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Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2020

Clive Gabay Open the ORCID record for Clive Gabay [Opens in a new window]
Clive Gabay*
Affiliation:
School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: c.gabay@qmul.ac.uk
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Abstract

Important scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it ‘realistic’, whereby ‘failed’ utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constructs a self-reinforcing relationship between change and realism, whereby only ‘realistic’ interventions can affect normatively desirable change, and therefore only interventions that are possible under current social and political conditions are normatively desirable. Drawing on the idea that the quest for utopia must always fail, the paper suggests that IR theory should be far more attuned to ‘failure’ than as simply a phenomenon that helps define the boundary between the realistic and unrealistic. The paper draws on non-canonical literatures from utopian studies and anarchism, to furnish an alternative ‘no-point’ form of utopianism that dissolves the chronos/kairos binary and thus engages neither in universalist and violent end-point, nor institutionally compromised ‘mid-range’ utopianism. This acts to reconceptualise ‘failure’ in excess of itself, a productive site for IR scholarship, and a political archive for movements and struggles to learn from.

Keywords

Chronosfailurekairosutopia
Type
Research Article
Information
International Theory , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , July 2022 , pp. 285 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Beckett 1984.

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