Description
In thinking through how the study of international life might be fruitfully advanced at this moment, this paper invites us to pay attention to the notion of ‘return’. A commonsensical and often seemingly banal term, it nonetheless also forms an increasingly central feature of international life – the politics of migration and soldiering, respectively, are only two examples of areas in which distinct imaginaries of return are progressively invoked. Tracing the inconsistencies inherent to such imaginaries, the paper argues that return remains an under-studied aporia at the heart of the contemporary international, and of Western political theory more broadly. Asking, with reference to the two above examples, what a view of international life and international studies alike through the lens of return might look like, the paper picks up recent exhortations for critical work to be alert to the prefix ‘re-‘ in interrogating novel renderings of seen-before and circulating practices and discourses (Aradau, 2019). Perhaps paradoxically, then, the paper proposes that one productive way forward for the study of the international may lie precisely in always being open to going(s) back.
