Political Science Workshop: The Grand Split? How The World is Dividing
Panel Two: A Different World Order – new challenges for International Relations
Hans-Martin Jaeger
Liberal international order, colonial-imperial aporias, and geontopower
It may by now be postcolonial common sense that debates about the crisis or resilience of liberal international order or international society in mainstream IR much like invocations of rules-based international order by Western policymakers remain fraught by (at best obliquely acknowledged) silences and aporias around, if not nostalgia for, Western colonial and imperial legacies and ongoing colonialities of power. How else to make sense of Western opposition to Russia’s imperial designs on Ukraine and simultaneous support for Israel’s ongoing colonial (or necropolitical) rule over Palestinian territories and lives? Or 32 Western countries’ co-sponsorship of Ukraine’s case against Russia under the Genocide Convention at the ICJ, while withholding (or at best, tepidly endorsing) a similar commitment to rules-based international order in South Africa’s case against Israel under the same convention? Beyond these colonial-imperial aporias, my intervention will explore whether such legitimate postcolonial concerns over life and death may yet be obscuring larger “geontopolitical” challenges of the Desert, the Virus, and the Animist at the boundary of life and nonlife (Povinelli 2016) looming in the background and the future of current geopolitical conflicts.