Barder - Empire Within (Interventions)

This important book challenges some of the foundational categories and assumptions of mainstream international relations theory by insisting that practices that take place in the colonies inevitably travel back to the metropole and transform modes of governance and governmentality at home. By examining the displacement of the camp as a technique of carcerality, surveillance technologies, and neoliberal political economies from over there (Iraq, Afghanistan or Latin America) to over here, Barder brilliantly shows the processes that are central to the imperial management of populations at home and abroad.

Laleh Khalili, School of Oriental and African Studies, UK

In this outstanding book, Alexander Barder provides a powerful and enticing account of the centrality of hierarchy in the international movement of norms and practices. Offering a fascinating analysis of transnational flows of violence, surveillance techniques and neoliberal policy, Barder reveals the multidirectional diffusion of norms, which transforms not only imperial domains but also their metropoles. Especially noteworthy is the focus on the experimentation of the United States in its periphery, experimentation which comes to have ramifications for U.S. democracy. Empire Within is a must-read for scholars interested in norm diffusion, globalization [human rights?] and hierarchy in international society

Ann Towns, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Alexander Barder has returned imperialism to international relations theory, which had long persisted in the view that the world is flat. His geography is more uneven, but with imperial power nonetheless on display here and there. And then what it learns 'there' is not insulated, but makes its way back here. A terrific antidote to the leaden approaches to international power.

Vijay Prashad, author, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South

If empires victims intuitively recognise in the sufferings of the metropoles peoples a repeat of their own experience of violence and erasure, Empire Within unravels the genealogy of this disturbingly common destiny. Barder offers a fascinating, chilling account of empire brought home, and a reminder that knowledges rarely stagnate or dissolve in the flux of human activity nothing is lost, all is translated. This simultaneously delineates a new horizon of postcolonial solidarity born of a shared experience that can reinvest older knowledges of resistance for todays common struggles.

Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Aberystwyth University, UK

Empire Within

This book explores the reverberating impacts between historical and contemporary imperial laboratories and their metropoles through three case studies concerning violence, surveillance and political economy.

The invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 forced the United States to experiment and innovate in considerable ways. Faced with growing insurgencies that called into question its entire mission, the occupation authorities engaged in a series of tactical and technological innovations that changed the way they combated insurgents and managed local populations. This book presents new material through three case studies concerning violence, surveillance and political economy, to develop the argument that imperial and colonial contexts function as a laboratory in which techniques of violence, population control and economic principles are developed and subsequently introduced into the domestic society of the imperial state. The text challenges the widely taken for granted notion that the diffusion of norms and techniques is a one-way street from the imperial metropole to the dependent or weak periphery.

This work will be of great interest to scholars of international relations, critical security studies and international relations theory.

Alexander D. Barder is a political scientist at Florida International University in the Department of Politics and International Relations. Barder is the author (with Franois Debrix) of Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence and Horror in World Politics (Routledge, 2011).

Interventions

Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes.

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes.

We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors:

Jenny Edkins ( ) and

Nick Vaughan-Williams ( )

As Michel Foucault has famously stated, knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. In this spirit the Edkins-Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IRs traditional geopolitical imaginary.

Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Mnoa, USA

The series aims to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural and post-colonial traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics.

Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines, and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.

Critical Theorists and International Relations

Edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams

Ethics as Foreign Policy

Britain, the EU and the other

Dan Bulley

Universality, Ethics and International Relations

A grammatical reading

Vronique Pin-Fat

The Time of the City

Politics, philosophy, and genre

Michael J. Shapiro

Governing Sustainable Development

Partnership, protest and power at the world summit

Carl Death

Insuring Security

Biopolitics, security and risk

Luis Lobo-Guerrero

Foucault and International Relations

New critical engagements Edited by Nicholas J. Kiersey and Doug Stokes

International Relations and Non-Western Thought

Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity

Edited by Robbie Shilliam

Autobiographical International Relations

I, IR

Edited by Naeem Inayatullah

War and Rape

Law, memory and justice

Nicola Henry

Madness in International Relations

Psychology, security and the global governance of mental health

Alison Howell

Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt

Geographies of the nomos

Edited by Stephen Legg

Politics of Urbanism

Seeing like a city

Warren Magnusson

Beyond Biopolitics

Theory, violence and horror in world politics

Franois Debrix and Alexander D. Barder

The Politics of Speed

Capitalism, the state and war in an accelerating world