Moran M. Mandelbaum

Keele University · School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy

Critical and poststructural theories were introduced to global politics in early to mid-1990s. Since then there has been a proliferation of critical thinking in global politics with Derridean and Foucauldian approaches being the most popular. While psychoanalysis made its appearance and gained in popularity alongside other critical approaches to in...

How could we understand the emotive power of national-populist discourses, indeed the calls to ‘make our country great again’? This paper directly tackles the recent Brexit discourse, within the broader context of rising national-populist sentiments. I offer a novel way of reading national-populism and the politics of subjectivity as I put forth a...

After the fragmentation of the state as modality of unity in late eighteenth-century thought, the fantasy of congruency becomes endemic to modern thought and practices. To exemplify this, this chapter analyses two political discursive formations that emerge in nineteenth-century Europe that draw on and further develop the discursive space of the na...

This chapter makes the case for a genealogy of nationalism, whilst focusing on the ideal of homogeneous societies, what the known scholar on nations and nationalism Ernest Gellner defines as congruency of state and nation. This chapter argues, moreover, that to critically unpack nationalism and its power, we should go beyond a critique of statism,...

This chapter interrogates early-modern juridico-political thought by showing that from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries it is in the idea of the state that the fantasy of congruency emerges. The state is in a state of void, as there is nothing essential about the state. The state is thus imbued with the notion of congruency and uni...

This chapter completes this genealogy by ‘returning to the present’, namely interrogating IR theory in the post–Cold War era. This chapter argues that the presupposition of the unitary ‘nation-state’ no longer holds: mainstream post–Cold War IR theory no longer takes its main unit of analysis as congruent. Instead, what is produced in our contempor...

This chapter puts forth the book’s analytical framework in two parts. The first part engages critically with Ernest Gellner’s theory of nationalism and particularly his theorisation of cultural homogeneity and nation/state congruency. This part demonstrates the problems with Gellner’s thought, namely his functionalist approach and his ‘presentist’...

This chapter analyses changes in political discourse around the ideas of the state and the nation in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that gave rise to the fantasy of nation/state congruency. The chapter focuses on the Abbé Sieyès, Johann Gottfried von Herder and the intellectual-political Romantic movement. Contra existing interpreta...

This chapter interrogates the fantasy of nation/state congruency in twentieth-century thought, focusing on traditional post–WWII IR (International Relations) theory, showing how congruency is now intertwined with the knowledge of the ‘international’. The chapter has three main arguments: first, traditional IR theory construes the fantasy of nation/...

This chapter summarises this book’s main arguments, namely the rise of the fantasy of nation/state congruency and the ideal of homogeneous societies, however defined and practiced, as constitutive of the ‘modern international’. Drawing on Rancière, this chapter engages with the ethico-political, thus exposing the exclusionary and violent dimensions...

This book explores the origins of nationalism and the ideal of nation/state congruency since early-modern European thought, their transformation over time and endurance in contemporary political thought and IR theory. The author deploys a Lacanian-psychoanalytical reading of nationalism and the nation/state that goes beyond methodological nationali...

The section ‘gay rights in Israel’, part of the gaytlvguide.com website promoting gay life and culture in Israel, narrates Israel as ‘… one of the world’s most progressive countries in terms of equality for sexual minorities… by far the most tolerant Middle Eastern country towards homosexuals’. The ways in which Israel has been positioning its spat...

Taking cue from Foucault’s Society Must be Defended and drawing on the Lacanian concept of fantasy, this paper puts forward an analytic of in/security by focusing on the fantasy of congruency of state, nation and society. I argue that this ideal of congruency is fantasmatic, as it offers an impossible – possibility of congruency, fullness and secur...

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fan...

This paper re-evaluates Ernest Gellner's theory of nations and nationalism and particularly his conceptions of cultural homogenization and congruency. The paper shows how Gellner's historical and epistemological stance naturalizes homogenization processes and rationalizes modern history as an inevitable trajectory of congruency making of states and...

This paper suggests that the notion of nation–state congruency has become a ‘leitmotif’ in International Relations (IR) theory, especially since the end of the Cold War. Congruent states are often constructed as the precursor of liberal democracy, peace, and modernity, while security in particular is discursively intertwined with nation–state congr...

In 2000 the leftist camp in Israel experienced a crisis of meaning and identity. This was the result of the failure of the 2000 Camp David Talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The atmosphere that emerged amongst the Israeli left was one of despair and disillusion, a void of meaning. Recently, however, a new Zionist “national left” di...