Description
This paper explains how and why the conceptual grammar of IR and security studies are inadequate for understanding international politics and security, and calls for the disciplinary conversation to move beyond the comparatively narrow categories of state and body toward the broader, more heterogeneous lenses of land and flesh. IR has long been underpinned by the body, although this was hidden from view until feminist and critical interventions brought embodiment to the center of the field. Work over the past three decades has excavated how international politics is profoundly embodied: bodies are made and unmade through practices of violence and security, in ways that are biopolitical, necropolitical, gendered, racialized, and species-differentiated. Yet the particular body at the foundation of IR—the masculinized, racialized, heteropatriarchal Leviathan—has been revealed as deeply unhealthy for global politics while the body itself has been found to be profoundly, ontologically insecure and precarious. Building on earlier interventions, including Wilcox’s Bodies of Violence (2015) and Purnell’s Rethinking the Body in Global Politics (2021), this paper consolidates scholarship that has unsettled, denaturalized, and politicized the body as ‘the political object par excellence’ (Epstein, 2021: 1) while highlighting alternative imaginaries that challenge the Eurocentric and exclusionary body politic (Fishel, Krickel-Khoi, Volkner) and have worked to reframe states and international systems as interdependent, multiple, and dialogical rather than sovereign, bounded, and singular. This paper also advances a radical shift from focusing on privileged and ontologically rare embodied subjects to attending to differently/dis embodied subjects-objects, ‘nobodies’, and the more-than-human(ised). Drawing on Hortense Spillers’ distinction between body and flesh, this paper details the alternate concept of enfleshment and explain how enfleshment exposes the limits of IR’s increasingly corporeal ontology while opening new possibilities for theorizing global politics.
