Ebook: Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives

Time transforms the way we see world politics and insinuates itself into the ways we act. In this groundbreaking volume, Agathangelou and Killian bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to tackle time and temporality in international relations. The authors – critical theorists, artists, and poets – theorize and speak from the vantage point of the anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial event. They investigate an array of experiences and structures of violence – oppression, neocolonization, slavery, war, poverty and exploitation – focusing on the tensions produced by histories of slavery and colonization and disrupting dominant modes of how we understand present times.

This edited volume takes IR in a new direction, defatalizing the ways in which we think about dominant narratives of violence, ‘peace’ and ‘liberation’, and renewing what it means to decolonize today’s world. It challenges us to confront violence and suffering and articulates another way to think the world, arguing for an understanding of the ‘present’ as a vulnerable space through which radically different temporal experiences appear. And it calls for a disruption of the "everyday politics of expediency" in the guise of neoliberalism and security.

This volume reorients the ethical and political assumptions that affectively, imaginatively, and practically captivate us, simultaneously unsettling the familiar, but dubious, promises of a modernity that decimates political life. Re-animating an international political, the authors evoke people’s struggles and movements that are neither about redemption nor erasure, but a suspension of time for radical new beginnings.

Anna M. Agathangelou is Associate Professor in Political Science and Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, and co-director of Global Change Institute, Nicosia. Her academic interests include postcolonial and Marxist theory; transnational feminisms; critical theories of empire, colonization and slavery, race, sex and bodies; militarization of global relations; Marxist epistemologies and poetics of transformation.

Kyle D. Killian is a family therapist and Core Faculty in the Marriage and Family Therapy Program at Capella University. He has published on intercultural and interracial couples, refugee families, trauma, and self-care and vicarious resilience in helping professionals. A blogger at Psychology Today, Dr. Killian has developed measures of traumatic stress, critical thinking, cultural identity, vicarious resilience, and emotional intelligence.

Reviews

'Modern politics has been shaped both by specific understandings of the temporality of human existence and by enormous forces demanding either amnesia about temporality or its translation into overbearing narratives of a linear history. The consequences can be read through our prevailing accounts of sovereign states, international relations, modernization, development, citizenship and the status of humanity as such. While still resilient, these accounts are being challenged at every turn. Shaped especially by postcolonial critiques of international relations, this remarkable and provocative collection of essays reports from many sites at which the politics of temporality and the temporalities of novel forms of politics press against the waning authority of all spatialized categories.' - R. B. J. Walker, University of Victoria, Canada

'An exceptional assemblage of essays written by an impressive array of critical theorists, artists and poets. The contributors lay down a powerful intellectual challenge aimed at disrupting dominant theorizations in IR, to "unhinge time from its presumed neutrality", and provoke engagement with the temporal structure of the relationship of politics and violence. The authors expand the anticolonial and postcolonial critique of the project of Modernity and the West or Global North as the primary temporal analytical site against which all else is to be measured or interpreted. The book provokes its readers to transform assumptions and re-imagine possibilities of an anti-racist and de-colonial vision of world politics, focused on "the politics of life" and immanent transformations of social relations.' - Barry Gills, University of Helsinki, Finland

'Time, Temporality, and Violence in International Relations: (De)Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives is obligatory reading for anyone interested in understanding how space and time constitutes the unyielding forms (sovereignty, the state, etc.) that are the staple of research in International Relations. Exploring time’s transformative promises, the texts assembled in this volume dare to unsettle the spatializing political categories of world politics, which hide how and why colonial and racial violence have constituted the global present.' - Denise Ferreira da Silva, Queen Mary University of London, UK

'Refusing to cede time to colonial and neo-liberal tempos and chronologies, Agathangelou and Killian bring together an accomplished range of authors who rethink the past, present and fate of international relations in stunningly diverse ways.' - Robbie Shilliam, Queen Mary University of London, UK