R Bleiker
Biographic Data
| ID | 48214 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Bleiker |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Bleiker |
| SIGNATURE | BLEIKER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1435-2990 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1167 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Ritual, emotion, and change in world politics
The question of political change – how the nature and the distinguishing features of orders persist or change – is an enduring puzzle in international theory. We engage ensuing debates through the burgeoning literature on the politics of rituals. We proceed in two steps. First, we introduce and build on existing scholarship that presents emotions as central to how rituals create a sense of collective unity. Second and primarily, we then show that…
Forum on Oliver Richmond’s The Grand Design: The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture
In this forum, seven scholars discuss Oliver P. Richmond’s The Grand Design: The Evolution of the International Peace Architecture , published in 2022. The editors, Gëzim Visoka and Annika Björkdahl, contextualise the book’s contribution within the broader intellectual framework of Richmond’s thoughts and writings on peace in the context of International Relations. Roland Bleiker examines the book’s main caveats and the outlook of international p…
Decolonising affect: Emotions and the politics of peace
Peace processes require societies to break with animosity and violence. Scholars and practitioners have traditionally focused on institutional and structural mechanisms. Recent contributions have stressed the need to address the emotional legacies of destructive conflicts and how they influence peace processes. We build on these contributions by engaging current debates on decolonisation. We advance a three-part argument that places decolonising …
Un-Disciplining the International
Writing in the context of the call for greater diversity, this short commentary makes a dual argument about the need to ‘un-discipline’ the discipline of International Relations. First: I return to an argument I made many years ago: the need to ‘Forget IR Theory’ and to explore the key issues in global politics without being constraint by the boundaries of existing debates. Key political problems, from climate change and pandemics, are far too co…
Visualising Korea: Critical Moments in History, Society and Politics
The purpose of this special issue is to examine how visual representations have shaped changing notions of Korean society, culture and nationhood. While images surround us, and are increasingly recognised as crucial, we know surprisingly little about the role visuality plays in the context of Korean politics and society. Only a few selected studies engage the issues at stake. To address these issues, the authors in this collection explore how the…
Seeing beyond disciplines: Aesthetic creativity in international theory
This essay outlines the contribution that Australia-based scholars have made to aesthetic politics: the exploration of creative and interdisciplinary approaches to International Relations. The struggle to legitimise aesthetic insights is indicative of a larger challenge: how academic disciplines discipline thought in ways that constrains innovative scholarly contributions and their potential to address concrete political problems. The essay advan…
Commentary for Visual Studies
Can we move beyond conflict?
This chapter examines one of the oldest and most difficult political problems: how to deal with conflicts that are so deeply entrenched that they seem virtually inevitable. New forms of violence constantly emerge, generating yet more hatred. Commentators speak of so-called intractable conflicts: situations where antagonisms have persisted for so long that they have created a vicious cycle of violence. Numerous commentators strongly oppose the ver…
Visual autoethnography and international security: Insights from the Korean DMZ
The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better o…
Mapping visual global politics
The dynamics of visual politics reach in all directions and go well beyond traditional media outlets. Visual Global Politics offers a comprehensive overview of and engagement with the role of visuality in politics and international relations. It is designed as an accessible, one-stop source for anyone interested in understanding the central role that images play in today's world. The chapter highlights, in accessible language, the key issues that…
Visual Global Politics
As Roland Bleiker (2015) points out, images do not speak by themselves and are there - fore always in need of interpretation. At the same time, because images are produced and “read” in cultural and historical context, there are not an infinite number of inter - pretations that are realistically possible. I focus on those particular images that are part of security politics. “Security images” are used to support claims that something is a threat …
Conspiracy and foreign policy
Conspiracies play a significant role in world politics. States often engage in covert operations. They plot in secret, with and against each other. At the same time, conspiracies are often associated with irrational thinking and delusion. We address this puzzle and highlight the need to see conspiracies as more than just empirical phenomena. We argue that claims about conspiracies should be seen as narratives that are intrinsically linked to powe…
North Korea’s hidden revolution: How the information underground is transforming a closed society
North Korea is one of the most authoritarian and tightly sealed countries in the world. In this fascinating study, Jieun Baek shows how the ability of the authoritarian government to stay in power
Writing Visual Global Politics: In Defence of a Pluralist Approach—a Response to Gabi Schlag, “Thinking and Writing Visual Global Politics”
Discourse and Emotions in International Relations
The field of International Relations (IR) has recently witnessed the emergence of a wide variety of different approaches to make sense of the many ways emotions work in and through discourse. This forum takes stock of and investigates this link based on two interrelated questions: Why study emotions through discourse? How can we study emotions through discourse? Concerning the first question, we argue that textual and verbal utterances provide us…
In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory
In the 15 years since the Millennium special issue on ‘Images, Narratives and Sounds’ scholarship on aesthetic politics has proliferated. Countless inquiries now show how aesthetics is about far more than art: it is about rethinking the fundamental issues that drive global politics. The moment has come to reflect on the contributions of the aesthetic turn and to identify potentials and challenges ahead. I do so by stressing that the key is not ag…
Visuality and Creativity in Global Politics: In Memory of Alex Danchev
Elections as Theater
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy
We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time—in 1941–1942 and in 2009—the government staged an extensive exhibition in the United States. Each time, the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence. But in each case, the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form of dip…
Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics
Images play an increasingly important role in global politics but pose significant and so far largely unexplored methodological challenges. Images are different from words. They circulate in ever more complex and rapid ways. I argue that the political significance of images is best understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods, even if they are at times incompatible. I defend such a pluralist approach as both c…
Visual Assemblages: From Causality to Conditions of Possibility
To explore how we can take assemblage thinking seriously, this chapter engages the study of images in world politics. Images need to be understood in their own multiplicities, with each requiring fundamentally different methodological tools. Yet numerous obstacles hamper the establishing of this type of heterogeneous methodological framework. Key among them is the antagonistic dualism between qualitative and quantitative methods. They are divided…
Authenticity and Deception in an Age of Visual Wearables [Viewpoint]
Experts share their views on the significance of authenticity and deception in the age of increasing use of visual wearable devices. The visual world is rapidly changing, increasing the human's ability to produce images and the range and speed in which they circulate. Every individual using a smartphone can take an image and circulate it through numerous social networks. New technologies, including the Internet, have democratized the production a…
Theorizing emotions in world politics
Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research. This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approa…
Introduction: Emotions and world politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Visual Cultures of Inhospitality
The concept of hospitality has long been central to how philosophers conceptualize the obligation of states to accommodate strangers in need of help. Rendered prominent, in particular, through Imma
Fear no more: Emotions and World Politics
Although emotions play a significant role in world politics they have so far received surprisingly little attention by International Relations scholars. Numerous authors have emphasised this shortcoming for several years now, but strangely there are still only very few systematic inquiries into emotions and even fewer related discussions on method. The article explains this gap by the fact that much of International Relations scholarship is condu…
The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory
We have all grown accustomed to familiar representations of the international and its conflicts. Wars, famines and diplomatic summits are shown to us in their usual guise: as short-lived media events that blend information and entertainment. The numbing regularity with which these images and sound-bites are communicated to great masses soon erases their highly arbitrary nature. We gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politi…
The visual dehumanisation of refugees
Dealing with refugees is one of the most contested political issues in Australia. We examine how media images of asylum seekers have framed ensuing debates during two crucial periods over the past decade. By conducting a content analysis of newspaper front pages we demonstrate that asylum seekers have primarily been represented as medium or large groups and through a focus on boats. We argue that this visual framing, and in particular the relativ…
Theorizing emotions in world politics
Emotions play an increasingly important role in international relations research. This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approa…
Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self as a Source of Knowledge
Research is all about a person's engagement with an issue. But most approaches to International Relations actively discourage personal involvement by the researcher. We question the adequacy of this norm and the related scholarly conventions. Instead, we explore how the personal experience of the researcher can be used as a legitimate and potentially important source of insight into politics. But we also note that simply telling the story of the …
Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics
Images play an increasingly important role in global politics but pose significant and so far largely unexplored methodological challenges. Images are different from words. They circulate in ever more complex and rapid ways. I argue that the political significance of images is best understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods, even if they are at times incompatible. I defend such a pluralist approach as both c…
Representing HIV/Aids in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment
This essay explores the nature and political consequences of representing HIV/AIDS in Africa, where the disease has taken its greatest toll. We examine how different methods of photography embody different ideologies through which we give meaning to political phenomena. We distinguish three photographic methods of representing HIV/AIDS: naturalist, humanist, and pluralist. Naturalist approaches portray photographs as neutral and value free. Human…
Discourse and Emotions in International Relations
The field of International Relations (IR) has recently witnessed the emergence of a wide variety of different approaches to make sense of the many ways emotions work in and through discourse. This forum takes stock of and investigates this link based on two interrelated questions: Why study emotions through discourse? How can we study emotions through discourse? Concerning the first question, we argue that textual and verbal utterances provide us…
In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory
In the 15 years since the Millennium special issue on ‘Images, Narratives and Sounds’ scholarship on aesthetic politics has proliferated. Countless inquiries now show how aesthetics is about far more than art: it is about rethinking the fundamental issues that drive global politics. The moment has come to reflect on the contributions of the aesthetic turn and to identify potentials and challenges ahead. I do so by stressing that the key is not ag…
Introduction: Emotions and world politics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma
This article examines the public significance of emotions, most specifically their role in constituting identity and community in the wake of political violence and trauma. It offers a conceptual engagement with processes of healing and reconciliation, showing that emotions are central to how societies experience and work through the legacy of catastrophe. In many instances, political actors deal with the legacy of trauma in restorative ways, by …
Forget IR Theory
Visual autoethnography and international security: Insights from the Korean DMZ
The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better o…
Art after 9/11
This article examines ways in which art can help broaden understandings of contemporary security challenges, especially in view of the limits of conventional forms of strategic and policy analysis. The article focuses especially on responses to 9/11 in literature, the visual arts, architecture, and music, and considers some epistemological questions about the status of art as a way of knowing political events, like those of 9/11, that escape stat…
Visual Cultures of Inhospitality
The concept of hospitality has long been central to how philosophers conceptualize the obligation of states to accommodate strangers in need of help. Rendered prominent, in particular, through Imma
Discourse and Human Agency
Conspiracy and foreign policy
Conspiracies play a significant role in world politics. States often engage in covert operations. They plot in secret, with and against each other. At the same time, conspiracies are often associated with irrational thinking and delusion. We address this puzzle and highlight the need to see conspiracies as more than just empirical phenomena. We argue that claims about conspiracies should be seen as narratives that are intrinsically linked to powe…
Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation
Visual Global Politics
As Roland Bleiker (2015) points out, images do not speak by themselves and are there - fore always in need of interpretation. At the same time, because images are produced and “read” in cultural and historical context, there are not an infinite number of inter - pretations that are realistically possible. I focus on those particular images that are part of security politics. “Security images” are used to support claims that something is a threat …
Identity and security in Korea
The summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state, which took place in Pyongyang in June 2000, constitutes a major turning point in the peninsula's history. As the effects of the meeting are gradually unfolding, a period of detente no longer seems impossible. But major difficulties remain unsolved and Korea will continue to be one of the world's most volatile areas. The task of this essay is to identify and analyse some of the entrenched p…
Radical Dreaming: Indigenous Art and Cultural Diplomacy
We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time—in 1941–1942 and in 2009—the government staged an extensive exhibition in the United States. Each time, the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence. But in each case, the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form of dip…
From the Sublime to the Subliminal: Fear, Awe and Wonder in International Politics
Key events in international politics, such as terrorist attacks, can be characterised as sublime: our minds clash with phenomena that supersede our cognitive abilities, triggering a range of powerful emotions, such as pain, fear and awe. Encounters with the sublime allow us an important glimpse into the contingent and often manipulative nature of representation. For centuries, philosophers have sought to learn from these experiences, but in polit…
Learning from Art: A Reply to Holden's ""World Literature and World Politics
(2003). Learning from Art: A Reply to Holden's ''World Literature and World Politics'' Global Society: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 415-428
Decolonising affect: Emotions and the politics of peace
Peace processes require societies to break with animosity and violence. Scholars and practitioners have traditionally focused on institutional and structural mechanisms. Recent contributions have stressed the need to address the emotional legacies of destructive conflicts and how they influence peace processes. We build on these contributions by engaging current debates on decolonisation. We advance a three-part argument that places decolonising …
Seeing beyond disciplines: Aesthetic creativity in international theory
This essay outlines the contribution that Australia-based scholars have made to aesthetic politics: the exploration of creative and interdisciplinary approaches to International Relations. The struggle to legitimise aesthetic insights is indicative of a larger challenge: how academic disciplines discipline thought in ways that constrains innovative scholarly contributions and their potential to address concrete political problems. The essay advan…
Neorealist Claims in Light of Ancient Chinese Philosophy: The Cultural Dimension of International Theory
Forget IR Theory
Retracing and Redrawing the Boundaries of Events: Postmodern Interferences with International Theory
Recognition of the extraordinary lengths to which one must go to challenge a given structure of intelligibility, to intervene in resident meanings by bringing what is silent and unglimpsed into focus, is an essential step towards opening up possibilities for a politics and ethics of discourse
The Politics and Ethics of Relocated Art
At the end of Word War II, Soviet occupation forces removed countless art objects from German soil. Some of them were returned during the 1950s, but most either disappeared for good or were stored away secretly in cellars of Soviet museums. The Cold War then covered the issue with silence. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, museums in St Petersburg and Moscow started to exhibit some of the relocated art for the first time in half a century. …
Pablo Neruda and the struggle for political memory
This article deals with a topic-poetry-that is often considered to be of marginal interest to politics. To prove otherwise is the article's principle task-a task that is pursed through apt engagement with Pablo Neruda's work. Nobel laureate, international diplomat and political activist in one, Neruda reveals how poetry can enter the political process and, perhaps more importantly, turn into a critical historical memory.;Ib engage political strug…
Give it the Shade’: Paul Celan and the Politics of Apolitical Poetry
This article analyses the political impact of Paul Celan's poetry to illustrate the potential for social transformation contained in seemingly apolitical practices of speaking and writing. Celan's work epitomizes the search for thinking space in the immediate post-war period. Much of the German language at the time was so closely associated with the horrors of the Nazi regime that it was difficult to address critically many important social issue…
Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics
Popular dissent, such as street demonstrations and civil disobedience, has become increasingly transnational in nature and scope. As a result, a local act of resistance can acquire almost immediately a much larger, cross-territorial dimension. This book draws upon a broad and innovative range of sources to scrutinise this central but often neglected aspect of global politics. Through case studies that span from Renaissance perceptions of human ag…
The ‘End of Modernity’?
Proclaiming the end of things is a common rhetorical practice in the study of world politics. We have heard about the end of the Cold War, the end of the Westphalian state system, even the end of history. Some also believe that the all-encompassing historical period called modernity has given way to something else, a postmodernity, perhaps. In the latter case, though, the necrologists are often not those to whom this endism is usually ascribed. F…
We Don’t Need Another Hero’
The collapse of the Berlin Wall is usually associated with images of progress, with falling autocrats and rising liberties. But things are not quite as straightforward if scrutinized from the vantage-point of women. Despite their unusually active participation in the mass protests of 1989, women in the eastern part of Germany suffered a series of setbacks in the subsequent unification process, most notably in the realms of reproductive rights, em…
Stroll through the Wall: Everyday Poetics of Cold War Politics
The dissident writer was a prominent figure in the Cold War theater of Eastern Europe. The likes of Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and Michnik stirred up political waters at home and made headlines in the West, where they were celebrated as symbols of light in a world of darkness and evil. Lesser-known than these icons of Cold War rhetoric, but in some ways more interesting, is a younger generation of East German poets that emerged in the late 1970s and fl…
East-West Stories of War and Peace: Neorealist Claims in Light of Ancient Chinese Philosophy
Neorealism has arguably been the single most influential contribution to the study of international relations (IR) since the 1980s. One of the paradigm’s main purposes is to transcend time and space in order to recognise ahistoric and global patterns in the recurrence of interstate conflict. Yet, the key concepts of neorealist theory have been developed by Western scholars, largely based on analyses of interactions among Western states. How repre…
An Introduction to International Relations: Australian Perspectives
Introduction to International Relations: Australian Perspectives provides comprehensive coverage of its subject while capturing distinctively Australian perspectives and concerns. Designed for undergraduate students this textbook brings together leading Australian scholars to present lively introductory analyses of the theories, actors, issues, institutions and processes that animate international relations today. Introduction to International Re…
Forget IR Theory
Stories, so we are told by prevailing social science wisdom, are not part of international relations (IR) scholarship. Stories belong to the realm of fiction, not the domain of fact. And yet, stories freely whizz in and out of IR. Indeed, if we look more carefully, IR appears as nothing but a set of narratives that provide us with meaning and coherence. Consider how critical scholars increasingly portray the locus classicus of IR – the state, tha…
Anna Akhmatova's Search for Political Light
(2001). Anna Akhmatova's Search for Political Light. Peace Review: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 181-186
Identity and security in Korea
The summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state, which took place in Pyongyang in June 2000, constitutes a major turning point in the peninsula's history. As the effects of the meeting are gradually unfolding, a period of détente no longer seems impossible. But major difficulties remain unsolved and Korea will continue to be one of the world's most volatile areas. The task of this essay is to identify and analyse some of the entrenched p…
Identity and security in Korea
The summit meeting between the two Korean heads of state, which took place in Pyongyang in June 2000, constitutes a major turning point in the peninsula's history. As the effects of the meeting are gradually unfolding, a period of detente no longer seems impossible. But major difficulties remain unsolved and Korea will continue to be one of the world's most volatile areas. The task of this essay is to identify and analyse some of the entrenched p…
Peacebuilding in East Timor
This essay analyses some of the political, economic and social challenges of East Timer's transition to independence. It scrutinizes the ethical dimensions of building peace in a territory devastated by the combined effect of Indonesia's colonial occupation and the violent militia attacks of September 1999. The most difficult task ahead does not lie in the physical rebuilding of the territory-gargantuan as it may be-but in the more intricate and …
The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory
We have all grown accustomed to familiar representations of the international and its conflicts. Wars, famines and diplomatic summits are shown to us in their usual guise: as short-lived media events that blend information and entertainment. The numbing regularity with which these images and sound-bites are communicated to great masses soon erases their highly arbitrary nature. We gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politi…
Timor-Oriental: Le Combat Pour La Paix Et Pour La Réconciliation
Timor-Oriental : le combat pour la paix et pour la rconciliation Roland BLEIKER et Rodd MCGIBBON 1 Quelle est la part du pass dont il faut garder le souvenir et faire le rcit ? Quelle est la part qu'il faut oublier et pardonner 2 ? Septembre 1999 : le rsultat du rfrendum organis au Timor-Oriental est trs largement favorable l'indpendance. Grce CNN, gouvernements et simples citoyens du monde entier assistent alors, scandaliss, aux exactions perptr…
Towards a Culture of Reconciliation in Divided Korea
Towards a Culture of Reconciliation in Divided Korea
Politics After Seattle: Dilemmas of the Anti-Globalisation Movement
Introduction "It was just like May 1968," said José Bové, sheep-farmer and French anti-globalisation hero, about the events in Seattle of December 1999 four days of massive street protests against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) turned the city into a battle ground - literally and metaphorically. Bové joined some 700 nongovernmental organisations and an estimated 40,000 demonstrators, including steelworkers, environmentalists, AIDS-activists, …
Aestheticising Terrorism: Alternative Approaches to 11 September
This paper highlights the methodological difficulties of ascribing causation to events which are to some extent “irrational” and demanding of different forms of understanding — such as those provided in Romantic literature, or poetry, or art. It may be that the scientific urge to systematise diverts analytical attention from debates over values, and from existential complexities in the connections between (say) poverty and violent acts of (imagin…
Learning from Art: A Reply to Holden's ""World Literature and World Politics
(2003). Learning from Art: A Reply to Holden's ''World Literature and World Politics'' Global Society: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 415-428
NGOs and Reconstructing Civil Society in Bosnia and Herzegovina
By examining the work of several NGOs in the context of post-conflict reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this essay scrutinizes both the potential and limits of NGO contributions to peace-settlements and long-term stability. While their ability to specialize and reach the grassroots level is of great practical significance, the contribution of NGOs to the reconstruction of war-torn societies is often idealized. NGOs remain severely l…
Political science (69 works) · Law (57 works) · Politics (55 works) · Sociology (51 works) · Law (42 works) · Epistemology (26 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Aesthetics (24 works) · Political economy (22 works) · History (19 works)