Introduction

Critical approaches are central to a flourishing study of international relations. They produce arguably the most exciting and challenging contemporary research, and provide crucial insights to scholars and students alike seeking to think through and in, and even move beyond, the current global conjuncture. As Michel Foucault argues:

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest … . As soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible.

(Foucault, 1988, 154–155) Over the years, critical approaches have questioned the very existence of the discipline of international relations as a separate field, and argued that it perpetuates colonial relations and can suffocate inquiry. Scholars labelled ‘critical’ have established productive trans-disciplinary connections, adding links with areas such as geography, sociology and anthropology to the long established, if sometimes fractious, relationships with history and politics. Creative practice, for example from the visual arts, literature and performance, has been added to the repertoire of methods and forms of analysis employed in international relations research. Some scholars have looked to the physical sciences – astrophysics or quantum mechanics, for example – for inspiration. These adventures in critical international relations have brought depth and substance to what was once, thirty years ago, an isolated and introverted field, largely ignored by those located in other disciplines who are concerned with global affairs. However, there are dangers as well as positives in working under the banner of critical international relations, as will be discussed in the early chapters of the volume.