The body of International Relations

Abstract

International Relations, in both theory and practice, has been increasingly concerned with a proliferation of modes of violence that use, target, and construct bodies in complex ways that challenge notions of security. The body has become the focal point to practices of security and international relations, contrary to the conventional IR/security understanding of bodies as apolitical objects. One of the deep ironies of security studies is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, the violence and vulnerability experienced by those bodies is largely ignored. Rather, bodies are implicitly understood as physical, apolitical entities among both traditional security studies scholars and feminists. This is surprising given that IR has been centrally concerned with the politics of harming bodies through warfare and other forms of political violence, as well as how to protect and secure bodies and promote life. This lacuna has limited the scope of thinking about the purposes and effects of violence. I argue that a focal shift to bodies in the practices of torture, suicide bombing, and precision warfare requires an alternative mode of knowing the human as an embodied subject of international violence and security drawing on currents of contemporary feminist theory. My project contributes to an understanding of violence that cannot be reduced to the strategic actions of rational actors or a destructive violation of community laws and norms. I argue that violence can also be understood as a creative force for shaping the limits of how we understand ourselves as political subjects, as well as forming the boundaries of our bodies and political communities. Building on the resources of IR and feminist theory, I use concrete international events to explore the embodiment of the human subject in practices of security and violence in order to interrogate concepts of sovereignty, violence, and vulnerability. I show how practices of international relations can (and should) be rethought in the discipline in terms of the production of bodies in their agency and historicity. By theorizing violence as a productive force in constituting the embodied subject, my work also contributes to feminist work on bodies in relation to international practices of violence and security. This project therefore has the potential to provide the ground for a fundamental re-thinking of core concepts associated with security and ethics in the field of IR.