My name is Julian Reid, a gardener from Wiltshire, UK. The title of this book, Totally Unexpected Poems, is based on my experiences, from things that have happened to me, things I have seen or listened to and people I have met throughout my life.

This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence.

While Foucault s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies.

Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of development, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and underdevelopment of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.

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Newly available in paperback, this book overturns existing understandings of the origins and futures of the War on Terror for the purposes of International Relations theory. It demonstrates why this is not a war in defense of the integrity of human life, but a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are a fundamental cause of the conflict. The question of the future of humanity is posed by this war, but only in the sense that its resolution depends on our abilities to move beyond the limits of dominant understandings of the human and its politics. Theorizing with and beyond the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio and Negri, this book examines the possibilities for such a movement. What forms does human life take, it asks, when liberal understandings of humanity are no longer understood as horizons to strive for, but impositions against which the human must struggle in order to fulfil its destiny? What forms does the human assume when war against liberal regimes becomes the determining condition of its possibility? Answers to such questions are pressing, this book argues, if we earnestly desire an escape from the current impasses of international politics.

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the 'realities' of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live? This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the 'realities' of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live? This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

This edited volume deploys Deleuzian thinking to re-theorize fascism as a mutable problem in changing orders of power relations dependent on hitherto misunderstood social and political conditions of formation. The book provides a theoretically distinct approach to the problem of fascism and its relations with liberalism and modernity in both historical and contemporary contexts. It serves as a seminal intervention into the debate over the causes and consequences of contemporary wars and global political conflicts as well as functioning as an accessible guide to the theoretical utilities of Deleuzian thought for International Relations (IR) in a manner that is very much lacking in current debates about IR. Covering a wide array of topics, this volume will provide a set of original contributions focussed in particular upon the contemporary nature of war; the increased priorities afforded to the security imperative; the changing designs of bio-political regimes, fascist aesthetics; nihilistic tendencies and the modernist logic of finitude; the politics of suicide; the specific desires upon which fascism draws and, of course, the recurring pursuit of power. An important contribution to the field, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, fascism and international relations theory.

This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies. Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.

This edited volume deploys Deleuzian thinking to re-theorize fascism as a mutable problem in changing orders of power relations dependent on hitherto misunderstood social and political conditions of formation. It shifts the theory of fascism in International Relations from its prevailing macro-historical moorings to focus on what Deleuze called micro-fascism. It demonstrates the insufficiencies of both traditional and existing critical accounts of relations between fascism and modernity, contextualizing its own Deleuzian account in contrast with the development of historical, liberal, critical and post-structuralist theories of fascism developed to date. The book provides a theoretically distinct approach to the problem of fascism and its relations with liberalism and modernity in both historical and contemporary contexts. It serves as a seminal intervention into the debate over the causes and consequences of contemporary wars and global political conflicts as well as functioning as an accessible guide to the theoretical utilities of Deleuzian thought for IR in a manner that is very much lacking in current debates about International Relations. Recognising that Deleuze & Guttari's account of fascism aligns it with many of the concerns which continue to trouble International Relations theorists today -- not least the global nature of war and the incessant desire for broader securitisation, so engaging with this aspect of their work is more pressing than ever. In light of this, this volume will draw upon their analysis to provide new critical commentaries into the phenomenon of fascism in the 21st Century. Covering a wide array of topics, all within the general remit of International Relations, this volume will provide a set of original contributions focussed in particular upon the contemporary nature of war; the increased priorities afforded to the security imperative; the changing designs of bio-political regimes, fascist aesthetics;

Throughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deployed by colonial powers to their own advantages and ends. Historically the indigenous have been represented as belonging to a past temporality in ways that legitimized colonial rule in the present and future. This book provides a cutting-edge, theoretically innovative, and analytically detailed response to significant developments occurring in the fields of indigenous governance. This book will explore the interfaces between power and indigenous critique by discussing widely articulated attributes of indigenous subjectivity. The book raises questions about the surfaces of contact between neoliberalism and indigeneity today. We know much by now about the long history of colonial violence that arose from the western desire to transform indigenous peoples on account of their perceived inferiority. We recognize and understand much less of the violence which arises from the purported desire to protect indigenous peoples and 'the ontological alterity they are said to embody. Yet that is the form, this book asserts, which neoliberal violence towards indigenous peoples now takes.

This edition of the building accounts is put into a wider context with a study of its founder, Richard Fox. Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was founded in 1517 by Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester. He intended it to educate students in classical Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and their literature; Erasmus praised it as a scholarly achievement, and a beacon of Renaissance classical learning. The heart of this book is an edition of the original fortnightly building site accounts of 1517-1518, giving us a window onto a late-medieval building site, with its detailsof early sixteenth-century building materials, craft techniques, project management skills and working conditions, including siesta periods and sub-contracting. The introduction describes Fox's long road to 1517: his motives far more complicated than a bishop looking for worldly fame and heavenly reward. Born into a Lincolnshire yeoman, Fox studied law at Oxford, rebelled against Richard III and became Henry VII's closest political adviser. Taken together,they provide a detailed account of the foundation of the College, both literal and metaphorical.

Throughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deployed by colonial powers to their own advantages and ends. Historically the indigenous have been represented as belonging to a past temporality in ways that legitimized colonial rule in the present and future. This book provides a cutting-edge, theoretically innovative, and analytically detailed response to significant developments occurring in the fields of indigenous governance. This book will explore the interfaces between power and indigenous critique by discussing widely articulated attributes of indigenous subjectivity. The book raises questions about the surfaces of contact between neoliberalism and indigeneity today. We know much by now about the long history of colonial violence that arose from the western desire to transform indigenous peoples on account of their perceived inferiority. We recognize and understand much less of the violence which arises from the purported desire to protect indigenous peoples and 'the ontological alterity they are said to embody. Yet that is the form, this book asserts, which neoliberal violence towards indigenous peoples now takes.

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to 'making life live'. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls 'the biohuman'. Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing. The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to 'making life live'. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls 'the biohuman'. Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing. The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

This is a book which completely overturns existing understandings of the origins and futures of the War on Terror for the purposes of International Relations theory. As the author shows, this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life against an enemy defined simply by a contradictory will for the destruction of human life as commonly supposed by its liberal advocates. It is a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being put to the test if not rejected outright. Seeking a way out of this conflict must in turn mean learning to question the limits of existing understandings of what constitutes human life and its political potentialities. The pursuit of such a line of questioning is integral to the biopolitical analysis developed in this book. -- .