Description
International Relations Theory is in an existential crisis. Modernity and the attempt to construct an international order is coming to an end. Neither constructivism nor geopolitics seem to be able to ‘save’ the situation. Recent catastrophes have demonstrated the ephemerality of things that we used to take for granted in the international order after the Second World War, like security or norms. Blockades in the UN Security Council, most recently in the context of the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or the Hamas-Israel conflict, denote the empirical contingency of the international system. In this paper, I propose a theory of re-creation in International Relations. I propose a theoretical framing of how things like norms or security can be re-created once they are lost or contingent, along two conceptual dimensions: a mimetic and a metaphysical dimension. Mimesis denotes an aesthetic and simultaneously epistemological category of re-production of a reality (first order), through imitation and performance of simulacra, crafting a second order. Second, a theory of re-creation requires a metaphysical dimension, one that is able to incarnate the state of travelling from one condition to another, while mimicking an order that agents can make sense of. Thus, the re-creation of things, whether security or norms, does not imply an eternal return to the same point, but a transformative process in which agents can ‘travel’ to new conditions, while embracing the same core normative order.
