Political Science

This inquiry into coloniality explores ambivalence -- the simultaneity of fear and desire -- as its instability occurs in discourse, psyche, and is embodied in colonialism. It traces Orientalist discourse’s narcissistic origins and colonial mimicry’s doubledness. Both are shown to be constituted by the conflicting attitudes of fear and desire, leading to splits in the psyche and anxiety in the discourse. Furthermore, this paper seeks to make a theoretical bridge to a third lens and applies the critical psychoanalytical theory of the Abject to elucidate psychosexual implications of ambivalence housed in the bodies of coloniality, such as racism and fetishism.

Many progressive accounts of the 2008 financial crisis have linked it to a conscious attack on government regulation, often by unscrupulous individuals; the Oscar-winning film “Inside Job” is a case in point. Robert Froese’s  “The Limits of Inside Job: Crisis, Ideology, and the Burden of Capitalism” challenges this perspective, arguing that it abstracts the crisis from the underlying logic of capitalism and the way that states and markets mutually constitute each other.

"In Chapter Three, Sampert and Froese explore the crime coverage of certain local and sensational cases of youth crime in the Winnipeg Sun, Winnipeg's tabloid newspaper.  While the authors make many critical findings, their conclusions suggest the media's agenda setting is problematic and creates a barrier for normative, fair and equal justice." (from the introduction)

Recent political critiques and appropriations of Emmanuel Levinas' work demonstrate the need to fundamentally reevaluate the meaning and status of his philosophy. Both the Marxist critiques (often apropos Lacan) and 'third wave' applications interpret Levinas' singular and unique relation to others-a bond which prohibits even the slightest trace of historical, hermeneutic, or political context-as the greatest obstacle to a Levinasian politics. From this standpoint, Levinas offers little more than a hyperbolic ethics that, at best, ignores, and, at worst, provides philosophical cover for, the political status quo (often defined by capitalism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism). To counter this established link between Levinas' philosophy and his potential for political thought, this article reexamines the significance of the decontextualized social relation. I argue that such interpretations misapprehend the intended analytical depth of Levinas' thought, which, in turn, misconstrue the relationship between Levinas and more traditional social ontologies. As a consequence, Levinas' valuable normative import for political theory is obscured. By shifting our perspective, we can understand Levinas as articulating a philosophy of political utopianism, well-suited to the challenges we face in our present conjuncture.

This article seeks to critically engage the recent revival within IR of Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD). While finding that U&CD does indeed hold much promise in its contemporary application to the field of IR, I suggest that contemporary debates around U&CD have all but omitted any sustained attention to the role of labour and labour markets as sources of both unevenness and combination. That labour has, largely, been absent from the recent revival of U&CD is surprising for at least two reasons. First, we must recall that Trotsky’s own rationale behind developing U&CD was precisely a concern with labour and the possibilities for the development of revolutionary class consciousness in the absence of a hitherto assumed evolutionary developmental trajectory. Second, and crucially, we should recall that labour markets were, for Marx, an integral component of unevenness and combination, as elaborated in his discussion of the general law of accumulation and the reserve army of labour. While Trotsky may have been primarily concerned with how the unevenness and combination of productive technologies generated contingent possibilities for class formation in a given social formation, an equally important and related component to be considered is the unevenness and combination of different fractions of labour itself. In moving forward with a research agenda for U&CD within IR, I suggest that the role of labour and labour markets need to be considered in so much as a) how unevenness in productive technologies generates an international division of labour and unevenly dispersed pools of reserve labour which increasingly move across national boundaries in the form of international labour migration, b) how the specific combination of labour populations themselves inform the productive strategies of capital and thus are an active element in determining the uneven quality of the organic composition of capital across space and time, and c) how the uneven and combined character of labour itself importantly changes the character of the state itself as a ‘material condensation of relations of class fractions and class forces’ with consequent implications for the means and mechanisms by which classes are formed, divided, and reproduced.

The comparative literature on capitalist transformations in the settler colonies has been dominated by either ‘staples’ or ‘cultural/behavioral’ models of explanation.  In the ‘staples’ approach, capitalist transformations are understood as a quantitative increase in the density and growth of the internal market. The potential for this type of growth is said to be determined by the particular technological characteristics of the dominant export ‘staple’ (raw commodity), the production of which is determined by world market demand. In the cultural/behavioral models, capitalist transformation is understood as the degree to which institutions are created which foster and reproduce private accumulation. The locus of this transformation is said to be found in the European migrants that come to populate the settler colonies, who by virtue of their cultural heritage seek to actively erect these necessary institutions.  In either case, an overriding logic of functional determinism pervades which is incapable of accounting for the significant qualitative variation in capitalist trajectories amongst the settler colonies. In this paper I suggest that an explanation of differential capitalist trajectories is to be found in the variable nature of class formation in settler colonies. In particular, I suggest that the combination of unique social property relations and material strategies of reproduction in the colonies and in the sending states of the European migrants who would come to populate these colonies, resulted in specific forms of struggle and class formation. Variable class formation, in turn, generated significant differences in the nature of capitalist transformation itself.

Understanding the relationship between race and class is an issue of utmost importance to left praxis today. Indeed, one of the largest rifts in the organization of the working class today is that which is premised on a highly vitriolic and racially charged rejection of the ‘immigrant’ worker and other racialized minorities. To adequately understand the challenges of building labour solidarity it is crucial that we understand the historical genesis of such rifts. This is a challenge that has been unevenly and addressed by Marxist theorizations and has tended to devolve into vulgar functionalism as a means of accounting for the relationship between race and class. This paper proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between race and class in a historically specific set of social formations – the settler colonies. Drawing upon elements of Political Marxism and Trotsky’s theory of Uneven and Combined Development (UCD) I make the following argument. First, in the settler colonies nationalism was a basic, existential precondition of the state. Following this, I argue that nationalism must be understood in the context of the specific social property relations of the capitalist mode of production which makes possible horizontal solidarities. And yet, for these property relations to emerge in the settler states, a grammar of racial exclusion applied to the indigenous populations was required. Thus, despite the surface appearance of formal, horizontal equality that nationalism suggests, in the settler colonies this required the generation of a racially exclusive grammar that manifested in the phenomenon of so-called ‘white nationalism’. As a result, class was understood in explicitly racial terms. Importantly, this meant that labour was self-consciously ‘white labour’. Despite these origins, however, the settler states were also subject to international processes of uneven and combined development which would result in myriad strategies of ‘catch-up’ among which were resort to varying forms of politically coerced labour processes through the importation of racialised immigrant labour. Far from simply a functionalist strategy of capital, however, the racialised stratifications of the labour market which would result emerged from complex interactions between the formation of settler classes, the geopolitical pressure to which settler capitalists were subject and the mix of strategies they pursued in order to compete with established metropoles, as well as the self-interest of white colonial labour.

This article offers a process-mechanism explanation of securitization. To make the case for a process-mechanism account more concrete, I use interpretivist process tracing to explain the crisis episode of the Sun Sea, a Thai cargo ship carrying Sri Lankan asylum-seekers, and the securitization of irregular migration in Canada. Drawing on interviews and grey literature, the article shows how securitization was possible and under what conditions, and argues that ideational dispositions of security organizations induced state officials toward a security interpretation of the the Sun Sea. The article aims to demonstrate that process-mechanism explanations represent a compelling methodological alternative with which to trace and explain securitization. The article sees itself as part of a broader refinement of a sociological variant of securitization theory. It seeks to examine and enhance the contribution that this 'post-Copenhagen' approach – its core assumptions and theoretical framework – makes to the analysis of securitization.

Using the theoretical toolkit of material-semiotics, this article theorizes global migration governance as a governing technology that constitutes migration as an object of global governance. Methodologically, the analysis draws on event observation of the International Organization for Migration's International Dialogue on Migration. Empirically, the article uses the illustrative example of the International Organization for Migration's Migration Governance Index to make the case for a material-semiotic account of global migration governance more concrete. Overall, the article seeks to examine and enhance the contribution practice-theoretical approaches make to the analysis of global governance.

Mapping out the constellation between liberal universalism, cosmopolitanism and International Relations (IR) theory, the following works explicitly politicise the ethics of contemporary cosmopolitanism, thereby responding to the criticism that cosmopolitan theory offers little more than a moralisation of politics. In a series of sustained engagements with IR's major theoretical perspectives, the following books explore the ways in which conventional and alternative perspectives explain the origins, prospects and limits of a modern cosmopolitan view of world politics. Through an examination of recent work by Richard Beardsworth, Gideon Baker and John M. Hobson, this review essay highlights an emerging dialogue between cosmopolitanism and IR. In different ways, and with different implications for IR, the following works develop a theoretically rigorous account of and response to three distinct yet interrelated criticisms against modern cos-mopolitanism: the critique of liberal universalism; the charge of impractical idealism; and lastly, the alleged Eurocentric and imperialist legacy of modern cosmopolitanism. Taken as a whole, these books thus pose an interesting challenge, both to mainstream and...