Charlotte Epstein
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 387649 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Charlotte Epstein |
| PRENOMES | Charlotte |
| SOBRENOME | Epstein |
| ASSINATURA | EPSTEIN C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5693-4505 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 281 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1961 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
The turn to turns in International Relations
In this article, we explore what it means to research in International Relations (IR) in a context of dizzying multiplication of turns in the discipline – towards things that are material, practised, emotional, aesthetic, quantic or visual. A two-fold assumption of our times seems to be that more turns is a sound development for the discipline, and that every turn is inherently more critical than the previous one. Taking a step back from these nu…
Multiplicity and ‘The International’ as Critique – A Forum
This forum reconsiders the standing of ‘the international’ in relation to ‘critique’. Is this relation best understood in ways reminiscent of the ‘Fourth Great Debate’, where the international, associated with political realism, was targeted for deconstruction by critical approaches drawn from outside International Relations? Or is the international, on the contrary, itself a source of potential critique needing to be excavated and utilized, as r…
Seeing the ecosystem in the international
Response to Sean Fleming’s Review of Birth of the State
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Birth of the State
This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers multiple sites of theory and practice and two revolutions. The f…
Spinoza's not so quiet influence
In this review essay I reflect on the centrality of Spinoza's thought to political modernity on the combined occasion of the 350th anniversary of the original publication of his first political treatise, the Tractatus theologico–politicus, and of the publication this year of George Eliot's English translation of Spinoza's Ethics, which had been lying in a drawer for almost a century and a half. His influence is both substantial and methodological…
Horizon Scan
What is changing?This: the contradictions and predations of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, and of the deeply racist and gendered material and symbolic order it produces, have enabled an accelerating, unrelenting, unfettered extractive stance toward the planet, its ecosystems and natural resources, and the plant and animal species and human beings that inhabit it.That stance has not only resulted in increasingly outrageous inequalities and co…
Frustrated sovereigns
In this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, to mis recognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Ou…
The productive force of the negative and the desire for recognition
In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through…
Against International Relations Norms
La reconnaissance. Lectures hégéliennes
Vers une reformulation antagonique de la lutte pour la reconnaissance
Les articles réunis dans ce dossier sont presqu’intégralement le fruit d’un workshop international organisé au CERI en juin 2014. Prenant comme point de départ un engagement critique envers la littérature de la reconnaissance, notre propos était de revenir sur les traces de l’Hegel de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit pour reformuler le concept de la lutte pour la reconnaissance. Ce retour nous offre un approfondissement des concepts contemporains de…
Surveillance, Privacy and the Making of the Modern Subject
In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary surveillance society. I use biometric technologies as a lens for tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy. Adopting a broader genealogical perspective, I retrace the role of the body in the constitution of the modern liberal political subject. I consider two different understandings of the subject, the Foucauldian political su…
Minding the Brain
Invited by the editors to respond to Professor Neumann’s inaugural lecture, 1 in this article I take issue with his core, unquestioned assumption, namely, whether IR should be considered as a science. I use it as a starting point to re-open the question of how the stuff that humans are made of should be studied in IR today. Beyond Neumann’s piece, I critically engage with two emerging trends in the discipline, the so-called new materialisms and t…
Forum
In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key e…
The postcolonial perspective
In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a diffe…
Securing Fish for the Nation
Concerns about supplies of food have been a feature of Japanese politics since Japan started modernising in the second half of the 1800s. It has remained a prominent political issue even after Japan cemented its status as a wealthy country in the 1980s, with the Japanese Government continuing to protect domestic food production from international competition. Protectionism is a curious policy for a country so dependent on world trade, including f…
Theorizing Agency in Hobbes's Wake
The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.” In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agenc…
Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations. Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight
In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social st…
Stop Telling Us How to Behave
In this paper, I use a phenomenon of resistance to a global norm as a catalyst to critically re-examine the cognitive frames underpinning the use of the concept of socialization in international relations. My critique, which adds to the now growing critique of constructivism's neglect of the role of power in the international system, is threefold. First, socialization tends to be apprehended as a bettering of the socializee, because of an implici…
Symposium
This symposium is the outcome of an initial workshop held at the University of Sydney in March 2009. Two decades into the reflectivist turn, its purpose was to open up a space for critically re-examining a concept whose widespread currency in the study of international politics today is a testimony to constructivism's success in providing alternatives to rationalist approaches. What was less clear was whether this success had been accompanied by …
Shaming to 'green
In this article, we consider how states wield shaming strategies to ‘be green’ and to try to influence other states to ‘become green’ – environmentally responsible states. We compare Australia–Japan relations in the international politics of whales and tuna, respectively, and show that only at the level of norms and identities, rather than material interests, can two seemingly contradictory behaviors be reconciled, where a country shames another …
Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics
This article aims to show the theoretical added value of focussing on discourse to study identity in international relations (IR). I argue that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. My starting point is a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically …
The power of words in international relations
In the second half of the twentieth century, worldwide attitudes toward whaling shifted from widespread acceptance to moral censure. Why? Whaling, once as important to the global economy as oil is now, had long been uneconomical. Major species were long known to be endangered. Yet nations had continued to support whaling. In The Power of Words in International Relations, Charlotte Epstein argues that the change was brought about not by changing m…
Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies
This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental sta…
Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics
This article aims to show the theoretical added value of focussing on discourse to study identity in international relations (IR). I argue that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. My starting point is a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically …
Stop Telling Us How to Behave
In this paper, I use a phenomenon of resistance to a global norm as a catalyst to critically re-examine the cognitive frames underpinning the use of the concept of socialization in international relations. My critique, which adds to the now growing critique of constructivism's neglect of the role of power in the international system, is threefold. First, socialization tends to be apprehended as a bettering of the socializee, because of an implici…
Theorizing Agency in Hobbes's Wake
The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.” In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agenc…
Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations. Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight
In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social st…
Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies
This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental sta…
The productive force of the negative and the desire for recognition
In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through…
Frustrated sovereigns
In this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, to mis recognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Ou…
The postcolonial perspective
In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a diffe…
The Making of Global Environmental Norms
Endangered species protection represents one of the most enduring paradigms of global environmental governance. From a localized concept rooted in North American conceptions of nature, it evolved over the first half of the 20th century into a norm shaping inter-state behavior. This article analyzes the making of endangered species protection as the first global environmental norm, within a broadly constructivist framework. The central concern is …
Horizon Scan
What is changing?This: the contradictions and predations of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, and of the deeply racist and gendered material and symbolic order it produces, have enabled an accelerating, unrelenting, unfettered extractive stance toward the planet, its ecosystems and natural resources, and the plant and animal species and human beings that inhabit it.That stance has not only resulted in increasingly outrageous inequalities and co…
Shaming to 'green
In this article, we consider how states wield shaming strategies to ‘be green’ and to try to influence other states to ‘become green’ – environmentally responsible states. We compare Australia–Japan relations in the international politics of whales and tuna, respectively, and show that only at the level of norms and identities, rather than material interests, can two seemingly contradictory behaviors be reconciled, where a country shames another …
WorldWideWhale.Globalisation/Dialogue of Cultures
This article questions the assumption that globalisation has fostered cultural dialogue. In order to understand how globalisation has specifically impacted the sphere of the cultural, it starts by examining the way cultural practises are transformed in its wake. Does globalisation yield new, global forms of culture? To address this conundrum, this article takes the example of a cultural movement that has sought to project itself on a global scale…
Securing Fish for the Nation
Concerns about supplies of food have been a feature of Japanese politics since Japan started modernising in the second half of the 1800s. It has remained a prominent political issue even after Japan cemented its status as a wealthy country in the 1980s, with the Japanese Government continuing to protect domestic food production from international competition. Protectionism is a curious policy for a country so dependent on world trade, including f…
Surveillance, Privacy and the Making of the Modern Subject
In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary surveillance society. I use biometric technologies as a lens for tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy. Adopting a broader genealogical perspective, I retrace the role of the body in the constitution of the modern liberal political subject. I consider two different understandings of the subject, the Foucauldian political su…
Minding the Brain
Invited by the editors to respond to Professor Neumann’s inaugural lecture, 1 in this article I take issue with his core, unquestioned assumption, namely, whether IR should be considered as a science. I use it as a starting point to re-open the question of how the stuff that humans are made of should be studied in IR today. Beyond Neumann’s piece, I critically engage with two emerging trends in the discipline, the so-called new materialisms and t…
Multiplicity and ‘The International’ as Critique – A Forum
This forum reconsiders the standing of ‘the international’ in relation to ‘critique’. Is this relation best understood in ways reminiscent of the ‘Fourth Great Debate’, where the international, associated with political realism, was targeted for deconstruction by critical approaches drawn from outside International Relations? Or is the international, on the contrary, itself a source of potential critique needing to be excavated and utilized, as r…
Seeing the ecosystem in the international
Symposium
This symposium is the outcome of an initial workshop held at the University of Sydney in March 2009. Two decades into the reflectivist turn, its purpose was to open up a space for critically re-examining a concept whose widespread currency in the study of international politics today is a testimony to constructivism's success in providing alternatives to rationalist approaches. What was less clear was whether this success had been accompanied by …
The turn to turns in International Relations
In this article, we explore what it means to research in International Relations (IR) in a context of dizzying multiplication of turns in the discipline – towards things that are material, practised, emotional, aesthetic, quantic or visual. A two-fold assumption of our times seems to be that more turns is a sound development for the discipline, and that every turn is inherently more critical than the previous one. Taking a step back from these nu…
Forum
In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key e…
An Interdisciplinary Approach to Education
The Difficulties of Desegregation
The walkabout gene
WorldWideWhale.Globalisation/Dialogue of Cultures
This article questions the assumption that globalisation has fostered cultural dialogue. In order to understand how globalisation has specifically impacted the sphere of the cultural, it starts by examining the way cultural practises are transformed in its wake. Does globalisation yield new, global forms of culture? To address this conundrum, this article takes the example of a cultural movement that has sought to project itself on a global scale…
The Making of Global Environmental Norms
Endangered species protection represents one of the most enduring paradigms of global environmental governance. From a localized concept rooted in North American conceptions of nature, it evolved over the first half of the 20th century into a norm shaping inter-state behavior. This article analyzes the making of endangered species protection as the first global environmental norm, within a broadly constructivist framework. The central concern is …
Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies
This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental sta…
The power of words in international relations
In the second half of the twentieth century, worldwide attitudes toward whaling shifted from widespread acceptance to moral censure. Why? Whaling, once as important to the global economy as oil is now, had long been uneconomical. Major species were long known to be endangered. Yet nations had continued to support whaling. In The Power of Words in International Relations, Charlotte Epstein argues that the change was brought about not by changing m…
Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics
This article aims to show the theoretical added value of focussing on discourse to study identity in international relations (IR). I argue that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. My starting point is a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically …
Stop Telling Us How to Behave
In this paper, I use a phenomenon of resistance to a global norm as a catalyst to critically re-examine the cognitive frames underpinning the use of the concept of socialization in international relations. My critique, which adds to the now growing critique of constructivism's neglect of the role of power in the international system, is threefold. First, socialization tends to be apprehended as a bettering of the socializee, because of an implici…
Symposium
This symposium is the outcome of an initial workshop held at the University of Sydney in March 2009. Two decades into the reflectivist turn, its purpose was to open up a space for critically re-examining a concept whose widespread currency in the study of international politics today is a testimony to constructivism's success in providing alternatives to rationalist approaches. What was less clear was whether this success had been accompanied by …
Shaming to 'green
In this article, we consider how states wield shaming strategies to ‘be green’ and to try to influence other states to ‘become green’ – environmentally responsible states. We compare Australia–Japan relations in the international politics of whales and tuna, respectively, and show that only at the level of norms and identities, rather than material interests, can two seemingly contradictory behaviors be reconciled, where a country shames another …
Securing Fish for the Nation
Concerns about supplies of food have been a feature of Japanese politics since Japan started modernising in the second half of the 1800s. It has remained a prominent political issue even after Japan cemented its status as a wealthy country in the 1980s, with the Japanese Government continuing to protect domestic food production from international competition. Protectionism is a curious policy for a country so dependent on world trade, including f…
Theorizing Agency in Hobbes's Wake
The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations (IR) revolves around two figures of agency, the rational actor and the constructivist “self.” In this article I examine the models of agency that implicitly or explicitly underpin the study of international politics. I show how both notions of the rational actor and the constructivist self have remained wedded to individualist understandings of agenc…
Constructivism or the eternal return of universals in International Relations. Why returning to language is vital to prolonging the owl’s flight
In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social st…
Forum
In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key e…
The postcolonial perspective
In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘-ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’, where the particular of subjective, embodied experiences are foregrounded rather than erased in the theorising. What the postcolonial has to offer are ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. This casts a diffe…
Minding the Brain
Invited by the editors to respond to Professor Neumann’s inaugural lecture, 1 in this article I take issue with his core, unquestioned assumption, namely, whether IR should be considered as a science. I use it as a starting point to re-open the question of how the stuff that humans are made of should be studied in IR today. Beyond Neumann’s piece, I critically engage with two emerging trends in the discipline, the so-called new materialisms and t…
La reconnaissance. Lectures hégéliennes
Vers une reformulation antagonique de la lutte pour la reconnaissance
Les articles réunis dans ce dossier sont presqu’intégralement le fruit d’un workshop international organisé au CERI en juin 2014. Prenant comme point de départ un engagement critique envers la littérature de la reconnaissance, notre propos était de revenir sur les traces de l’Hegel de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit pour reformuler le concept de la lutte pour la reconnaissance. Ce retour nous offre un approfondissement des concepts contemporains de…
Surveillance, Privacy and the Making of the Modern Subject
In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary surveillance society. I use biometric technologies as a lens for tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy. Adopting a broader genealogical perspective, I retrace the role of the body in the constitution of the modern liberal political subject. I consider two different understandings of the subject, the Foucauldian political su…
Against International Relations Norms
Frustrated sovereigns
In this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, to mis recognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Ou…
The productive force of the negative and the desire for recognition
In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through…
Horizon Scan
What is changing?This: the contradictions and predations of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, and of the deeply racist and gendered material and symbolic order it produces, have enabled an accelerating, unrelenting, unfettered extractive stance toward the planet, its ecosystems and natural resources, and the plant and animal species and human beings that inhabit it.That stance has not only resulted in increasingly outrageous inequalities and co…
Birth of the State
This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers multiple sites of theory and practice and two revolutions. The f…
Political science (24 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Politics (19 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Philosophy (14 obras) · Epistemology (12 obras) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (11 obras) · International relations (11 obras) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (10 obras)