Shannon Brincat

University of the Sunshine Coast | USC · School of Law and Society

This article performs a thought experiment. We ask: what if we were to engage two venerable legacies of dialectics, Hegelianism and Daoism, to see what results in terms of our thinking in International Relations (IR) about World Politics (WP)? Would some kind of a shift, synthesis, or transformation occur, as suggested by the dialectical goal of bo...

Dialectics remains an underutilized methodology in contemporary IR theory, which represents a significant limitation to the study of world politics, particularly in under-standing processes of transformation and change - an oversight that this article intends to redress. This article has two primary goals. First, it aims to reconstruct and build up...

This paper examines the conceptual development of the philosophical justifications for tyrannicide. It posits that the political philosophy of tyrannicide can be categorised into three distinct periods or models, the classical, medieval, and liberal, respectively. It argues that each model contained unique themes and principles that justified tyran...

This is the final part of a series of two papers that have examined the conceptual development of the philosophical justifications for tyrannicide. While Part I focused on the classical, medieval, and liberal justifications for tyrannicide, Part II aims to provide the tentative outlines of a contemporary model of tyrannicide in world politics. It i...

This article aims to reinvigorate the utopian imagination as a vital and necessary component in IR theory. Since the First Great Debate between the Realists and the Utopianists (or more accurately, the Liberal-Internationalists) the utopian tradition has been viewed as being both subjective and arbitrary, leading to its dismissal as vain idealism i...

This introduction explores the paradox of Latin America’s weak regional integration despite its shared linguistic, historical, and cultural ties, alongside strong public support for cooperation. It situates this regional challenge within broader global trends, contrasting Latin America’s fluctuating and fragile integration efforts with the more ins...

The phenomenon of misrecognition has been analysed under various angles by philosophy, political theory, sociology and lately also by international relations (IR). In IR, (mis)recognition is mainly understood as either status denial (i.e. denial of legal state recognition), inflated honor pretentions (including positive self-images, mythical narrat...

In this paper we examine and critique adaptive management (AM) practices for protected areas (PAs), in pursuit of practices that can account for more-than-human relations. Engaging with empirical research from Australian PAs, we reflect on the formation of PAs as “exceptional places” where Nature is implicitly/explicitly to be controlled. We find t...

The global political environment in the twenty-first century is proving dynamic and challenging for Australian policymakers and political institutions. Australian Politics in the Twenty-first Century contextualises the Australian political landscape through an institutional lens. It examines the legislative and judicial bodies, minor parties, lobby...

The imagination is at the heart of what it means to be human. For this reason, it has been the subject of close examination across time and locale. Yet, while international relations (IR) researchers often mobilize the term rhetorically, its character and operations remain underconceptualized in the discipline and disconnected from the rich literat...

This article explores the ways in which class structure in agrarian societies shape local adaptation responses to the impact of climate change, based on an empirical study of a village society in western Maharashtra, India. It draws on two types of fieldwork data, quantitative and qualitative, including a round of household socio‐economic survey qu...

Conceptions of Nature are infused with metaphysical ideas across all cultural systems. This is no less so in Fiji, where ideas of nature are infused with meanings across a rich tapestry of traditional iTaukei beliefs/practices and faith systems. Yet the question of whether these metaphysical ideas offer a means by which communities can harmonise th...

In celebration of Murray Bookchin's birth centenary, his daughter Debbie is joined by a number of his former friends, students and fellow travelers to honor his memory and reflect on his revolutionary legacy. ROAR Magazine is an independent journal of the radical imagination providing grassroots perspectives from the frontlines of the global strugg...

Dialectics has an incredibly rich, though relatively modest, place in the field of international relations (IR) theory. While the influence of dialectics has remained largely confined to a handful of scholars working within Marxism and critical international relations theory (CIRT), more recent developments have also seen its application in those a...

This chapter focuses on the cosmology within Nāgārjuna’s thought, the foundational philosopher in the Mādhyamaka Buddhist tradition. Nāgārjuna weaves a carefully reasoned path—the ‘Middle Way’—between substantialism and nominalism. Yet his emphasis on Śūnyatā (‘Emptiness’) is widely misinterpreted in the West as leading to nihilism when read with l...

The transformation of the Kurdish Freedom Movement towards Democratic Confederalism has promised a new horizon for emancipatory political organisation. This article examines the relationship between Bookchin's political theory of communal-ism and Öcalan's democratic confederalism informed by various lived practices of the Kurdish Freedom Movement....

This paper examines recognition in the cosmopolitan sphere of recognition – a sphere of ethical life and social freedom formed in the processes of recognition between individuals and groups across, over, and beyond, the state. The paper contends that Axel Honneth’s recognition theory can overcome many of the limitations inherent to established cosm...

It has been widely held that China’s development was forged from a unique pathway to that of Western countries. As a result, it has been assumed that China’s historical experience of modernization contains important lessons for other developing states. However, as we show, modernization in China can be seen as sharing many of the same assumptions o...

There has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse, particularly regarding their shared concern with humanism and dialectics. Recent edited collections on Dunayevskaya’s correspondence have, however, drawn a sharp contrast between the conceptions of the dialectical method: Dunayesvkaya, who emphasized the n...

in From International Relations to World Civilizations: The contributions of Robert W. Cox, in Globalizations, Vol. 13(5), 2016 .

Robert W. Cox's dictum that ‘(t)heory is for someone and for some purpose’ (emphasis in the original) is said to be the most-quoted line in International Relations (IR) theory. Yet whilst this spurred a revolution in critical thinking in IR, it echoed a far older conception of Critical Theory advanced by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s that claimed the...

Radical Cosmopolitanism. By Ingram James D. . New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 352p. $35.00 - Volume 13 Issue 3 - Shannon Brincat

The problem of global climate changes has raised fundamental questions of justice in world politics centered around the vast discrepancies between the causes and the effects of global warming and the uneven levels of consumption/enjoyment of fossil fuels. The overwhelming majority of approaches in environmental ethics have focused on either distrib...

In the wake of ecological crises, there has been a resurgence of interest in the relation between dialectical thought and nature. The work of Herbert Marcuse and Murray Bookchin offers unique approaches to this question that remain highly relevant. In the first half of the article, we engage with Marcuse's application of the dialectical method in w...

The question ‘What is dialectics?’ is notoriously difficult to answer. Theoretical obfuscation and ideological baggage have fostered widespread misunderstandings of the concept. This article is intended to go some way in providing an answer, though one offered as a heuristic in which further developments can be made, rather than as doctrinaire stat...

This paper explores potential points of synthesis between two leading theorists in Critical Theory and Critical International Relations Theory, Axel Honneth and Andrew Linklater. Whereas Linklater's recent work on the harm principle has turned away from the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School in favour of Norbert Elias and process sociol...

This article offers a reconstruction of the methodological tools pioneered by the first generation of the Frankfurt School (FS) and how they have been adapted in the contemporary project of emancipation in Critical International Relations Theory (CIRT). It is argued that the praxeological and methodological commitments of the early FS are of contin...

An interview with Robert W. Cox

Introduction: Andrew Linklater is one of the leading thinkers in Critical International Relations Theory. He joined the Department of International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth as the 10th Woodrow Wilson Professor in 2000 and has also taught at Keele University, the University of Tasmania and Monash University. He is a member of the Ac...

This article illustrates the importance of negativity within the dialectical method, aiming to bring clarity to what has been rendered unnecessarily mystical within recent revisions of dialectics, particular in the conception of “meta-dialectics.” The negative element in dialectics, where in the movement of sublation the subject remains undetermine...

This is a preliminary argument of a much larger research project inquiring into the relation betweenHegel’s philosophical system and the project of emancipation in Critical International Relations Theory. Specifically, the paper examines how Hegel’s theory of recognition gestures towards a form of radical cosmopolitanism in world politics to ensure...

This article is a reply to Steven C. Roach’s attempt to formulate a “meta-dialectical” approach to IR which appeared in a previous edition of Millennium (Vol 35(2), 2007). Though Roach’s ambitious undertaking is commended, it is argued that there are considerable conceptual difficulties arising from Roach’s attempt to counterpose negative dialectic...

This article explores some of the changes regarding the right to silence that have flowed from the passage of the so-called ‘anti-terror laws’, particularly the amendments to the ASIO Act(1979). It finds that the right has been significantly weakened through a number of provisions in the legislation. The writer contends that the judicial protection...

Introduction to the journal