Description
The paper explores the limits and possibilities of critique in “critical” International Rela-tions (IR). “Critical” IR, we argue, is at an impasse: increasingly self-referential and paro-chial, it is no longer emancipatory. This article identifies the lack of normative orientation in “critical” IR as the fundamental problem. Due its adoption of predominantly non-normative understanding of its epistemologies, it can neither rethink nor reorient political praxis. We demonstrate the lack of normativity through three examples: the equation of “theory” and “ideology”, securitization theory, and the (mis)use of deconstruction. Taking inspiration for the role of the critical theorist as outlined by Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, we subsequently develop notions of thin and thick normativity. Both concep-tions of normativity, we argue, are necessary in order to reconceptualise critical theorizing so that it is both emancipatory and global in its underlying epistemologies and ontologies. This is illustrated in the final section through an engagement with cosmologies, which, we argue, exhibit both thick and thin normativity. Such an engagement opens “critical” IR up to cultural (including religious) difference while not essentialising it into binaries and hier-archies.
