Abstract
Notwithstanding its structuring characteristic, one element that is rarely thought about – if even considered – when problematising international relations (IR) is time. It is precisely in this direction that Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations moves, which immediately makes the book an important contribution to the discipline.
By bringing together ‘critical theorists, artists, and poets to engage systematically the temporal structure of the relationship of politics and violence’ (p. 15), the book sheds light, quite successfully, on the importance of having time and temporality – and the articulation of these elements – as essential parts of the process of theorising IR. Collectively, the contributors of the book ‘ask about the production of the earthly, from the vantage of time and temporality of the anti-colonial and postcolonial event’ (p. 16). Consequently, the book enables an analyst of the international reality to drastically shift his or her framework of analysis while positioning time as the very core element of the problematisation of international politics. This is a noteworthy contribution.
The book is organised into 19 chapters and 3 sections. Its first section, titled ‘Contemporary Problematics: Tensions, Slavery, Colonization and Accumulation’, discusses themes such as temporality and insecurity, temporality and violence, ethnography and black insurgency, to name a few. The section collectively deals ‘with tensions of the neo-colonial and postcolonial event, pointing to the untimeliness of their readings’ (p. 16).
Its second section, titled ‘Neoliberal Temporalities’, discusses issues like the violence of the work of migrant day labourers in Seattle and Portland, homelessness in Japan, the insecurity of the immigrant in the Mediterranean or Hurricane Katrina, to mention just a few examples. This section ‘addresses different temporalities and the ways they provide insights to think and understand a defatal present beyond the fatalisms of neoliberalism’ (p. 17).
The third and final section, ‘Poetic Interventions for Social Transformation’, offers chapters containing poetry and film stills. Collectively, the section shows ‘how the colonized body takes hold in a universality of time and a universality of relations of time to disrupt the project of particularity that has never been the concern of the colonized’ (p. 19).
The book is an interesting mosaic of contributions that is of great interest for all scholars and students who are either interested in perceiving a structuring – although often neglected – element of the international reality, or seriously engaged in rethinking the way international politics is problematised.