Description
While there is widespread recognition that the project of critique, which entered IR in the 1980s, has fallen into crisis, there is no consensus on either the cause or the meaning of this predicament. By locating it at the most general level, that of the international, this paper interprets the crisis of critique in relation to the wider theoretical malaise of IR since the end of the Third Debate. The paper argues that the fundamental deficit of critique in IR is that it has never articulated a compelling conception of the international itself that would displace the Realist/Liberal understanding. Instead, critique always engaged ‘mainstream’ IR within the space of the international, its assumption being that it could exist in and contest that space. What it has found, however, is that it cannot – hence its crisis or exhaustion. This failure, however, is in fact the real success of critique. For, in reaching its own limit, it has also exposed the limit of IR generally. What the failure of critique has revealed is that IR has no concept of the international. That is, it has no explanation of why there is such a thing as the international at all and what it means. This is the root of the contemporary malaise of IR – its own basic object is still a theoretical mystery to it. The crisis of IR, though, is that it cannot develop an adequate concept of the international, resolving the mystery at its core, and remain ‘International Relations’.
