Alker and IR: Global Studies in an Interconnected World by Renée Marlin-Bennett

Author:Renée Marlin-Bennett [Marlin-Bennett, Renée]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory, International Relations, Social Science, Sociology, Social Theory
ISBN: 9781136624209
Google: SL2oAgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 17548707
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Over time, those of us who study International Relations on a world scale look for order within or cutting across different eras. Thus the modern era is usually seen as a long chapter in human experience in which world history became fully global. Taking strength from scientific, technological, cultural, economic and political developments ..., certain European states achieved global status. In these terms, one can ask “Has America become an Imperial superpower like those of old? Should it be?” More generally, is the modern era ending, or has ended, being replaced by a post-modern one, in which international relations works in different ways? Or are we only re-experiencing a late modern change of hegemons? ...

Global or near-global patterns can be defined in more ways than just in terms of their salient political, military or even economic structures. We follow here Fernand Braudel's belief that civilizations and their encounters with each other offer the longest stories humans can tell, stories in which epochs or eras are only chapters.

And we want to think about the future. What are new patterns of order and disorder likely to look like? Is the world turning into a post-sovereign, post-hegemonic, territorially confused, culturally heterogeneous, environmentally “anarchic” yet economically organized, post-modern disorder ... ?

After a highly topical discussion of the contemporary situation, we will begin our quest for arguable answers to questions about epochal change with a probing look at the previous transition, from the pre-modern era to the modern one. ... And then we shall turn to more extended discussions of civilizational encounters and inter-community development possibilities.

The lecture course is not, in the first instance, about ways of thinking or scholarly debates. Instead it is about great changes in the way ever larger numbers of people live. With Alker's help, students stand back as observers, the better to see what is transpiring in their world, their civilization. Yet the course engages them in story telling. Eras are announced as such, and as chapters in a bigger story. Such terms as modern and post-modern are foregrounded. Most of all marking the difference between the two courses is an emphasis on the world today, “transitions,” “epochal change,” and the future.

The two courses are complementary. Together they reveal Alker to be a voyager, not back in time (as he was in Rediscoveries and Reformulations), but through time rendered in spatial terms. His voyages endorse a view of the world as a manifestly diverse place. This is a cosmological perspective we moderns take for granted – a perspective new to the Renaissance and indispensable to modernity's rise (Bartelson 2009). Like voyagers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries taking their ships from land to land, we find Alker tacking from pre-modern to modern to post-modern eras, and from civilization to civilization. We find him stopping to ask what happens when eras change, civilizations appear and disappear. He may have wanted to call his journey a “modern dialectical approach.” I would call it epochal thinking – the kind of thinking so readily lending itself to story-telling.

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