Description
How have social and political movements deployed a politics of scale to make claims, forge solidarities and imagine worlds? Breaking with international relations' somewhat rigid imaginary of levels of analysis, this panel draws on anticolonial, feminist, queer, indigenous, posthumanist and other critical approaches to re-centre the question of scale in the analysis of world politics. By exploring totality, smallness, intimacy, and gigantism, the panel will suggest methods for analysing how power operates—and is resisted—across different scales, from the personal to the global. It will suggest that a reconsideration of scale is central to theorising international power, with implications for how we think about capitalism, imperialism, and decolonisation. In the process, it will also suggest different ways of addressing the conceptual issues and pitfalls that commonly emerge when we try to describe the interrelationship between scales.
