Fragmenting Spaces of the International and the Critique of Globality

11 March 2015

Time: 5:00 - 7:00pm
Venue: Room 1.08, Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus

Speaker: Prof. Joao Pontes Nogueira (PUC Rio, and visiting professor at the School of Law, Queen Mary)
Chair: Leonie Ansems de Vries

Abstract
One of the distinctive traits of Rob Walker's postructuralism is the critique of the spatio-temporal categories that constitute and reproduce the modern international.  While rendering conventional accounts of world politics utterly problematic, this line of critique also took issue with the 'vertical' move to the global that characterized the different strands of globalization literature as well critical theories seeking to  transcend the antinomies of the international by displacing social and political processes to other (broader) spatial frames.  Alternatively, contemporary contributions in international political sociology, postcolonial thought, new materialism, among others, have tried to understand the social and the political in terms of heterogeneous relations, multiplicities and fractured spatialities without linking them back to structural or political wholes.   One interesting question seems to be whether these efforts to theorize politics transversally, of exposing the contingency of the boundaries of the international, do indeed escape the logic of its reproduction.  In this presentation I engage with Walker's critique of globality to further explore this problem.  

Bio
Joao Pontes Nogueira is Associate Professor of International  Relations at the International Relations Institute at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Recently he was Visiting Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in 2013 and at as well as at the University of Newcastle in 2014.  He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary University of London.   From 2008 to 2012 he was Director of the International Relations Institute (IRI) at PUC-Rio.    He is one of the founders of the Brazilian International Relations Association, and he is currently co-Editor in chief (with Jef Huysmans) of the ISA journal International Political Sociology (IPS).   His fields of interest include international relations theory, the  geopolitics of knowledge in IR, humanitarianism, inequality in world politics; and the role of the BRICS in contemporary international relations.   He has co-authored with Monica Herz "Peru vs. Ecuador: peacemaking amid rivalry" (Lynne Rienner, 2002); "Teoria das Relacoes Internacionais: correntes e debates", with  Nizar Messari (Elsevier/Campus, 2005); edited the book  “Os BRICS e as Transformações na Ordem Internacional” (Editora PUC Rio, 2012) and co-editing, with Rob Walker, "International Relations and the (re)invention of History" (forthcoming).