James Der Derian
Biographic Data
| ID | 253050 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Der Derian |
| GIVEN NAMES | James Der |
| FAMILY NAME | Derian |
| SIGNATURE | DERIAN J D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1950-1572 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 235 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Quantum 3.0”: What Will It Mean for War, Peace, and World Order
Without quantum mechanics, the nuclear and information revolutions of the twentieth century would not have happened. In this article, we examine how new quantum technologies are coming to reshape war and peace in the twenty-first century. Research and development across quantum computing, communications, and sensing has taken on the dynamic of a “quantum race” between major powers, big tech, and academic institutions. A quantum advantage in these…
Quantum espionage: A phenomenology of the Snowden affair
In 2019 Britain’s top spy agency GCHQ staged ‘Top Secret: From Ciphers to Cyber Security’, a major exhibition at the London Science Museum. Spanning a hundred years of espionage, over a hundred objects were on display, including the MacBook Air owned by The Guardian, which held top secret files stolen by Edward Snowden from the US National Security Agency. The essay constructs a hybrid method of quantum theory and phenomenology to better understa…
Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics
Life, Death, and the Living Dead in the Time of Covid-19
Is COVID-19 our first global zombie event? The question leads to others that fall outside the decorum of official discourse, possibly because the answers reach beyond the pale of the state. Unable to understand the nature of the threat, national leaders failed early and caught on late to the need for a globally coordinated response. Coupled with a deep resistance by states to the alienation of any degree of sovereignty to international institutio…
Quantizing international relations’: The case for quantum approaches to international theory and security practice
This special issue is conceived out of the proposition that recent developments in quantum theory as well as innovations in quantum technology have profound implications for international relations, especially in the field of international security. Interaction with quantum theory outside the circle of physics has been limited; our goal is to catalyse an informed debate on the virtues of quantum theory for international relations. As new scientif…
A Quantum of Insecurity
Every Dog Got His Day’: On Diplomacy after Thirty Years
From War 2.0 to quantum war: The superpositionality of global violence
As information networks catalyse local incidents into international crises, as global events appear and disappear on multiple screens at an accelerated pace and as a war of images displaces the image of war, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the rapidly changing nature of global violence within the confines of security studies. Phase-shifting with each media intervention from states to sub-states, local to global, public to private,…
Quantum Diplomacy, German–US Relations and the Psychogeography of Berlin
This article is inspired by a series of events that took place in February 2011 around the effort to negotiate a memorial in Berlin on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Reagan. A thought experiment with images is constructed to consider whether these events — produced by the ubiquity, interconnectivity and reflexivity of global media — are symptomatic of a new quantum diplomacy
Introduction: Sustaining Global Hope: Sovereignty, Power and the Transformation of Diplomacy
Can diplomacy be saved? Can diplomacy save us?
Sustainable Diplomacies
Reading Lebow: A funny thing happened on the way to the oracles
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Now We Are All Avatars’
The films Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Human Terrain are presented as critical intertexts for understanding how the cinematic aestheticisation of violence can glorify as well as vilify war, depending on how the spectator identifies with the protagonist and the investigator with the informant. Estrangement from and entanglement with the other become key variables for assessing the anti-war impact of a film
Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network
Offering an insight on the questions that arise as technology influences war, this book provides a 'virtual theory' for the military strategies, ethical issues, and political controversies surrounding the future of war. "This is the first book to offer a long history of the military strategies, philosophical questions, ethical issues, and political controversies that lead up to the global war on terrorism and the Iraq War"--Publisher description.
Critical encounters in international relations
This article aims to map the most significant influences of Foucault on the study of international relations. This is done through an analysis of Foucault's diverse intellectual toolbox, including the notions of discourse, heterotopias and genealogy. It considers whether Foucault helps us understand the most pressing issues in world politics and offers a critique of the historical and cultural limitations of Foucault's ideas, and questions the re…
The desert of the real and the simulacrum of war
As the global war on terror bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new inter-and intra-service struggle emerged within the military, between what we might call the ‘transformationists’ and the ‘neotraditionalists’. The transformationists put their faith in network-centric warfare and precision munitions to resolve the intractable political, civil and religious conflicts of the twenty-first century. The neotraditionalists, in contrast, go back to …
The Alker Effect
Prominence in the field of international relations is measured in many ways: citations in journals, the big book, the esteemed chair at a top university, or gaining the ear of the Prince. More ineffable and difficult to measure is the power of thought of the individual, unmediated by professional or political criteria, ranging across all modes of written and spoken discourse. This is made all the more difficult in a field of thought so balkanized…
Imaging terror: Logos, pathos and ethos
As verb, code and historical method, terrorism has consistently been understood as an act of symbolically intimidating and, if deemed necessary, violently eradicating a personal, political, social, ethnic, religious, ideological or otherwise radically differentiated foe. Yet, as noun, message and catch-all political signifier, the meaning of terrorism has proven more elusive. After the Cold War terror mutated from a logic of deterrence based on a…
The Question of Information Technology in International Relations
Against the backdrop of events produced by the InfoTechWarPeace Project at Brown University, including internet interventions, videoconferences, symposia, public forums, multi-media exhibitions and video documentaries, this article seeks to understand through information technology (IT) how the `Digital Age' and an `Age of Terror' converged on 9/11. As an inquiry into the impact of IT on International Relations (IR), it mobilizes the key concepts…
Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
Research Article| August 01 2003 Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America James Der Derian James Der Derian Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2003) 30 (3): 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-3-19 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite I…
The War of Networks
Theory & Event - Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001
Global Events, National Security, and Virtual Theory
Virtuous War/Virtual Theory
Strategic discourse and the use of force in the twentieth century have become increasingly virtual. Leading the way, as the dominant actor in global politics, is the United States, whose diplomatic and military policies are now based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compellence that could best be described as virtuous war. At the cyborg heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperat…
Response to Devetak: The rehabilitation of international theory
(1999). Response to Devetak: The rehabilitation of international theory. Cambridge Review of International Affairs: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 77-79
A virtual theory of global politics, mimetic war, and the spectral state
Some might invoke globalization and the attendant death of sovereignty as the first step toward more peaceful forms of governance. I would not. I think Friedrich Nietzsche, seeing the coachman beat his horse at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, embraced the dying beast out of not madness but clairvoyance. He understood, probably better than any other philosopher, how the effects of the near-dead play on the not-yet-alive. Faced by the uncertainties of li…
Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network
Offering an insight on the questions that arise as technology influences war, this book provides a 'virtual theory' for the military strategies, ethical issues, and political controversies surrounding the future of war. "This is the first book to offer a long history of the military strategies, philosophical questions, ethical issues, and political controversies that lead up to the global war on terrorism and the Iraq War"--Publisher description.
The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed
Against the neorealist claim that the "reflectivist" or postmodernist approach is a dead-end unless it merges with the "rationalist" conception of research programs, this essay argues that new technological and representational practices in world politics require not synthesis but theoretical heterogeneity to comprehend the rise of chronopolitics over geopolitics. The theoretical approaches of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Virilio are drawn upon to …
Quantizing international relations’: The case for quantum approaches to international theory and security practice
This special issue is conceived out of the proposition that recent developments in quantum theory as well as innovations in quantum technology have profound implications for international relations, especially in the field of international security. Interaction with quantum theory outside the circle of physics has been limited; our goal is to catalyse an informed debate on the virtues of quantum theory for international relations. As new scientif…
The Question of Information Technology in International Relations
Against the backdrop of events produced by the InfoTechWarPeace Project at Brown University, including internet interventions, videoconferences, symposia, public forums, multi-media exhibitions and video documentaries, this article seeks to understand through information technology (IT) how the `Digital Age' and an `Age of Terror' converged on 9/11. As an inquiry into the impact of IT on International Relations (IR), it mobilizes the key concepts…
From War 2.0 to quantum war: The superpositionality of global violence
As information networks catalyse local incidents into international crises, as global events appear and disappear on multiple screens at an accelerated pace and as a war of images displaces the image of war, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the rapidly changing nature of global violence within the confines of security studies. Phase-shifting with each media intervention from states to sub-states, local to global, public to private,…
Now We Are All Avatars’
The films Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Human Terrain are presented as critical intertexts for understanding how the cinematic aestheticisation of violence can glorify as well as vilify war, depending on how the spectator identifies with the protagonist and the investigator with the informant. Estrangement from and entanglement with the other become key variables for assessing the anti-war impact of a film
Virtuous War/Virtual Theory
Strategic discourse and the use of force in the twentieth century have become increasingly virtual. Leading the way, as the dominant actor in global politics, is the United States, whose diplomatic and military policies are now based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compellence that could best be described as virtuous war. At the cyborg heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperat…
Quantum Diplomacy, German–US Relations and the Psychogeography of Berlin
This article is inspired by a series of events that took place in February 2011 around the effort to negotiate a memorial in Berlin on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Reagan. A thought experiment with images is constructed to consider whether these events — produced by the ubiquity, interconnectivity and reflexivity of global media — are symptomatic of a new quantum diplomacy
The Conceptual Cosmology of Paul Virilio
Virilio constructs concepts as mental images for disturbing conventional, commonsensical views of world events but with the added visual warp of a life lived at the speed of cinema, video, light itself. It is not, then, a criticism (nor, for that matter, an unqualified recommendation) to say that reading Virilio will probably leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but…
Introducing Philosophical Traditions in lnternational Relations
The desert of the real and the simulacrum of war
As the global war on terror bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new inter-and intra-service struggle emerged within the military, between what we might call the ‘transformationists’ and the ‘neotraditionalists’. The transformationists put their faith in network-centric warfare and precision munitions to resolve the intractable political, civil and religious conflicts of the twenty-first century. The neotraditionalists, in contrast, go back to …
Imaging terror: Logos, pathos and ethos
As verb, code and historical method, terrorism has consistently been understood as an act of symbolically intimidating and, if deemed necessary, violently eradicating a personal, political, social, ethnic, religious, ideological or otherwise radically differentiated foe. Yet, as noun, message and catch-all political signifier, the meaning of terrorism has proven more elusive. After the Cold War terror mutated from a logic of deterrence based on a…
The virtualization of violence and the disappearance of war
This essay begins with the recent visit of the Secretary of Defense William Cohen to the National Training Center for an Advanced Warfighting Experiment (AWE), and ends with an ethnographic ramble in Disneyworld's backyard at Orlando, Florida, where the CEOs of the defense industries and the flag and general officers of US armed forces convened for four days at the annual Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference, to analyze…
Mediating estrangement: A theory for diplomacy
How does one live according to reason if the other , the alien , the foreigner whether remote or nearby may burst into one's world at any moment? Raymond Aron, Peace and War Diplomacy has been particularly resistant to theory. What knowledge we do have of the practice and principles of diplomacy is largely drawn from the works of former diplomatists like Abraham de Wicquefort's L'Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions (1681), Frangois de Callières' De la M…
Global Events, National Security, and Virtual Theory
The Pen, the Sword, and the Smart Bomb: Criticism in the Age of Video
S/N: International Theory, Balkanisation and the New World Order
The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars
Life, Death, and the Living Dead in the Time of Covid-19
Is COVID-19 our first global zombie event? The question leads to others that fall outside the decorum of official discourse, possibly because the answers reach beyond the pale of the state. Unable to understand the nature of the threat, national leaders failed early and caught on late to the need for a globally coordinated response. Coupled with a deep resistance by states to the alienation of any degree of sovereignty to international institutio…
Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
Research Article| August 01 2003 Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America James Der Derian James Der Derian Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2003) 30 (3): 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-3-19 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite I…
Response to Devetak: The rehabilitation of international theory
(1999). Response to Devetak: The rehabilitation of international theory. Cambridge Review of International Affairs: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 77-79
Mediating estrangement: A theory for diplomacy
How does one live according to reason if the other , the alien , the foreigner whether remote or nearby may burst into one's world at any moment? Raymond Aron, Peace and War Diplomacy has been particularly resistant to theory. What knowledge we do have of the practice and principles of diplomacy is largely drawn from the works of former diplomatists like Abraham de Wicquefort's L'Ambassadeur et ses Fonctions (1681), Frangois de Callières' De la M…
Introducing Philosophical Traditions in lnternational Relations
Books in Review
International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics
Drawing on the philosophies and intellectual approaches of numerous contemporary social critics (Nietzche, Foucault, Barthes, among others), this collection sheds light on the relationship between international theory and political power. Using such disciplines as geneaology, deconstruction, semiotics, feminist psychoanalytical theory, and intertextualism, these readings address such diverse topics as: sovereignty, terrorism, the psychology of wa…
Arms, Hostages, and the Importance of Shredding in Earnest: Reading the National Security Culture (II)
The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed
Against the neorealist claim that the "reflectivist" or postmodernist approach is a dead-end unless it merges with the "rationalist" conception of research programs, this essay argues that new technological and representational practices in world politics require not synthesis but theoretical heterogeneity to comprehend the rise of chronopolitics over geopolitics. The theoretical approaches of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Virilio are drawn upon to …
The Simulation Syndrome: From War Games to Game Wars
S/N: International Theory, Balkanisation and the New World Order
Rules, Norms, and Decision: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs. Friedrich V. Kratochwil
Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War
The Pen, the Sword, and the Smart Bomb: Criticism in the Age of Video
International Theory: Critical Investigations
Critical Interventions: New Directions in IR Theory
Global swarming, virtual security, and Bosnia
The virtualization of violence and the disappearance of war
This essay begins with the recent visit of the Secretary of Defense William Cohen to the National Training Center for an Advanced Warfighting Experiment (AWE), and ends with an ethnographic ramble in Disneyworld's backyard at Orlando, Florida, where the CEOs of the defense industries and the flag and general officers of US armed forces convened for four days at the annual Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference, to analyze…
God Is an American
Cet article reprend les idees developpees par Bonnie Honig a propos du role ambigu tenu par les immigres dans le mythe americain jouant sur l'opposition entre bons ou mauvais etrangers. Cependant, il ne partage pas l'optimisme de B. Honig quant a la possibilite d'un etat denationalise et d'un cosmopolitisme democratique
Response to Devetak: The rehabilitation of international theory
(1999). Response to Devetak: The rehabilitation of international theory. Cambridge Review of International Affairs: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 77-79
A virtual theory of global politics, mimetic war, and the spectral state
Some might invoke globalization and the attendant death of sovereignty as the first step toward more peaceful forms of governance. I would not. I think Friedrich Nietzsche, seeing the coachman beat his horse at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, embraced the dying beast out of not madness but clairvoyance. He understood, probably better than any other philosopher, how the effects of the near-dead play on the not-yet-alive. Faced by the uncertainties of li…
The Conceptual Cosmology of Paul Virilio
Virilio constructs concepts as mental images for disturbing conventional, commonsensical views of world events but with the added visual warp of a life lived at the speed of cinema, video, light itself. It is not, then, a criticism (nor, for that matter, an unqualified recommendation) to say that reading Virilio will probably leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but…
Virtuous War/Virtual Theory
Strategic discourse and the use of force in the twentieth century have become increasingly virtual. Leading the way, as the dominant actor in global politics, is the United States, whose diplomatic and military policies are now based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compellence that could best be described as virtuous war. At the cyborg heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperat…
The War of Networks
Theory & Event - Volume 5, Issue 4, 2001
Global Events, National Security, and Virtual Theory
The Question of Information Technology in International Relations
Against the backdrop of events produced by the InfoTechWarPeace Project at Brown University, including internet interventions, videoconferences, symposia, public forums, multi-media exhibitions and video documentaries, this article seeks to understand through information technology (IT) how the `Digital Age' and an `Age of Terror' converged on 9/11. As an inquiry into the impact of IT on International Relations (IR), it mobilizes the key concepts…
Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America
Research Article| August 01 2003 Decoding The National Security Strategy of the United States of America James Der Derian James Der Derian Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2003) 30 (3): 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-3-19 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite I…
Imaging terror: Logos, pathos and ethos
As verb, code and historical method, terrorism has consistently been understood as an act of symbolically intimidating and, if deemed necessary, violently eradicating a personal, political, social, ethnic, religious, ideological or otherwise radically differentiated foe. Yet, as noun, message and catch-all political signifier, the meaning of terrorism has proven more elusive. After the Cold War terror mutated from a logic of deterrence based on a…
Political science (34 works) · Law (27 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (16 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · History (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works)