Books by Charlotte Epstein
In the second half of the twentieth century, worldwide attitudes toward whaling shifted from wide... more 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 material interests but by a powerful anti-whaling discourse that successfully recast whales as extraordinary and intelligent endangered mammals that needed to be saved. Epstein views whaling both as an object of analysis in its own right and as a lens for examining discursive power, and how language, materiality, and action interact to shape international relations. By focusing on discourse, she develops an approach to the study of agency and the construction of interests that brings non-state actors and individuals into the analysis of international politics.
Epstein analyzes the "society of whaling states" as a set of historical practices where the dominant discourse of the day legitimated the killing of whales rather than their protection. She then looks at this whaling world's mirror image: the rise from the political margins of an anti-whaling discourse, which orchestrated one of the first successful global environmental campaigns, in which saving the whales ultimately became shorthand for saving the planet. Finally, she considers the continued dominance of a now taken-for-granted anti-whaling discourse, including its creation of identity categories that align with and sustain the existing international political order. Epstein's synthesis of discourse, power, and identity politics brings the fields of international relations theory and global environmental politics into a fruitful dialogue that benefits both.
Papers by Charlotte Epstein
Birth of the State
This chapter analyses a crucible of the state’s making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries... more This chapter analyses a crucible of the state’s making in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the public anatomy lesson. The body, this piece of ‘natural’ property that every human ‘has’, was being increasingly opened up and peered into for the purposes of finally seeing human nature itself. Bringing together visual studies and international relations, the chapter charts the scopic regime that established vision as modernity’s primary ordered instrument and that was honed upon the body dissected in public. To map its contours, it begins with the writings of anatomist William Harvey and scientist-statesman Francis Bacon. The chapter then tracks how this scopic regime was institutionalised by the spread of the highly popular public anatomy lesson across early modern Europe. It then analyses Renaissance and early modern representations of the public anatomy lesson, notably the frontispiece of the first manual of modern medicine, Andrea Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body (1...
Birth of the State
The role of the fundamental right to liberty in the making of the modern individual, or individua... more The role of the fundamental right to liberty in the making of the modern individual, or individualisation, is at the heart of this chapter. It tracks the place of the body in Thomas Hobbes’s and John Locke’s texts on liberty respectively, arguing that, whereas Hobbes externalised political liberty by rooting it solely in the body, Locke instead re-internalised it by bringing into focus the mind and the body. At the heart of Lockean liberty stands a Calvinist conscience, which Locke durably established as a pillar of political modernity. The centrality of the conscience to Locke’s liberty establishes him as the first theoretician of modern discipline. Locke brought back together two distinct functions of the conscience, the moral and the epistemological, which were initially folded together in the theological notion, but had been separated out by Hobbes and Descartes schematically. Key to this recovery of the conscience was another concept that Locke coined for modernity: ‘consciousn...
Birth of the State
This chapter assesses how security was established as the first absolute and natural right of the... more This chapter assesses how security was established as the first absolute and natural right of the subject. Thomas Hobbes remains in focus, insofar as he articulated the furthest what had already become an established dogma of early modern thought, notably in natural right theories, and of nascent state practice. The chapter then considers the different kinds of natures that troubled the enterprise of naturalisation. For nature was also appearing, as a result of the scientific revolution, as a source of disorder. It was no longer simply the stable referent for the task of political ordering. This new, epochal instability in the constructions of nature and the way it was addressed by Hobbes in his epistemological writings contains resources for short-circuiting the naturalising work that Hobbes, amongst others, was engaged in. These resources include Hobbes’s nominalism, which marks him as the original constructivist, and his critique of universals, including ‘paternal dominion’, his ...
Birth of the State
This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphor... more This chapter studies how liberty in the law evolved from being attached to a collective, metaphorical body—the medieval corporation—to being rooted instead in the individual body across a range of practices in seventeenth century Europe. It analyses the early modern forms of toleration that developed from the ground-up in Protestant Europe (Holland and Germany in particular), including the practices of ‘walking out’ (auslauf) to worship one’s God, and the house church (schuilkerk). These practices were key to delinking liberty from place, and thus to paving the way to attaching it instead to territory and the state. The chapter also considers the first common law of naturalisation, known as Calvin’s Case (1608), which wrote into the law the process of becoming an English subject—of subjection. This law decisively rooted the state-subject relation in the bodies of monarch and subject coextensively. Both of these bodies were deeply implicated in the process of territorialisation that ...
Birth of the State
This chapter describes how the body served to privatise property and to establish the human subje... more This chapter describes how the body served to privatise property and to establish the human subject, instead of the natural order, at the centre of the law. Whereas modern science expelled humanity from the world’s centre, a second revolution in the law achieved the opposite. It begat legal modernity and the right to private property that supports capitalism. The site for this revolution was early modern theories of natural rights. The chapter traces the genealogy of the concept of private property, from Hugo Grotius via Samuel von Pufendorf to John Locke, through this tradition and under the lens of the body, underscoring the extent to which they broke from premodern Thomist theories of natural law, whose default mode of property relations were communal. It then shows how Locke deployed the most effective legitimation of capitalism by locating the original mechanism by which property is privatised in ‘the hand that grabs’ – by corporealising it. The chapter then turns to the partic...
Birth of the State, 2020
This chapter examines the corporeal ontology of statehood, tracing how it first emerged as a spec... more This chapter examines the corporeal ontology of statehood, tracing how it first emerged as a specific solution to the religious wars that were raging through Europe in the seventeenth century. It focuses on Thomas Hobbes and the new political technology of raison d’état (reason of state). The state, Hobbes argued, was created to address the ongoing threat of conflict; hence, security is its raison d’être. Hobbes demonstrated why matters of the conscience and the soul were not for the state; indeed, that its appropriate ‘matter’ is the body. The chapter then demonstrates how the body emerged from this singular convergence of political thought and practice at the seventeenth century’s midpoint as the site where the founding relation of modern sovereignty was sealed, and that somatic security is the original form that this relation took. This relation is what the state (and private actors) continues to tap into today when it promises to keep people safe. It also shapes the subject’s ex...
Norms have become part of IR’s established tool-kit for analysing the behaviour of international ... more Norms have become part of IR’s established tool-kit for analysing the behaviour of international actors that is driven, not merely by a concern for self-interest maximisation, but by a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen 1998). Norms, or, in Martha Finnemore and Katheryn Sikkink’s (1998, 894) classic definition, ‘shared ideas, expectations and beliefs about appropriate behaviour’ are ‘what gives the world structure, order and stability’. They oil the workings of international cooperation. In the history of the discipline, norms, along with its conceptual counterpart, identity, have played a crucial role in moving IR beyond its narrow focus upon material understandings of power and interest-maximising behaviours. Norms is a hallmark of ‘conventional constructivism’ (Hopf 1998, Wiener 2004), and the driving concept of its highly successful empirical research programme, now into its third decade.[i]
This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two d... more 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 first, scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and political, re-established humans as the centre-point of a framework of rights. The book analyses the fundamental rights to security, liberty, and property, respectively, as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments, that the body served to naturalise security, to individualise liberty, and to privatise property. Covering a wide ...
International Affairs, 2020
In this review essay I reflect on the centrality of Spinoza's thought to political modernity ... more 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. It owes to the singular way in which he calibrated the relationship between reason, or the natural human need to understand, and faith, or the need to believe. But, over a century before the social sciences were invented, Spinoza also laid the foundations for the interpretative methods that would become central to these sciences and to the study of international politics. He remains essential reading for understanding our world.
Review of International Studies, 2018
In this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of int... more 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 recognition theory back to Hegel’s original dialectic of the master and servant in thePhenomenology of Spirit. What the dialectic captures, I argue, are the actual dynamics of misrecognition in social life, not an idealised form of recognition. This foundational, constitutive misrecognition is what Lacan also theorises by way of his concept of ‘fantasy’. Both Hegel and Lacan foreground a misrecognised, desiring subject that challenges the ways in which agency has been understood in international politics. Lastly, I show the purchase of a He...
Body & Society, 2016
In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary... more 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 subject, and the Lacanian psychoanalytic subject. The psychoanalytic perspective serves to appraise the importance of hiding for the subject effects of excessive exposure to the Other’s gaze. I conclude to the importance of the subject’s being able to hide, even when it has nothing to hide. By considering these two facets of subjectivity, political and psychic, I hope to make sense of our enduring and deeply political passionate attachment to privacy.
International Theory, 2014
International Theory (IT) promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normati... more International Theory (IT) promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normative aspects of world politics respectively. IT is open to theory of all varieties and from all disciplines, provided it addresses problems of politics, broadly defined and pertains to the international.
International Theory, 2014
In this article I consider what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial p... more 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 different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in international relations (IR), such as ‘norms’. In this perspective colonisation appears as a foundational shaper of these orders, to a degree and with effects still under-appraised in the discipline. The postcolonial perspective is thus deeply historical, or rather genealogical, in its dual concerns with, first, the genesis of norms, or the processes by which particular behaviours come to be taken to be ‘normal’. Second, ...
International Studies Perspectives, 2012
In this paper, I use a phenomenon of resistance to a global norm as a catalyst to critically reex... more In this paper, I use a phenomenon of resistance to a global norm as a catalyst to critically reexamine 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 implicit teleological assumption of change as progress. Second, the concept tends to frame out the perspective of the socializee. Third and relatedly, it infantilizes the socializee. I use the international politics of whaling to illustrate the practical and conceptual effects of this infantilization of the socializee and specifically the ways it curtails both policymaking and scholarly research. The purpose of my efforts here are not to discount the usefulness of ''socialization'' in understanding norm dynamics but to caution against these three particular forms of silencing effected by the epistemological apparatus that has taken shape around it.
International Political Sociology, 2007
This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under ... more 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 state, orchestrated by the security function, which ultimately strengthens the state. It is associated with the rise of a new governmentality discourse, which operates on a binary logic of productive/destructive, and where, in fact, the very distinctions between private and public, guilty, and innocentFclassic categories of sovereigntyFfind decreasing currency. However, biometric borders reveal a complicated game of renegotiations between sovereignty and governmentality, whereby sovereignty is colonized by governmentality on the one hand, but still functions as a counterweight to it on the other. Furthermore, they bring out a particular function of the ''destructive body'' for the governmental state: it is both the key figure ruling the whole design of security management, and the blind spot, the inconceivable, for a form of power geared toward producing productive bodies. (.. .) Political power is like the sun; everyone can see it, nobody can look straight at it, it has taken centuries to ''discover'' it, and it's not finished yet! (Henri Lefebvre 1987:18). Biometrics are at the borders: the discussion on biometrics has been fueled by the series of deadlines imposed by the U.S. government upon the 27 countries partaking in the ''U.S. Visa Waiver Program'' for their adoption of the biometric passport. 1 It also brought out a host of new anxieties associated with the experience of traveling, in the face of forms of control that have become increasingly close, increasingly invasive, even promiscuous (Big Brother is Looking After You 2006; Jeffrey 2006). Biometric passports have changed the way we travel. For travelers Author's note: I would like to thank the participants of the ISA workshop Governing by Risk in the ''War on Terror,'' Mark Salter, Mick Dillon, Vivienne Jabri, as well as two anonymous reviewers for the journal for their helpful comments on this article.
International Organization, 2013
The rationalist-constructivist divide that runs through the discipline of International Relations... more 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 agency that were first incarnated in the discipline's self-understandings by Hobbes's natural individual. Despite its turn to social theory, this persistent individualism has hampered constructivism's ability to appraise the ways in which the actors and structures of international politics mutually constitute one another “all the way down.” My purpose is to lay the foundations for a nonindividualist, adequately relational, social theory of international politics. To this end I propose a third model of agency, Lacan's split speakin...
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Books by Charlotte Epstein
Epstein analyzes the "society of whaling states" as a set of historical practices where the dominant discourse of the day legitimated the killing of whales rather than their protection. She then looks at this whaling world's mirror image: the rise from the political margins of an anti-whaling discourse, which orchestrated one of the first successful global environmental campaigns, in which saving the whales ultimately became shorthand for saving the planet. Finally, she considers the continued dominance of a now taken-for-granted anti-whaling discourse, including its creation of identity categories that align with and sustain the existing international political order. Epstein's synthesis of discourse, power, and identity politics brings the fields of international relations theory and global environmental politics into a fruitful dialogue that benefits both.
Papers by Charlotte Epstein
Epstein analyzes the "society of whaling states" as a set of historical practices where the dominant discourse of the day legitimated the killing of whales rather than their protection. She then looks at this whaling world's mirror image: the rise from the political margins of an anti-whaling discourse, which orchestrated one of the first successful global environmental campaigns, in which saving the whales ultimately became shorthand for saving the planet. Finally, she considers the continued dominance of a now taken-for-granted anti-whaling discourse, including its creation of identity categories that align with and sustain the existing international political order. Epstein's synthesis of discourse, power, and identity politics brings the fields of international relations theory and global environmental politics into a fruitful dialogue that benefits both.
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