R. B. J. Walker

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R. B. J. Walker
Born 1947
CitizenshipBritish & Canadian
Academic background
Alma mater Queen's University (MA & Ph.D)
University of Wales, Swansea (B.A.)
Academic work
Institutions University of Victoria & Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Main interests Political theory, global politics, concepts of space/time, principles and practices of sovereignty, and early modern political thought
Notable worksInside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory

R. B. J. "Rob" Walker (born 1947) is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada, and PUC-Rio. He is the founding co-editor, with Didier Bigo, of the journal International Political Sociology, and long-term editor of the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political . With his colleague Warren Magnusson, he is a founding member of UVIC's interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought. His work, while critical of international relations and political theory disciplines, addresses a broad range of problematics bound up with practices and theories of spatiotemporality, boundaries, and sovereignties.

Contents

Borders and boundaries

Walker has written extensively on the logic of "inside/outside", a dichotomy which enables and frames international relations and its theorizations. [1] For Walker, border practices and boundary discourses, spatial demarcations and conceptualizations of here/there and us/them, operate as important sites for understanding these "inside/outside" logics. Vaughan-Williams, assessing the study of borders within international relations disciplines, praises Walker's work for "offering the most sustained engagement with the problem of borders, especially the relationship between the concept of the border of the state and sovereignty, at the intersection of IR and political theory." [2]

State sovereignty

Perhaps Walker's largest body of work is on the topic of state sovereignty. Because modern theories of international relations were created in a time when state sovereignty was a given cornerstone of political theorizing, modernist theorists continue this trend, despite it becoming increasingly less apparent. Though Walker denies cosmopolitanism and the assumption that state sovereignty will eventually be a thing of the past, he stresses the importance of Modern theorists to acknowledge the decline of a states ability to act autonomously within its own fixed borders. The European Union is an excellent example of states that are slowly losing sovereignty in a way many traditional IR theorists fail to realize. [3]

Political theory

One of Walker's biggest contributions to international relations discourse is his analysis of theories. Walker rejects the dichotomy between theory and practice, where epistemology is favoured over ontology. Practice is "theory-laden", inseparable, and a different theoretical approach will reveal different practical outcomes. [4] It is no small wonder that Walker describes Realism and its tenancies (often afflicted by a negative perception of mankind) in a negative light: "As it informs a rather large and influential literature on geopolitics and military affairs, realism has often degenerated into little more than an antipolitical apology for cynicism and physical force." [5] For Walker, the use of such a theory leads to increasingly negative and cynical practice.

Postmodernism

Walker is often cited as being a postmodernist thinker, [6] [7] bringing postmodernism into the eye of scholars alongside Richard Ashley. [8] Despite countless theorists and scholars saying otherwise, Walker himself does not claim to be a postmodernist, but rather rejects this principal. Walker, being more concerned with theories themselves and the spatial-temporal factors of their creation, sees postmodernism not as theory separate from modern theories, but simply a product of its own inception. In this sense postmodernism is not the answer to modernism, but the continuation thereof. [9]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to describe a historical era said to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era.

Postmodern music is music in the art music tradition produced in the postmodern era. It also describes any music that follows aesthetical and philosophical trends of postmodernism. As an aesthetic movement it was formed partly in reaction to modernism but is not primarily defined as oppositional to modernist music. Postmodernists question the tight definitions and categories of academic disciplines, which they regard simply as the remnants of modernity.

Sovereignty Concept that a state or governing body has the right and power to govern itself without outside interference

Sovereignty is the supreme authority within a territory. In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body, or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people in order to establish a law or change an existing law. In political theory, sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme legitimate authority over some polity. In international law, sovereignty is the exercise of power by a state. De jure sovereignty refers to the legal right to do so; de facto sovereignty refers to the factual ability to doing so. This can become an issue of special concern upon the failure of the usual expectation that de jure and de facto sovereignty exist at the place and time of concern, and reside within the same organization.

Discourse

The term discourse identifies and describes written and spoken communications. In semantics and discourse analysis, a discourse is a conceptual generalization of conversation. In a field of enquiry and social practice, the discourse is the vocabulary for investigation of the subject, e.g. legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, et cetera. In the works of the philosopher Michel Foucault, a discourse is “an entity of sequences, of signs, in that they are enouncements (énoncés).”

International relations Study of relationships between two or more states

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Fredric Jameson

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Reflectivism is a broad umbrella label, used primarily in International Relations theory, for a range of theoretical approaches which oppose rational-choice accounts of social phenomena and, perhaps, positivism more generally. The label was popularised by Robert Keohane in his presidential address to the International Studies Association in 1988. The address was entitled "International Institutions: Two Approaches", and contrasted two broad approaches to the study of international institutions. One was "rationalism", the other what Keohane referred to as "reflectivism". Rationalists — including realists, neo-realists, liberals, neo-liberals, and scholars using game-theoretic or expected-utility models — are theorists who adopt the broad theoretical and ontological commitments of rational-choice theory.

Postmodernism in political science refers to the use of postmodern ideas in political science. Postmodernists believe that many situations which are considered political in nature can not be adequately discussed in traditional realist and liberal approaches to political science. Postmodernists cite examples such as the situation of a Benedictine University “draft-age youth whose identity is claimed in national narratives of ‘national security’ and the universalizing narratives of the ‘rights of man,’” of “the woman whose very womb is claimed by the irresolvable contesting narratives of ‘church,’ ‘paternity,’ ‘economy,’ and ‘liberal polity.’ In these cases, postmodernists argue that there are no fixed categories, stable sets of values, or common sense meanings to be understood in their scholarly exploration.

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Carole Pateman

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Andrew Linklater FAcSS is an international relations academic, and is the current Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. In 2000, he was featured as one of the fifty thinkers in Martin Griffith's Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations.

Didier Bigo is a French academic from Lille and Professor of International Relations at King's College London and at Sciences Po, Paris. He has written two books by himself and has been the editor for many others.

Raia Prokhovnik, is Reader in Politics at the Open University's Faculty of Social Sciences, for their Department of Politics and International Studies, and founding editor of the journal Contemporary Political Theory. She is the chair of the OU's interdisciplinary politics module, Living political ideas, and contributed to other modules including Power, dissent, equality: understanding contemporary politics.

Critical realism (philosophy of the social sciences)

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References

  1. Nick Vaughan-Williams. (2009) Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  2. Ibid., 51.
  3. Walker, RBJ (1993) "Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory", Cambridge University Press, p. 159-179
  4. Walker, RBJ (1993) "Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory", Cambridge University Press, p. 8
  5. Walker, RBJ (1987) "Realism, Change and International Political Theory", International Studies Quarterly31, 1: 65-86
  6. Woods, T. (1999) "Beginning postmodernism", Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 250
  7. Griffiths, M et al (1999) "Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations", New York: Routledge p. 274
  8. Gibbs, D. (2000) "Is There Room for the Real World in the Postmodernist Universe?" p. 6
  9. Walker, RBJ (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge University Press, p. 10

Further reading