘deproblematize’ the question of world community, trying to rid it of logical paradoxes by enfolding the problematic of community into an explicitly cosmological context and thus making the world the a priori site of any community whatsoever. In contrast, Walker re-problematizes this question in a hyperbolic manner, making it practically impossible to exit the condition of the international once we are in it. Reading the two approaches together, world politics appears to ceaselessly oscillate between being presupposed as self-evident and unmasked as impossible. And yet, there remains a question of whether world politics is indeed as difficult to conceive as Walker argues. After the Globe demonstrates admirably that one will never reach world politics if one begins from the international. There is no passage from particularistic pluralism toward universality, as any such move would necessarily be an instance of hegemonic universalization of particular content, which is precisely what the modern international system was designed or at least desired to prevent. This is certainly a powerful argument against various strands of cosmopolitan universalism that conceal the particularity of their claims. Yet, the hegemonic character of universalization is only inevitable as long as we continue to envision universality in terms of the move from IR to world politics, which therefore becomes ‘postinternational’. But if we cannot move from ‘here’ to ‘there’, why not find a better starting point? After all, as Walker demonstrates, as long as we remain within the discourse of IR theory, we are never really ‘after the globe’, be it the globe carved into sovereign states or united in a hegemonic project of globalization. From this perspective, the book may be read as the ultimate demonstration of the limits of IR. Yet, the question is whether these limits are as unsurpassable as Walker makes them appear. In my view, they are not, for two reasons. First, it is not very surprising that the discourse of IR theory is incapable of conceptualizing world politics, as this discourse is a phenomenology of the particular world of the international, the ‘here’ that ensures the non-accessibility of the ‘there’. As an objective phenomenology in the Badiouan sense, this discourse is from the outset restricted to the particular transcendental order that it describes. It therefore has no access to the ontological dimension, in which the r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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question of the world and its politics must be posed: there is no such thing as ‘international ontology’ because the international has no ontological consistency but is a strictly ontic, historically specific phenomenon. The impossibility of posing the question of world politics from within IR that Walker’s book demonstrates so brilliantly does not prove the impossibility of world politics but only illuminates our being confined within a very specific kind of discourse, in which the ontological question of world politics cannot be formulated other than in the modality of negation. Second, as Walker demonstrates in great detail, the object of IR, that is, the phenomenal reality of the international, is historically contingent, there being nothing necessary about either the state or the states system, sovereignty or the international. Although the passage to world politics is necessarily impossible in the historic-political constellation of the international, this constellation itself is wholly contingent. In other words, as the international has no ontological status, there is no ontological necessity for this constellation to exist but only the ontic fact of its contemporary presence. This means that the limits that we encounter on the way to world politics are conditioned by our starting point in the international, which is entirely contingent. Once we come to terms with this contingency, the claim that we cannot get ‘there’ from ‘here’ only means that we no longer have to start from ‘here’. From this perspective, After the Globe not only demonstrates our entrapment but also, perhaps unwittingly, points toward the possibility of escape by demonstrating that the limits of IR are entirely self-imposed. Sergei Prozorov University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland [email protected]

What is wrong with the world? This book is not to be read with a hangover, as its style calls for an agile mind. Written to induce sobriety among those who entertain lofty beliefs about the possibility and desirability of another world beyond that of the international system of states, this book represents the most sustained critical engagement with cosmopolitan political thought to date. Although it is not possible to do justice to its complexity and sophistication here, the main argument goes something like this: Given that we accept the basic spatiotemporal framing of the problem of political authority handed down to us by Hobbes, we are also compelled to accept that the sovereign state and the international system are mutually constitutive aspects of the same quintessentially modern political order. 288

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Whereas we can catch rare glimpses of a world beyond, the makeup of this world will only become more elusive the harder we try to grasp it, as the concepts at our disposal are contaminated with semantic baggage from the very order we wish to escape. Hence, attempts to transcend this order tout court in favor of the more encompassing category of world politics are doomed to be counterproductive, as their universalistic claims to epistemic and political authority merely bring us back to square one with respect to the problem of sovereignty and the spatiotemporal limits of modernity. There is thus no simple route taking us from international to world politics, only a tight reproductive circuit plunging us right back into the former whenever we try to reach beyond it. But being stuck within this order, we are nevertheless invited to renegotiate its limits from within, so that its undesirable consequences can be mitigated. Herein is the only real hope of emancipation from the discriminatory practices of the modern order. Walker thus maintains that a politics of the world is impossible rather than merely undesirable. All aspirations in a universalistic direction are vain, as they cannot be but imperialisms in disguise. But as this is primarily an ontological claim, it has to be met on the same ground. It seems to me that the warrants of such pessimism are two: on the one hand, an insistence on a sharp disjunction between modern and premodern political orders, on the other a reification of the modern international system into an inescapable condition of modern political life. But if we would accept – as I think that Walker himself is inclined to do – that this disjunction and this system are real only by virtue of having been conceptualized into existence in the past, what would keep us from admitting that world politics could enjoy a similar ontological status simply by virtue of being conceptualized into existence right in our present? Would not the fact that quite a few people today actually speak, think and act as if world politics indeed constitutes a domain categorically distinct from that of the international system entitle us to assume that such a domain is in the process of being constituted as a social fact, however, incoherent such thinking and speaking might seem from our own vantage point within the modern order? Both these warrants reflect Walker’s selective application of the principles of historical ontology; this inconsistent application in turn is what makes it so difficult to understand the coming into being of world politics other than in terms of a transcendence of the limits of modernity and a simultaneous escape from the international system. Since the early-moderns were able to reconceptualize the foundations of political order in ways incommensurable with the universalistic ontology of their medieval predecessors, it seems to me that our cosmopolitan contemporaries ought to be allowed some of the same latitude, and this quite irrespective of the veracity of their claims. What rather matters is their attempt to talk another world into existence and the relative success these attempts have enjoyed institutionally. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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Although this book deserves much praise for its critical verve, it is hard to see in whose name its criticism is undertaken. Walker does not leave us with any principled ways of distinguishing between claims to empire and hegemony on the one hand, and critical visions of a more just world order on the other. They are equally suspect and equally futile. Yet, denying the existence of something distinctively global on grounds of its ontological impossibility is not very helpful if we want to understand how present relocations of political authority have been justified with reference to various global imaginaries, let alone come to terms with the forms of domination that now threaten to undermine human freedom in the absence of legitimate authority. To be able to do those things, we must first be allowed to take the existence of something called world politics seriously, and then revise the scope of our ethical and critical claims accordingly. Although I agree with Walker that this cannot be done by taking any quick leaps from the international system to the global realm, I think the proper way to proceed is by carefully analyzing how the latter has been constructed as a sui generis category of thought and action, in the past as well as in the present. This done, we would perhaps be in a better position to ask difficult questions about what politics might mean in this not-so-new context, and to pose equally hard questions about the ethical options at our disposal, as well as about what kind of critique might be best suited in this seemingly unfamiliar setting. But ruling the universalistic option out altogether will not take us very far in understanding or passing moral judgment on a world in which politics is animated by competing universalisms. Finally, and curiously, I cannot but detect a similarity between the predicament of the early-moderns and that of Walker. This is one of profound skepticism, which once prompted the early-moderns to articulate the very notion of sovereignty with which Walker still wrestles. This predicament casts epistemic and political authority as two sides of the same coin, and calls for sovereignty to settle disputes with regard to both. I think one might legitimately ask whether this predicament is still operative, or whether it has been superseded by a widespread agnosticism when it comes to both truth and power. Failure to accept the skeptical predicament would perhaps make it less tempting to take sovereignty claims at face value, but all the more interesting to focus on the embodiment and exercise of political authority in a global context. Therefore, although there are many things that are wrong in this world, I do not think that the world is among them. Rather the world is their remedy. Jens Bartelson Lund University, Lund, Sweden [email protected] 290

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After Walker Forums on books are also always already about the author, their previous work and stature, so, I begin with some context about how I read After the Globe, Before the World. On the one hand, I have long enjoyed the insights that Rob Walker brings to IR theory. I have especially enjoyed the conference figure of Walker, who brings his wit and weight of experience to bear upon the discipline, expertly rendering IR as a vaguely ridiculous, yet somehow important place. On the other hand, I would not claim to be an expert on Walker’s work. I am not directly concerned with the central aporia of inside/ outside that animates his thought and its extension in a number of directions within this book. Instead, I have rather come to ‘use’ him, quite instrumentally, as a clearly identifiable reference point, a quote when seeking to express how certain debates are just missing the point. The central argument is something of a meditation, a constant circling around the central aporia or aporias of inside/outside, the boundaries, borders and limits that serve to contingently constitute the commonalities and separations, the inclusions and exclusions, the metaphors of presence and absence and all the other binaries that simultaneously facilitate and condemn us to our current political imagination. For this, I think the great compliment I would bestow on this book is that it made me feel uncomfortable. It challenged my way of thinking, it made me reevaluate assumptions, it suggested that many of the moves I attempt to make are more difficult, more problematic and more violent than I would care to acknowledge. In stylistic terms, one is made to go with him. It is an idiosyncratic exploration of a way of thinking. For me, at least, circling an aporia can be a difficult movement. But, perhaps it is at least an honest approach when compared to the silences and unfounded foundations that permeate much contemporary thought in a range of disciplines. Most importantly, I think, there are also moments of quite lyrical prose that get beyond being mere words on a page to a form of expression that is now rarely stressed in the age of metrics. To quote from the book: Our experiences with the polis, the state and the nation have indeed been foundational, as the metaphor goes; a metaphor that invites speculation about the founding of foundations and fears that our most trusted foundations might be no more that sticks buried in quicksand, claims about necessity that rest only upon genealogies of contingency, mere names bearing no necessary relationship to whatever names are supposed to name. To my mind at least, such passages are edifying because they ask us to reevaluate, once again, what it means to take contingency seriously. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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One of the central intentions motivating this book is to engage in a kind of ground clearing exercise, exposing and coming to terms with the way that so much of our modern thinking has been structured around and through these certain aporias. The suggestion is that we should carry out such ground clearing so as to allow spaces for imagination to happen; that there might be other ways of being otherwise. My question would then be: what is imagination? Put bluntly, why would we be any more likely to experience imagination after reading this book than before? Is imagination not, by definition, an imaginative and creative realm that depends on luck, timing and chance? And once the imagination is had, as it were, why would it not instantiate its own aporias, its own violence? More critically, I wonder whether, as it stands, there is some form of ‘get out’ lurking here? Walker does not pitch it as a get out, and the program of research suggested at the end does not sound like a get out. But, I would argue, the assumption of the possibility of a ‘better way of doing things’, ‘a better way of imagining’, persists, as a motive force in the framing of the exercise. Therefore, maybe this idea of imagination requires further reflection to deuniversalize it, or perhaps bring it to the fore in some way? Second, perhaps unsurprisingly, I was concerned that cosmopolitan ethics got something of rough ride in this book. Now maybe cosmopolitanism deserves a rough ride, particularly in relation to the blueprint versions that Walker rightly dismisses as too neatly tied to metaphors of escape, globalization and citizenship. But my question is: why was this the only version of cosmopolitan ethics considered? What of the myriad other interpretations of cosmopolitan thought that are less tied to spatio-temporal models and moral hierarchies, and more located in a realm of ongoing and fallible attempts to live and live with? Indeed, my thinking in this regard is actually inspired by Walker’s previous arguments, such as in ‘Polis, Cosmopolis, Politics’: If cosmopolitanism is a name to be given to an openness to connections, to a sense that we all participate in various patterns of both commonality and diversity that are not and cannot be fixed by the lines inscribed by modern subjectivities, and that also insists on recognizing the radically uneven developments and sites in which people struggle to act in the world, then there is much to be said for it y I prefer to underline its status as a question, and a practice, rather than a given y . (Walker, 2003, pp. 284–285, emphasis added) In this vein, my suggestion is that there a number of authors who would entirely agree and sympathize with this notion, who are aware of the violence within existing cosmopolitan discourses and who would benefit from reading this book, but who may feel slightly caricatured as ‘silly globalizers’. 292

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In summary, I would suggest that grappling with other ways of being otherwise might mean de-linking the concept of imagination from a particular formula of what the central political problems are and how to address them. And it may also involve asking whether and how imagination can come from unexpected places. In this way, I again underline my high regard for the rhetorical flourishes and lyrical prose that reminds us of the contingency of contingency, but question the idea that the possibility of new possibilities requires any pact with a particular method, agenda or disposition. In short, I am happy to let imaginative people imagine whatever their particular theoretical disposition leads them to. James Brassett University of Warwick, Coventry, UK [email protected]

Politics of/on the line The front cover of After the Globe, Before the World offers some clues about the key themes and approach of the book. Paul Klee’s painting ‘Chosen Site’ (1934) depicts a landscape of entities both constituted and disrupted by different intersecting lines. This reflects Walker’s overarching concern with modernity as a series of line-drawing practices. Klee’s paintings have been characterized variously as expressionist, pointillist, symbolist, cubist and neither strictly abstract nor obviously representational. Similarly, After the Globe – and Walker’s work more generally – defies easy classification: it is neither straightforwardly ‘structuralist’, nor what has become referred to as ‘poststructuralist’; and, ultimately, it both reaffirms and disrupts commonplace assumptions found in the theoretical literature produced by the disciplines of Politics and IR. The comparison between the two works under consideration here can be further extended into the realms of influence and method. It is widely known that Klee was inspired by music: he came from a musical family and sought to inject rhythm and movement into art. Equally, it is possible to detect musical overtones throughout Walker’s book: the use of technical terms such as ‘prelude’, ‘reprise’, ‘misterioso’ (a direction suggesting mystery); the reliance on multiple codas and riffs to work arguments through; and the rhythmic way in which the prose proceeds all point to the author’s musicianlike qualities. Therefore, what is ‘new’ about After the Globe, we might ask? Buried in the wealth of footnotes is an acknowledgement that much of the book is prefigured in Walker’s earlier text Inside/outside: International Relations as Political r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993). There are obvious areas of common concern between the two texts, including: the problem of sovereignty; the authorization of authority; the relationship between the modern subject, state and state-system; and the spatiotemporal limits that condition the possibility of modernity and its Others. Equally, we see the reappearance of certain key philosophical backstops: Hobbes, Kant, Machiavelli, in particular. Yet, both the framing of the argument and range of interventions that After the Globe seeks to make are notably different from Inside/outside. In many ways, this contrast reflects broader developments in the disciplinary landscape between 1993 and 2010. On the one hand, the argument sustains the deconstruction of Realism that we see in Inside/outside. On the other hand, the scope of Walker’s critique has expanded to encompass globalization theory, cosmopolitanism and theories of the generalized state of exception. These perspectives, although ostensibly very different, all imply a shift from the ‘international’ to the ‘world’ without working through the range of distinctions, aporias, constitutive contradictions – and their political implications – that condition the possibility of such a move. Clearly, the intellectual ambitions of After the Globe are not limited to a critique of this scholarly literature, but rather aim to interrogate the aspirations of modernity to secure the meaning of ‘where and therefore what political life must be’. Walker proceeds chiefly via a diagnosis of the various lines, distinctions and borders through which the specifically modern account of the nature and location of politics is established, reproduced and concealed. It is precisely this politics on/of the line that Walker insists has become a site of increasing complexity, and yet, he argues, there continues to be a relative paucity of critical reflection on this theme. Indeed, a central ‘prediction’ of the book is that future political analysis will need to ‘think much more carefully about how complex practices of drawing lines have come to be treated as such a simple matter’. That is, instead of assuming that it is somehow simple to move across and thereby take for granted the line between the international and the world, the reader is urged to ‘think more carefully about that line’. The interdisciplinary study of borders has to some extent already begun to take on that challenge: borders are now problematized as sites where the activity of sovereign power, resistance against practices of subjectification and desubjectification and in some sense, therefore, ‘politics’ takes place. What is often missed in this literature, however, is precisely the role that some borders have in conditioning the possibility of other borders, even what we think of as the concept of the ‘border’ in the first place. After the Globe constitutes a major intervention in the border studies literature in its systematic diagnosis of modernity as ‘a structure of inclusions and exclusions within the modern state and state-system’, which, in turn, must have a constitutive 294

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outside: the world. One of the key lessons of the book, therefore, is that it is a specific framing of borders, one structured by modernity, that currently tells us who we are, where we are from, what we should do, with whom our loyalties should lie. As modern subjects whose lives are structured by the state/state-system, we are always already ‘bordered’. Although there can be ‘no simple beginning, middle, end to an analysis that engages with beginnings, middles and ends’, the choice of starting points in After the Globe is arguably contentious and an important site for debate. One concern is that by starting with – and emphasizing throughout – the continued grip of the modern inside/outside coordinates of the state/state-system, Walker’s analysis runs the risk of reifying the very structures it seeks to deconstruct. In this regard, a less sympathetic reader might well ask: is politics always necessarily about discriminations and their authorization, as the aspirations of modernity insist it must be, or are there other experiences of the political that might be drawn upon as a counter-current? How might alternative starting points, such as those from the point of view of refugees in between the cracks of the system, or activist networks that forge linkages across those cracks and/or the politics of encounter between the modern world and its constructed others, prompt a different set of diagnoses and interventions? Another related line of enquiry might seek to push Walker to elaborate on those intriguing moments in the text when he implies that the coordinates of modernity are vacillating. Indeed, far from an ‘iron cage’ that fully entraps the meaning of political life, there are glimpses of various outsides that haunt the modern edifice from within. Thus, peppered throughout the analysis are references to the changing nature of the inside/outside relation: ‘There seems to me to be little doubt that the sharp distinction between the internal and external spaces of modern politics y is now extraordinarily difficult to sustain’; ‘The limits of modern politics are not easily kept where they are supposed to be’. This prompts a secondary line of questioning: to what extent does the contemporary vacillation of borders reflect deeper structural changes to the modern grid of insides and outsides? How are these changes to be characterized, given the grip of the modern geopolitical imagination and what are their implications for the rest of the analysis? Why not start with these changes? Ultimately, we might enquire as to whether such a brilliant diagnosis of the modern horizon of intelligibility needs to reaffirm that horizon quite as much as it disrupts it.

Nick Vaughan-Williams University of Warwick, Coventry, UK [email protected] r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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Alternatives, labyrinths and the politics of escape After the Globe, Before the World is an extraordinary book by one of the most important thinkers in IR today. It is also an extraordinarily demanding book; dense and uncompromising, even for those who are acquainted with and appreciative of R.B.J. Walker’s previous work, its style is bound to disturb many. Walker’s genre exemplifies a major theme of the book: the ‘politics of escape’. This concerns the difficultly of modern subjects to imagine true political alternatives, being themselves already spatially located in and under the sway of (sometimes competing, sometimes complementary) sovereign authorities. Walker’s ‘obstinate’ writing style highlights the labyrinths that IR theorists end up constructing in their attempts to produce political knowledge and exit the Platonic cave of shadowy opinion. What is problematic is not the production of labyrinths per se, which as Cornelius Castoriadis suggests are the inevitable result of philosophical thinking, but how contemporary (critical) theorists miss out or cover up the labyrinthic character of their discourse so as to present easy ways out of current political predicaments. Entering Walker’s labyrinth is therefore primarily about confronting the illusion of the easy escape, as well as coming to terms with the wide range of discursive moves authorized through claims of escape. The philosophical terms employed would not be unfamiliar to those who have been in touch with developments in international political theory. The book’s complexity lies in the circularity of the argument, the constant reiterations, variations and reversals of the same point and the double deconstructions that persistently question the tools one uses to question, leaving one with insecure ground upon which to build a thesis or an antithesis. This creates uncertainty and difficulty about Walker’s ‘message’ or how to ‘use’ him. To employ a Socratic tease on Heraclitus, one can easily drown in the depths of his thinking unless one is a skilled diver. One requires (or needs to develop) special skills to navigate the thought of the thinker; it takes deep breathing exercises to go through those long equivocal sentences and reach a ‘saving’ point. And even then, Walker would be there waiting to deflate your safety raft and demand that you swim more, by, for example, deconstructing the meaning of getting ‘the point’ through an exposition of the metaphysics of Eucledian geometry. This may not be appreciated by everyone. But this is not a book for everyone, not meant for the amateur swimmer or someone who wants to relax in calm seas. Indeed, the reader must work hard and negotiate it slowly and extra carefully. To appreciate the profundity of the book, one must be vigilant to minor differences of emphasis that work contrary to the logics of an either/or 296

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argument. One must also remain sensitive to how shifts in formulation often reveal and renew conceptual contestations that proponents of simple and uniform expression wish to treat as settled. It requires discontent with the pattern of identifying mere synonymy or antinomy in the various points made, recognizing instead the incessant interplay of synonymy and antinomy in political discourse. For Walker, it is especially important to realize that international relations and world politics can work both as synonyms and antonyms in various situations, and that this instability can be immensely rich analytically, given how it can be exploited to frame options and delimit the possible. One must also attend to how key political terms may mean more or less or else in different contexts: ‘Weakness does not automatically translate into irrelevance. Greater Power does not always imply greater authority. Self-assertion is no guarantee of political autonomy. Boundaries, borders and limits do not necessarily have only marginal significance’. Walker takes issue with how certain key figures whose work is potentially disruptive are being canonically codified (namely, figures like Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Weber and so on). Their disruptive potential is being appropriated to build routes of escape from mainstream thinking, grand alternatives prophesying transcendence and brought under the rubric of an ‘ethics’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘postcolonialism’ or ‘postmodernism’ and so on. Soon, however, they can become the new orthodoxy, the dominant discourse that functions through ‘claims to universality [that] are contained within a universalizing particularity’. In this way, scholarly practices mobilize accounts about the way things are (with philosophy, with critique, with the world), imagining easy ways in and out of conceptual debates and global problems that simply encourage and reproduce their normative aspirations. It creates a natural automatism in thinking that quickly persuades one that a certain problem needs to be addressed by this or that authority, and which consequently limits contemporary political imagination and possibility, even at the same time as it may encourage visions of alterity and escape. To that extent, After the Globe, Before the World interrogates the pursuit of political alternatives which unreflectively appropriate variations of the great narratives of ‘enlightenment’ without displaying an awareness of the complex moves and power implications of those narratives. This very much speaks to what ‘we’ do as (critical) international political theorists, as alternative theorists or theorists of the alternative. Although I concur with the critique, I am not entirely persuaded that one needs to follow Walker’s way. This is because Walker’s thesis posits (explicitly or implicitly) a prerequisite that I find difficult to accept. Namely that one has to engage with Plato, Hobbes and Kant (again and again), read them more carefully r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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(again and again), so as to acquire the philosophical astuteness required for refined political judgment. But what if one wants to engage instead with Euripides, Gentili, Las Casas, a minor poet or cultural practice to reflect on the state of imprisonment in and the possibility of escape from dominant political discourse? For a book that so brilliantly deconstructs sovereign authority at one level, at another level it creates a sense that one’s starting point can only be the philosophical masters – not that one is not supposed to study other authors or political phenomena, but rather that one’s reading of non-classical writings and issues is likely to issue in problematic claims because one has not fully understood certain key texts. As such – and while taking on board Walker’s critique of selective reading and philosophical caricature in IR – this aspect of the perpetual reengagement of ‘the masters’ I would want to resist. In short, After the Globe, Before the World provides a compelling and critical assessment of the state of international political theory today, which has developed tremendously in the last couple of decades. A lot of work in this field has tried to escape from mainstream theorizing and the dominant discourse and debates of IR theory. The results have been impressive in many respects, and as we know Walker has been at the forefront encouraging this work. I see him now looking more somberly at the implications of critical theorizing. Though he insists that claims of escape need to be rigorously examined, Walker is not a perennial pessimist, and he finds that there is ‘often hope’ hidden ‘between the lines’, between borders of authorization and subjectivity. This tragic hope is what I find most inspiring in the book: the realization that one must continue to seek understanding inside the labyrinth, learn from routes and dead ends that map the diversity of past engagements and by doing so get acquainted with the changing limits of political possibility.

Costas M.Constantinou University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus [email protected]

Lost in the world In After the Globe, Before the World, Rob Walker says that Immanuel Kant should be understood more as a framer of questions than a source of clear-cut answers. The same can be said of Walker’s approach in this book, in that we 298

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certainly do not arrive at the end with any answers. The style is circulatory, and although it takes us on a journey, it is not a journey that has one start and one end point. I want to suggest that in this book Walker invites us to become lost with him. By that, I do not mean that we can easily get lost in the book or that we are at a loss in reading this book. I am not suggesting that Walker invites us to get lost in order to offer some signposts as to where we might go from here. He does not. Rather, evoking the title and theme of Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), I want to suggest that Walker’s approach forms an invitation to dwell in being lost, in a way that we might have been once as students perhaps, but in ways that we are encouraged to overcome, at least if we want to earn a salary. As Walker tells us: ‘we are y supposed to know more or less what we are talking about when we deploy such terms (as “international relations” and “world politics”.) y we are supposed to have little trouble knowing y both where the place of the international is supposed to be in the world and where it is not’. He claims that it is not at all clear, however, that we know what these terms mean or what/where exactly they point to. Walker invites us to become ‘lost’ in the same way as Solnit, when she draws on the way in which Walter Benjamin advocated the art of losing oneself in a city. As she reminds us, for Benjamin: ‘to not be able to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling’ (Solnit, 2005, p. 6). Because to lose oneself in this sense requires being ‘capable of being in uncertainty and mystery’ (Solnit, 2005, p. 6), the kind of mystery that Walker evokes when he describes the international as ‘that strange and very puzzling place’ (2009, p. 26). He says that the questions he aims to ask are quite simple, but it is also worth saying that this is one of the key strengths of the book. For academics to pose simple questions, the kinds of questions we may have once had about political life before we began to read hundreds of different attempts at making sense of political life, may be the most difficult thing of all. As he says (2009: p. 43), we seem to be surrounded by information but we have very little means of interpreting it. Gilles Deleuze makes a very similar point, which chimes with Walker’s aims and sense of humor in this book, when he says that: ‘it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say y . What we’re plagued by these days isn’t any blocking of communication, but pointless statements y’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 129). This book, like much of Walker’s earlier work, is attentive to those silences, and as other commentaries in this collection attest, this is not a book for those in search of quick or easy answers. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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Walker’s style is closer to John Cage’s, when he says in his ‘Lecture on Nothing’: If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. (1973: p. 109) How then, in accepting this invitation to become lost, might we arrive at some useful pointers for thinking critically about the ‘world’ and the ‘international?’ It might mean forgetting for a moment about those ‘normative assumptions about what contemporary political life should be like’ and offering some suggestions about ‘what is empirically interesting about political life now’. It will also mean forgetting about sovereignty as a locus, thing, endpoint, higher plane or necessity and thinking instead about sovereignty as a problem. In forgetting for a moment that which we already think we know, we might therefore be reminded of those very simple questions we might have once had about politics, power and authority. Those simple questions are most cutting when Walker talks about authority: the grounds on which claims to authority are made; how they are established; and how a claim to political authority is made to seem legitimate. These kinds of questions are the ones that go down best of all with first year students who (in my experience) will often either feel conned or confused to hear that International Politics is predominantly about realism, idealism, the international system, anarchy, balance of power, actors, interests, man, the state and the system, and only marginally about culture, pluralism, language, inequality, poverty, energy, private security contractors, ‘race’, sex and new forms of slavery and colonialism. In terms of the different audiences addressed in this book, I think it is most humble in addressing students and political activists. The book places a great deal of emphasis on politics as that capacity to claim authority. In a highly Rousseauist passage, Walker writes: ‘Absolute authority has itself no ground to stand on. What counts is the degree to which people can be persuaded to underwrite the sovereign power, can be persuaded by the proper curriculum, by the proper religion, by civic education’. Such passages made me think about another book, released exactly one year after After the Globe: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s autobiography, A Journey (2010), which has recently been followed by Former US President George W. Bush’s memoirs, Decision Points (2010). Although Rob’s book might in parts leave us quite depressed about the capacity of the discipline of IR to raise questions about the politics of the authorization of politics, the question of the grounds on which governments take decisions to go to war have (so far) refused to go away in the case of the Iraq War, as the leaking of Iraq War logs testify. 300

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This book’s refusal to offer any easy answers does not mean that it represents a ‘difficult’ or ‘highbrow’ book but quite the opposite: it attempts to take us back to questions of beginnings. Politics, Walker tells us, is ultimately about the ‘authorization of politics’ as one set of problems and not another, about this and not that. But in addition to this emphasis on authorization, I want to ask: can politics also be thought of as encounters; a gathering; the forming of a sociality; a becoming; a remaking; or rewriting? By encouraging us to think about the lines that enable and are enabled by the distinctions made familiar by a ‘binocular politics’ (between the international and the world; politicization and depoliticization; the state and the state system) this book points toward another cartography of political life. We are told that politics should be understood less as what can be located within the space of a particular polis and more as the drawing of lines. But, whereas many of us are keen to run and explore these new imaginaries, this book remains overwhelmingly cautious when it comes to the question of alternatives. I suspect that this book will become central in inspiring accounts of how to think politics otherwise although the book itself will remain, paradoxically perhaps, deeply skeptical about the possibilities of such a task.

References Deleuze, G. (1995) Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press. Solnit, R. (2005) A Field Guide to Getting Host. New York: Penguin Books.

Angharad Closs Stephens Durham University, Durham, UK [email protected]

In search of another politics After the Globe, Before the World presents a powerful and uncompromising analysis of the difficulties in coming up with alternative ways of thinking about politics in the late modern world. Its themes were evident already in the articles and book chapters published from around 2003, in which Walker mentions not just a single constitutive outside of the sovereign state but a doubled outside of the state and the international system of states. This second outside refers to a world located somewhere beyond the modern international – a world that is no longer conditioned by the same lines, borders and limits as the state system. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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At the same time, this world is forever beyond reach as any attempt to move from the international to the world must inevitably confront certain problems, in relation to which the modern international already exists as one particular solution. It is a solution not least to the problems of how to establish the appropriate and necessary conditions for realizing the universal within one single system, which comprises a multiplicity of modern states and a multiplicity of modern individuals. In this way, the modern international is already based on a promise to take us from the particular to the universal. But the international is also full of limits, telling us how such a move should be made, and how certain things in the world cannot be tolerated and therefore must be excluded. These are the aporias of the modern international: they demonstrate how the existence of a world ‘beyond’ is rendered both possible and impossible in relation to the boundaries, borders and limits of the modern state/state system. Is there a risk that we are encountering certain limits in the analysis of limits here? The limits of the modern political imagination are of course in one sense inescapable. Following the persistent reproduction of this imagination – in theory as well as in practice – the world in which we live is full of limits, borders and exceptions. To think of politics without taking those limits into consideration must inevitably result in some kind of illusion. We can of course think of alternative forms of existence – an alternative ontology that can recast our being (and becoming) in a different light. But to think of politics in relation to such an ontology is very different. That would imply trying to think beyond the problems in relation to which the modern individual, the modern state and the modern state system together have been produced as a highly efficient albeit contingent solution to some very difficult problems. It would also have to imply ignoring the ways in which this solution continues to be reproduced through different levels of exceptionalism. What can be done, however, is to suggest that politics already takes place in spaces and temporalities that in different ways elude, as well as disrupt those limits. As Walker puts it: ‘Even the most absolute sovereign authority has unintended consequences. What can go wrong often does. The unanticipated happens. Rationalities breed irrationalities. Lines take flight’. In this respect, I think that there is an interesting tension informing much of Walker’s work: a tension that relates to how he acknowledges that the modern world crumbles in different ways, yet at the same time returns very quickly to an analysis of the ‘limits’ of the modern political imagination. It can of course be argued that he has very good reasons for doing this as his primary aim is to show how attempts to move ‘beyond’ do not in fact take us ‘beyond’ but participate in an ongoing politics of reproducing the lines separating what is ‘beyond’ from what is ‘within’. At the same time, there is the question of why we should continue to think of politics only in relation to the ways in which the limits of the modern 302

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political imagination are continuously reproduced. Is it not possible to problematize and politicize those limits even further by suggesting that the modern political imagination itself is always open to and emerges from another outside? Would it not be possible to think of a ‘third outside’, which refers to neither of the two outsides of the modern state/state system, but to an outside of the imagination as such? Crucially, the point of thinking about a ‘third outside’ would not be to move ‘beyond’, ‘escape’ or force everything ‘within’. The point would rather be to explore the potential significance of that which eludes the distinctions upon which the modern political imagination is based, and in so doing open up space for thinking about another politics, different from the one that the modern political imagination allows us to imagine, and which does not necessarily contradict the limits of that imagination, but rather exists like a ‘double’. Even though most emphasis is put on showing us how difficult it is to think of another politics, it can be argued that After the Globe, Before the World simultaneously, in the very same moves, opens up space for doing just that. Walker is providing us with an extremely difficult challenge, which relates to how it might be possible to think of another politics, without ignoring the persistent problems in relation to which the modern political imagination functions as a very powerful solution. But the question, then, is how far Walker himself would be willing to go in order to take on this challenge, and what his starting point for doing so would be: a starting point that would not be linked to either of the two outsides of the modern state/state system, nor to the limits of the modern political imagination, but perhaps to something that is further away and at the same time very much ‘present’ and ‘ongoing’. Tom Lundborg The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm, Sweden [email protected]

World, politics I am very happy to receive such positive comments about the diagnosis of contemporary political possibilities offered in After the Globe, Before the World. I am aware that some people find it a difficult text to read, so I appreciate the care with which it has been read here. I also agree with most of the points that are made, though I would not admit to being as pessimistic, or trapped, as some comments suggest. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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The book poses some difficulties of style in part because I tried to write in a way that does not immediately betray the book’s substantive argument about the contradictory character of modern politics, and thus the aporetic character of the boundaries, borders and limits within which modern politics is enacted. The nice short sentences currently preferred in didactic English may work well to affirm claims about phenomena that are assumed to fall within uncontentious circles of containment, but this is precisely the assumption that sustains many highly contestable accounts of what the past, present and future of modern political life must be like and which I want to call into question. The social sciences encourage a disturbing naivety about the politics of writing, in this as in many other respects. I also tried to create difficulties for anyone seeking to fit my analysis into the received categories of contemporary academic fashion. The categories sustaining prevailing accounts of IR especially may be more than faintly ridiculous, but they have a grip on scholarly knowledge and practical wisdom that is very difficult to disrupt. This is why I played two very different forms of common sense against each other, one affirming basic assumptions about modern politics expressed in the cliche´s of IR theory and one affirming processes of change that promise a very different political order. I tried to show how these forms of common sense are mutually sustaining, and how, in their prevailing versions at least, both must be placed under intense suspicion. I would certainly argue that the familiar binary and trinitarian categories still shaping accounts of what it means to speak about forms of political life within a system of (national) states pose a much greater hindrance to understanding and action than do long sentences and circular formulations. Just as there is no simple outside to any internalized political order, whether within a state or a system of states, there can be no adequate way of writing about such a political order that does not gesture in some way to the constitutive and reproductive role of the boundaries, borders and limits working within the presumed distinction between internality and externality. My gestures are intentionally hyperbolic in this respect, but only because the assumption that one can and must treat this distinction as an absolute dualism is so entrenched not only in the foundational categories of Anglo-American theories of IR but in ultimately more troubling forms of political theory generally. So yes, the writing does try to disturb some substantive assumptions; and yes, both the form and substance of the analysis have been shaped by many meditations on the politics of music, from Bach to Monk to Cage, among many. Plato’s fateful attempt to squeeze the life out of both music and politics is always in the background. Some difficulties probably also stem from my call for greater clarity about what is at stake in the way problems are posed rather than what might count as an enticing response. As several commentators 304

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imply, I am a bit austere and intransigent in this respect; but as Angharad Closs Stephens especially recognizes, this is because I believe the problems I try to clarify are of immense importance, and the degree to which they have become trivialized in many academic arenas has had enormous costs. Sergei Prozorov captures my general stance especially well: if we are to be serious in speculating about possible/desirable patterns of political change, we need to engage more systematically with the spatiotemporal articulation and rearticulation of modern politics. I am less concerned to make this claim in empirical terms (as Nick Vaughan-Williams might have preferred) than to show how this must be the case in principle. Given that the spatiotemporal organization of modern politics enables a characteristic set of relations between claims to universality and claims to particularity and plurality, there is no point pretending that we can or should move on by moving from plurality to universality, at least as these possibilities have been framed as values under modern conditions. If there are to be other forms of political organization, they will not be understandable or achievable on the basis of some Aristotelian/ Kantian teleology or some monotheistic claim about transcendence, nor on the variations on these themes that frame our origins in something like the Treaty of Westphalia and then chart our futures as the affirmation or negation of this starting point. I do not think that this argument is especially controversial, or even difficult to grasp. If the achievements of modernity are indeed predicated on claims about the distinction between man and nature, for example, it is going to be very difficult to sustain these achievements while demanding that modern man simply reunite with some more naturally given world from which he has achieved some kind of autonomy. Proponents of natural law may want to argue that modern claims about autonomy and subjectivity have been a great mistake, and that modern forms of international politics provide especially compelling evidence that it has been a mistake. Yet, the kinds of natural law with which we are most familiar are not easy to reconcile with political ideals established against the hierarchical authority of theocracies and empires. The need to rethink the relationship between man and nature certainly implies some profound challenges, in many contexts, just as the fragilities of a modern internationalized political order imply profound challenges to the ways in which we have sought to reconcile competing claims to citizenship and to humanity. That I try to point to the significance and scale of such challenges certainly does not mean that I am one of those wretched realists for whom everything remains the same. On the contrary, I simply think that too many interpretations of the abundant evidence that might be suggestive in this respect are all too predictable, complacent and intrinsically conservative, especially when they are advertised as radical. Changes of many kinds are clearly palpable, but are r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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unlikely to take the forms we have come to expect. Machiavelli is still insightful about this, and political theorists have a lot of work to do in order to make the insight productive under contemporary conditions. It is work that is not likely to be done by utilitarian methodologists or by critical thinkers who believe that philosophy or ethics are a plausible substitute for political analysis. The shared judgement of all my commentators is that I come across as a bit of a pessimist. I would certainly agree that there are currently many grounds for political pessimism, though I do not explore them in the book, where my pessimism arises primarily from the character of prevailing accounts of what it means to be politically pessimistic or optimistic. Costas Constantinou captures my stance on this especially well. These accounts are conditional on the degree to which one is committed to a scalar order constituted through and sustained by contradictory relations between individualized subjects, sovereign states and a system of sovereign states. The difficulty here is that there are good reasons to remain committed to this order, good reasons to wish that we could be rid of it, good reasons to conclude that it may not be with us very much longer whether we want it or not and good reasons to think that this is not the only order we need to understand so as to grasp either our contemporary dilemmas or our future possibilities. I try to remain open to all these possibilities, though without being overbearingly explicit about my own judgements about them. Rather, I try to keep a tight focus on one central problem: modern political life is sustained by a multidimensional and multiscalar desire to find a politics of the world, even though just about every value that is significant for modern political principles is predicated on a constitutive distinction between man and world. The book thus follows this constitutive distinction as it works in the most obvious but neglected site of modern political analysis, where the limits of the modern international order meet whatever it was (whether natural, theological or the potentially human) that was excluded (but also included in a new form) so as to constitute a modern political order of spatiotemporally orchestrated inclusions and exclusions. Although the basic contours of this problem are not so difficult to grasp, their implications are certainly quite daunting. We should prepare to be daunted and stop going round in circles in the mistaken belief that this will provide a way out of the problems of political modernity. I also tried to be quite open in sketching the possibilities before us in this respect. Despite my worries about trinities, I especially tried to be open to three possibilities simultaneously. First, I am prepared to accept that something like a modern international order still offers a plausible framework though which to think about contemporary politics. This is again less because of any empirical evidence than because that order expresses a range of normative commitments (not least 306

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to principles of liberty, equality, community and security) that remain very attractive, to the extent that they tend to shape the normative ambitions of those who are also persuaded that an internationalized politics is inadequate to our times. In this context, I simply want to insist that forms of political analysis demanding simplistic choices between men or citizens, order or justice, universal or plural, internal or external, realism or idealism, state sovereignty or system sovereignty, Schmitt or Kelsen, political theory or international theory and so on will continue to provide a hopeless ground on which to consider any political principle that might retain any significance. Modern politics is inherently contradictory. It works within limits that are not just neutral demarcations of geographical space. Within it, all claims to universality are subject to suspension and the effects of a constitutive narrative about an originary entry into a modern international order – the temporality of modernization that enables the natural spatial order of the modern international – continue to shape all distinctions between a properly constituted humanity and all its others. Therefore, if one wants to keep thinking about politics in fairly conventional statist and international terms, it will be necessary to be much more serious about what happens at its limits. If the promises of the enlightenment are indeed still to be achieved, and we want to sustain a political order that does justice to both men and citizens as we have come to know them, then the limits within which these promises have been framed must be engaged with some intensity rather than brushed aside through vague and ultimately incoherent appeals to universality, plurality or the world as such. In this context, the relation between state sovereignty and the sovereignty of the system of states is still open to considerable renegotiation. Second, and nevertheless, I am also prepared to believe that we are indeed in the midst of profound spatiotemporal rearticulations, in the plural, of the universalities within particularities and particularities within universalities of the modern internationalized political order. In this context, I not only think that we should pay more attention to the boundaries, borders and limits of modern politics but to the decreasing capacity of prevailing accounts of how boundaries, borders and limits are supposed to work to explain how they work now. I agree with Vaughan-Williams and others that a lot of interesting work is already being done in this respect. Considerable empirical research that has been captured within conventional categories is also open to interesting re-readings from this direction. It is in this context that it is perhaps easiest to see that questions about what it means to speak about sovereignty will become most pressing, and that claims about sovereignty being either ever-present or imminently absent will seem equally naive. In any case, if one wants to think about political change on terms expressed by modern theories of IR, it will be necessary to abandon all those narratives telling us that boundaries, like r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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sovereignties, can be treated as either present or absent. This, I suspect, is really what makes many people most uncomfortable with what I say; it resonates with many fears about the decadence that might come from quivering boundaries between competing moral absolutes. Still, I do not think I am seriously at odds with many more empirically oriented speculations, or with many other desires to put Schmittean/liberal exceptionalisms to rest. Third, my entire analysis is predicated on a specific conditionality. If one frames one’s analysis within the conventions expressed by Anglo-American theories of IR, or within the political imaginary expressed in the United Nations Charter, then any attempt to identify a politics that is different from this account of similarity and difference will necessarily run into a very familiar dead end. This is a very big if. I had hoped that I had dropped enough hints about my deep skepticism about the wisdom of this conditionality, whatever its many attractions. I recognize that it sustains a widely pervasive and persuasive account of how we are supposed to think, both about where and what politics is and about what the alternatives to it can and cannot be. It is nevertheless dubious as a claim to scholarly history and is partial at best in its depiction of contemporary situations and tendencies. It also affirms the legitimacy of limits in both space and time at which all the vaunted claims to universality, humanity and enlightenment are necessarily open to suspension, in ways that I ultimately find intolerable. Consequently, I can only endorse the claims made by some of my commentators that it might be possible to begin one’s analysis in some other way: through empirical accounts of transformative practices (VaughanWilliams); by taking less stereotypical accounts of cosmopolitanism more seriously (James Brassett); by seeing that politics already occurs in spatiotemporalities that elude the official limits of modern politics (Tom Lundborg); or by engaging minor and dissonant writers rather than the same wretched canon of famous political theorists (Constantinou). I would happily extend the list to include the kind of politics we might appreciate more by ‘seeing like a city’; or by thinking more intensively about the relationship between the practices of sovereignty associated with states in a system of states and the practices of sovereignty that sustain capitalism as an ultimate source of (neoliberal) value. I mention many other such alternative starting points during my brief circular tour of the various ways in which claims about state sovereignty have been theorized so as to recognize some of their broader historical resonances, and thus to understand what might be involved in claims about novelty. Yet, even though apparent alternatives have already made substantial accommodations with established conventions, it seems clear enough to me that it is increasingly difficult to map, say, cities, citizenships, legal jurisdictions, cultural practices or whatever regulation of the circulation of capital as may now exist onto the approved cartographies of statist and 308

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international sovereignties. I would certainly not want to ground many of my own judgements about what is currently of political significance upon the categories I use as a regulative ideal in this book. Again, however, the difficulty with identifying a range of possibly interesting and important phenomena is that it is helpful to have some prior sense of what counts as interesting and important, and in relation to which communities of knowledge. This is no small difficulty. In this context, I obviously appreciate Jens Bartelson’s attempts to resist the grip of the standard historiography of IR by telling an alternative story; we share a deep sense of the crucial importance of such resistance. I am less persuaded not only by the specificities of his particular historical narrative, but especially by the implication that just one alternative narrative is sufficient to derail the conventions. Hobbes already played a version of this move in his alternative account of political creation. It is not one I think we should emulate. What counts as a history that might ground the values of a future politics is itself a matter of political authorization and thus a practice that will have to be negotiated politically by people and peoples with competing commitments to history. I would also say that if we are to ground our analysis upon social facts, the presence of people willing to demand radical (and not just statist) distinctions between themselves and others requires more urgent attention than those who may be acting as if some sort of world politics already exists. Moreover, Bartelson takes me to task for not providing criteria for identifying a more just world order. This is, I would say, not quite right; but it is also beside the point. I have engaged in many collaborative explorations of what a just world order might look like – it is not exactly a neglected topic – but this book is explicitly concerned with much harder questions about the practices and principles through which competing accounts of justice and order might come to have authority, in relation to which world, and within what limits. In this respect, I have also drawn rather different lessons than Bartelson about the relevance of the ways we have come to understand various transitions to modernity (continuities as well as ruptures), as well as the role of skepticism (which is not agnosticism) as a necessary virtue of enlightenment. It is Brassett who asks the hardest question, about what I mean when I speak about political imagination. This is a term that became useful once old distinctions between truth and ideology became unworkable, and the more grandly utopian calls for a more visionary politics ceased to inspire. The more I used the term, however, the more it felt like a temporary plug in a very large hole, and it does indeed stick out like a sore thumb. I would not want to defend my usage as anything more than that, but I do agree that this is a problem that requires far more extensive discussion. I suspect that becoming lost with some of Constantinou’s favorite writers, as well as more sensitive ears, might be just r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 10, 2, 286–310

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as productive in this respect as the more obvious sites of difficulty named, say, Plato, Marx or Foucault. On this question, also, it remains the case that the limits of an internationalized political order ought to awake many forms of political theory from their dogmatic slumbers. R.B.J. Walker University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada and Pontifica Universidade Cato´lica do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [email protected]

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