Description
Recent years have a seen a proliferation of approaches to global politics that emphasise a concern with the everyday. For some, the everyday is a site of discipline and government, where routines and bodies are ordered; for others, it is a site of resistance, where previously untapped subversive tactics can perform global politics otherwise. This everyday turn has featured across IR, Security and IPE, but also across critical perspectives including feminism, post-/decolonialism, constructivism, post-structuralism and queer theory. A basic insight is that the everyday can provide important empirical, theoretical and political extensions to study the international. This panel contributes to this emerging terrain, foregrounding the everyday as site for the imagination and negotiation of global ethics. Beyond the traditional binaries (ideal/non-ideal, cosmopolitan/communitarian), the everyday can help us reflect on how such narratives are imagined, enacted or forgotten. An everyday ethics of the international engages with the ongoing and lived negotiation of clashing responsibilities, values and emotions in often banal sites and quixotic relationships, where obligations are expressed in changing vernaculars rather than abstract universals. It asks, how can starting from the everyday change our perspective on ethical dilemmas in IR? What are the dangers and potentials of such an approach?
