Showing papers in "Millennium: Journal of International Studies in 2010"
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss what an IR and peace-building praxis derived from the "everyday" might entail, and examine the insights of a number of literatures which contribute to a discussion of the dynamics of the everyday.
Abstract: This article discusses what an IR and peacebuilding praxis derived from the ‘everyday’ might entail. It examines the insights of a number of literatures which contribute to a discussion of the dynamics of the everyday. The enervation of agency and the repoliticisation of peacebuilding is its objective. It charts how local agency has led to resistance and hybrid forms of peace despite the overwhelming weight of the liberal peace project. In some aspects this may be complementary to the latter and commensurate with the liberal state, but in other aspects the everyday points beyond the liberal peace.
243 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that there remains a strong normative consensus about carbon markets and a deepening set of transnational governance practices, and that these governance practices only partly depend on the interstate negotiations.
Abstract: Assessments of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 have tended to see it as a ‘return to realism’ — as the triumph of hard interstate bargaining over institutional or normative development about climate change. This article contests that interpretation by showing how it focuses too closely on the interstate negotiations and neglects the ongoing development of carbon markets as governance practices and systems to deal with climate change. It shows that there remains a strong normative consensus about such markets, and a deepening set of transnational governance practices. These governance practices only partly depend on the interstate negotiations. Thinking about the future of global climate governance needs to start with the complexity of interactions between these transnational governance systems and the interstate negotiations.
107 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the logic of climate mainstreaming and explained the paradoxical result of such a consistent inconsistency, arguing that the global governmentality of climate protection is built on four discursive pillars, namely globalism, scientism, an ethics of growth and efficiency, which make it possible to integrate climate protection into the global hegemonic order without changing the basic social structure.
Abstract: More and more international organisations are starting to incorporate climate protection as an important policy goal. Strikingly, most institutions only rephrase existing activities in the terms of climate protection instead of changing them, although there are tensions and contradictions between short-term economic and long-term environmental goals. The aim of this article is to explore the logic of climate mainstreaming and explain the paradoxical result of such a consistent inconsistency. It employs a poststructuralist approach that combines elements of governmentality and discourse theory. Analysing discourses of the WTO, IMF, World Bank and OECD, it argues that the global governmentality of climate protection is built on four discursive pillars — globalism, scientism, an ethics of growth and efficiency — that make climate protection function as an empty signifier; that is, they make it possible to integrate climate protection into the global hegemonic order without changing the basic social structure...
92 citations
TL;DR: The American-led world system is troubled as mentioned in this paper and some would argue that it is in crisis, but what sort of crisis is it? Is it a crisis of America's position in the global system or is it a deeper world historical transition in which liberalism and the liberal international order are at risk?
Abstract: The American-led world system is troubled. Some would argue that it is in crisis.1 But what sort of crisis is it? Is it a crisis of America’s position in the global system or is it a deeper world historical transition in which liberalism and the liberal international order are at risk? Is the American-led “liberal era” ending, or is it transforming into a new sort of liberal order? What would a post-hegemonic liberal order look like? What sort of historical moment is this? Has the “liberal ascendency” of the last 200 years peaked, or is it simply taking new twists and turns? If liberal internationalism as it has been organised in the post-war era is giving way to something new, what is that “something new”? This chapter takes up these questions.
59 citations
TL;DR: The work in this article traces human rights, relations of subjectification, that is, the ways in which human rights call homo juridicus into being as a distinct type of subjectivity that, in parallel to homo oeconomicus, makes possible the contraction of the state and its governmentalisation.
Abstract: Taking liberalism as a technology of government characterised by its signature impulse what Michel Foucault called 'the internal rule of maximum economy' , the article interrogates the ways in which human rights produce a distinct subjectivity, homo juridicus, which is a subject amenable to self-government and, as such, acts as a partner, indeed a predicate, to neoliberal governmentality. Taking its impetus from Foucault's discussion of homo oeconomicus , the article traces human rights, relations of subjectification, that is, the ways in which human rights call homo juridicus into being as a distinct type of subjectivity that, in parallel to homo oeconomicus, makes possible the contraction of the state and its governmentalisation. The article calls such subjectification liberal 'ontogenesis' and argues that it takes four distinct but related forms: rhetorical, epistemic, performative and structural ontogenesis. It provides an illustration of how each of these forms of ontogenesis produce, and produce globally, through their discourses, knowledge production, law-making and restructuring of the 'conditions of freedom' , a necessary subject for neoliberalism. The article thereby shows that human rights assist in the evolution of government as the conduct of conduct, and irrevocably recast the very meaning of freedom and the possibilities for agonism.
53 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the ideal, Anglo-Saxon model of neoliberalism was viable because it was heavily subsidised from around the world, and they reveal important geopolitical shifts which are likely to prevent a return to "business as usual" in the world of finance.
Abstract: Has the global credit crunch shifted the foundations of global financial architecture away from the philosophy of ‘neoliberalism’? In this article, we argue that the neoliberal project is most probably dead and buried, despite the apparent commitment, which we detail in this article, to the spirit of neoliberal thinking in economic thought. By analysing three constitutive elements of neoliberalism (its public, private and regulatory components) before and after the credit crunch, we reveal important geopolitical shifts which are likely to prevent a return to ‘business as usual’ in the world of finance. We find that the defining trend among these changes is the global rise of the Eurozone. Specifically, we argue that the ideal, Anglo-Saxon model of neoliberalism was viable because it was heavily subsidised from around the world. Accordingly, the key to the future of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism lies with the willingness of European, East Asian and Middle Eastern creditors to continue extending their financial...
50 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed a novel distinction among four IR approaches and especially highlighted the approach which will be called here "offensive liberalism" (OLL), which they called offensive liberalism.
Abstract: The objective of this article is to develop a novel distinction among four IR approaches and especially to highlight the approach which will be called here ‘offensive liberalism’. This four fold di...
45 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the consequences for global governance of the growing power of the world's biggest retailers, illustrating with the case of global forest governance, are discussed. But the authors focus on analysing the consequences of big retail within global commodity chains, arguing that the rising power of big retailers is creating significant challenges and some opportunities for global environmental governance.
Abstract: This article focuses on analysing the consequences for global governance of the growing power of the world’s biggest retailers, illustrating with the case of global forest governance. It argues that the rising power of big retail within global commodity chains is creating both significant challenges — and some opportunities — for global environmental governance. The analysis suggests a need for IR to focus more on the shifting political power of multinational corporations, as both barriers to, and progress in, the governance of complex global issues such as deforestation and climate change increasingly occur in the corporate sphere. More specifically, the authors see great value in bringing research on globalising commodity chains back into IR, first revealing the power dynamics within these chains, then building on this to analyse the implications for global change and world politics. This reinforces and complements the message in Bernstein et al. (in this volume) that understanding the future of global ...
37 citations
TL;DR: Star Trek and the recent version of Battlestar Galactica are used to reflect on how America views its own destiny, its relationship to technology and its place in the universe as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Popular culture can be used as a mirror to reflect on how societies think about themselves. Here Star Trek and the recent version of Battlestar Galactica are used to reflect on how America views its own destiny, its relationship to technology and its place in the universe. Space and ‘final frontiers’ are particularly resonant in American culture, and these two television series provide numerous benchmarks by which to contrast the optimistic and outgoing America of the 1960s with the darker and more paranoid America of post-9/11. Can an America that has given up the goal of returning to the moon still claim to own the future, and is the US becoming inward- and backward-looking — a new Middle Kingdom?
33 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that elite anxieties regarding populism can engender the "technocratic repression" of emotion from paradigmatic debates in ways that paradoxically render policy less stable and pragmatic, and that such repression obscures the emotional bases of market trends and engenders overconfidence in the ability of monetary fine-tuning to restrain manias and to contain panics.
Abstract: Emotional forces shape not only market tendencies to ‘manias, panics and crashes’, but also policy debates as they predispose agents to definitions of state and societal interests. Nevertheless, IR scholars often downplay emotional influences, casting them as secondary to coalitional or cognitive forces. In this article, I address these limitations by disaggregating intersubjective understandings into popularly resonant traditions of thought and elite-based paradigmatic frameworks. Drawing on the insights of Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Hofstadter, I then argue that elite anxieties regarding populism can engender the ‘technocratic repression’ of emotion from paradigmatic debates in ways that paradoxically render policy less stable and pragmatic. Firstly, such repression obscures the emotional bases of market trends and engenders overconfidence in the ability of monetary fine-tuning to restrain manias and to contain panics. Secondly, in isolating paradigmatic debate from everyday language, technocratic rep...
33 citations
TL;DR: A reply to Vrasti's recent article in Millennium as mentioned in this paper is useful on four counts. Selected criticisms are overdrawn; what might be considered ‘pure’ ethnography is left unexplored; the relationship between method and methodology is not discussed; and useful methodological reflection is left unattended.
Abstract: A reply to Vrasti’s recent article in Millennium is useful on four counts. Selected criticisms are overdrawn; what might be considered ‘pure’ ethnography is left unexplored; the relationship between method and methodology is not discussed; and useful methodological reflection is left unattended. This article proceeds to address these issues by first offering comments on Vrasti’s treatment of the most methodologically sophisticated of the scholars reviewed: Pouliot and Neumann. Then the rest of Vrasti’s reductive types are unpacked by way of critique of Cohn and Enloe. Framed by these presentations, the third section explores Vrasti’s understanding of ‘ethnography’ in relation to the anthropological review and critiques of the use of ethnographic methods in IR. Finally, the article engages Vrasti’s conclusions on the value of ‘ethnographic IR’, offering a different direction than the author tables, arguing that the inherent ethical dilemmas that confront the researcher using ethnographic methods are themse...
TL;DR: The origins of these ideas are appropriately explained in this article by the authors of this paper: "sovereignty as responsibility" and "the responsibility to protect" (see Section 2.1).
Abstract: Ideas of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ and ‘the responsibility to protect’ have become increasingly accepted by the society of states in recent years. The origins of these ideas are appropriately...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a survey of sociological theories on structure and agency in the context of climate change, focusing on sociologists and anthropologists, who will find much food for thought in this book.
Abstract: 855 the issues raised in the book. Two minor complaints: firstly, the over arching theoretical framework could be clearer. For example, I would have liked the editor to explain further ideational–material and agent–structure dualities. This brings up the other room for improvement – the book could benefit greatly from more attention to sociological theory. For example, Anthony Giddens’ and Margaret Archer’s influential work on the interaction between structure and agency is not even mentioned by any author. Overall, this volume is a great achievement. Although the book was clearly produced with an international relations audience in mind, sociologists and anthropologists will find it provocative as well. And those who enjoy Foucault’s work will find much food for thought in this book. Students of climate change will appreciate how much a constructivist perspective has to offer.
TL;DR: This article reviewed several scholarly positions or practices, from objectivism to verstehen, which confront, quarantine or accommodate scholarly emotionality in varied ways, before articulating the benefits of irony.
Abstract: While an emerging group of scholars has made productive inroads investigating emotion’s role in politics, the way in which scholars face these emotions remains an issue in need of updated study. While no article can provide definitive conclusions on such a topic, the current effort posits one narrative device that IR scholars might utilise in order to cope with the realities of politics — irony. Irony is useful in that it allows us a ‘critical distance’ from our subject without requiring us to abandon our emotions. The article briefly reviews several scholarly positions or practices, from objectivism to verstehen, which confront, quarantine or accommodate scholarly emotionality in varied ways, before articulating the benefits of irony. It proposes two forms of ironical study drawn, respectively, from the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Richard Rorty.
TL;DR: This article argued that representations of criminality and victimhood, which define the construction of the African subject at the ICC, are crucial to the self-identity of the ICC through their discursive corroboration of the court's cosmopolitan and liberal narratives.
Abstract: Since 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened 13 cases against African individuals who have been accused of crimes under the purview of the Rome Statute. This article critically examines the centrality of African subjects and African conflicts to the operation of the court. I argue that representations of criminality and victimhood, which define the construction of the African subject at the ICC, are crucial to the self-identity of the ICC through their discursive corroboration of the court’s cosmopolitan and liberal narratives. These representations are consequently institutionalised in the operation of the court, which encourages the repeated indictment of African subjects at the ICC and the reproduction of the criminal—victim dichotomy in the representation of African subjects in the discourse of international criminal law. Rather than presenting this trend as a simple phenomenon of the court’s mechanisms of referral, or alternatively suggesting that the court is engaged in a conscious ...
TL;DR: This article paid special attention to two of Rancatore's main points of criticism: that I advance a purist notion of ethnography and that ethnography is a data-collection method like any other data collection method.
Abstract: This rejoinder pays special attention to two of Jason Rancatore’s main points of criticism: that I advance a purist notion of ethnography and that ethnography is a data-collection method like any o...
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TL;DR: This article argued that post-Cold War peacebuilding is increasingly conflated with the smooth functioning of a range of processes associated with democracy, governance, development and securitisation. But, critiques o...
Abstract: Post-Cold War peacebuilding is increasingly conflated with the smooth functioning of a range of processes associated with democracy, governance, development and securitisation. However, critiques o...
TL;DR: The authors argue that both internationalisms fail to adequately theorise world order in part because of their flawed characterisation of hierarchy and their related lack of attention to performances of social conventions, and that the crisis is on the legitimacy or authority side of the register.
Abstract: Liberal internationalism is the default setting for thinking about the development of international institutions since 1919. It provides the template for practitioners whose job it is to juggle contending norms of power and justice, rights and responsibilities. For complex reasons, proponents of liberalism believe that the default needs to be reset — their critics agree. Liberalism is in trouble because of the fragility of the inter-state order coupled to the challenge posed by rising, non-liberal powers. Closer to home, liberalism is in trouble because of a contestation over its specific liberal values. Contemporary liberal international theory understands this challenge in subtly different ways. For US-based internationalists, the crisis is one of authority; for English School internationalists, the problem with international order is that its institutions are ‘deformed’ because of a failure to legitimise power and institutions. Whether the crisis is on the legitimacy or authority side of the register, we argue that both internationalisms fail to adequately theorise world order in part because of their flawed characterisation of hierarchy and their related lack of attention to performances of social conventions.
TL;DR: The authors reconceptualises the emotions associated with "anti-Americanism" and sketches an alternative account of impassioned protest in the Middle East and South Asia, and encourages international relations scholars to view grassroots actors as neither impulsive insurgents nor aggregations of survey data.
Abstract: This article reconceptualises the emotions associated with ‘anti-Americanism’ and sketches an alternative account of impassioned protest in the Middle East and South Asia. I identify two overlapping discursive images that mistake what emotions are and how they fuel political resistance: ‘Islamic anger’, which delegitimises emotional expression as a form of political agency, and ‘anti-American hatred’, which assumes that popular emotions in these regions are tied to a clear and distinct object — America. Drawing on two recent cases widely discussed in the American media, I show how the emotional quality of political resistance is used to undermine its legitimacy. Using ethnographic sources, I then offer a preliminary sketch of the normative, historical and interactive contexts of those protests. The article encourages international relations scholars to view grassroots actors as neither impulsive insurgents nor aggregations of survey data but instead complex moral agents embedded in local struggles.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw on Foucault's biopolitics and argue that imperial processes such as liberal internationalisms, neoliberal entrepreneurships and neoconservative politics are intimately converging and diverging in the reassembling and reconstructing of international life.
Abstract: The leaders of the neoliberal world order are now intensifying their interventions by unleashing force with impunity while slaughtering people in the name of liberal internationalism’s peace, freedom, democracy and security. Their calls, interventions of imperial violence, push us to ask: how do we disrupt these dominant processes guided by ontological antagonisms and existential wars whose ultimate goal becomes ‘bringing life back’? In this article, I draw on Foucault’s biopolitics and articulate beyond his theorisations that imperial processes such as liberal internationalisms, neoliberal entrepreneurships and neoconservative politics are intimately converging and diverging in the reassembling and reconstructing of international life. More concretely, an analysis of the CPA planners and forces in Iraq points to those processes and terrains of antagonism that are foundational to the reassembling and reconstructing of this order: the direct use of force and the racial and gendered corporeal reconstruction...
TL;DR: The films Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Human Terrain are presented as critical intertexts for understanding how the cinematic aestheticisation of violence can glorify as well as vilify war, depending on how the spectator identifies with the protagonist and the investigator with the informant.
Abstract: The films Avatar, The Hurt Locker and Human Terrain are presented as critical intertexts for understanding how the cinematic aestheticisation of violence can glorify as well as vilify war, depending on how the spectator identifies with the protagonist and the investigator with the informant. Estrangement from and entanglement with the other become key variables for assessing the anti-war impact of a film.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how the construct of autonomy shorn of its liberal sovereign inheritances could serve as a resource for creative enactment, and explore two trajectories of investigation.
Abstract: This article pursues two trajectories of investigation: one which explores how the construct of autonomy shorn of its liberal sovereign inheritances could serve as a resource for creative enactment...
TL;DR: The authors argue that the international system has to be seen as embedded within a range of physical systems, and other social systems including those which reproduce a range (gendered, racial, class-based, colonial) relations of domination.
Abstract: The use of ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory appears very different from its incarnations in political philosophy. Whilst realist scholars have used anarchy to describe an absence of centralised political authority in which states wield differential power, political philosophers in the anarchist tradition have mounted a critique of the coercive and compulsory powers of states themselves. This article argues for reconceptualising ‘anarchy’ in International Relations theory using insights from complexity theory. We would describe the international system as a complex adaptive system which has a tendency to self-organisation. Furthermore, in distinct contrast to Waltz, we argue that the international system has to be seen as embedded within a range of physical systems, and other social systems including those which reproduce a range of (gendered, racial, class-based, colonial) relations of domination. Here insights from anarchist social ecologism can be utilised to further accounts of hierarchy and...
TL;DR: The authors argue that the homo faber concept still breathes the obsolete notion of a powerful working class which is, like capitalism, based solely on production and consumption and cannot meet the ongoing fundamental change of the glob...
Abstract: Global capitalism claims to offer emancipation as liberation from the bureaucratic cage of working routines, and justice as a result of global growth. The price for this model of emancipation and justice is constant change and flexibility of the self. I agree with Richard Sennett, who I take here as a representative of a pragmatic approach in critical theory, that this development leads to a corrosion of character, ultimately threatening the foundations of democracy and preventing the creation of a global community of political agency. What is needed is a cultural narrative enabling the self to act for a global community of political agency that favours ways to global justice. However, contrary to Sennett, I argue that this new self cannot be reinvented as the classical homo faber. I argue that the homo faber concept still breathes the obsolete notion of a powerful working class which is, like capitalism, based solely on production and consumption and cannot meet the ongoing fundamental change of the glob...
TL;DR: A persistent struggle within liberal thought is how to recognise cultural particularity within an ethical system in which toleration does not become indifference as mentioned in this paper, which is a persistent struggle in liberal thought.
Abstract: A persistent struggle within liberal thought is how to recognise cultural particularity within an ethical system in which toleration does not become indifference. The liberal internationalism espou...
TL;DR: In this article, the central role played by conceptions of truth in critical IR scholarship is described and a way out of the resultant impasse is found in Theodor Adorno's theory of truth, in which a concern with the primacy of the objective is coupled with an insistence on the connection between truth and human needs.
Abstract: This article describes the central role played by conceptions of truth in critical IR scholarship. Two broad positions are identified. Firstly, despite their differences, Critical Theorists and post-structuralists understand truth in intersubjective terms, and its political significance as arising from its relationship to the norms and practices constitutive of political reality. In contrast, Critical Realists understand truth in terms of the cognitive relationship of subjects with an independent objective reality, and its significance as arising from the importance of accurate knowledge of that reality. The article suggests that each of these positions blocks the legitimate insights of the other. It argues that a way out of the resultant impasse can be found in Theodor Adorno’s theory of truth, in which a concern with the primacy of the objective is coupled with an insistence on the connection between truth and human needs.
TL;DR: In this paper, a range of neoconservative thought reveals a unifying theme: the enervating effects of democracy on state power and the will to wield it in a dangerous world, and the United States enjoys greater safety among other democracies due to a more favorable distribution of relative power.
Abstract: While realists and neoconservatives generally disagreed on the Iraq invasion of 2003, nothing inherent in either approach to foreign policy accounts for this. Neoconservatism’s enthusiasm for democratisation would appear to distinguish the two but its rejection of all other liberal mechanisms in world politics suggests that the logic linking democracy and American security shares little with liberalism. Inspecting the range of neoconservative thought reveals a unifying theme: the enervating effects of democracy on state power and the will to wield it in a dangerous world. Consequently, the United States enjoys greater safety among other democracies due to a more favourable distribution of relative power. Viewing regime type through the prism of state power extraction in a competitive, anarchic world puts neoconservatism squarely in the neoclassical realist camp. The article concludes by suggesting why the rest of International Relations should care about this new ‘neo—neo’ debate.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this article, an estudo de natureza qualitativa, tendo-se recorrido a opiniao de 40 alunos e 40 professores, with the object of se conhecer a percepcao dos dois principais intervenientes do processo ensino-aprendizagem acerca do significado of “bom professor”, consubstanciado, na pratica, pelas caracteristicas do professor eficaz, efectuou-se um estudo
Abstract: Resumo Com o objectivo de se conhecer a percepcao dos dois principais intervenientes do processo ensino-aprendizagem acerca do significado de “bom professor”, consubstanciado, na pratica, pelas caracteristicas do professor eficaz, efectuou-se um estudo de natureza qualitativa, tendo-se recorrido a opiniao de 40 alunos e 40 professores. Os depoimentos colhidos pela pesquisa de opiniao, com recurso a tecnica da entrevista, foram trabalhados seguindo os pressupostos da analise de conteudo, sendo as opinioes categorizadas com o auxilio de uma matriz teorica que incorpora as seguintes dimensoes: a) conhecimento especifico; b) comunicacao e linguagem; c) relacionamento; d) exigencia; e) motivacao; f) valores pessoais; g) cordialidade; h) recursos didacticos; e i) avaliacao da aprendizagem. O facto de se ter optado por docentes de diferentes niveis de ensino, levou a identificar aspectos coincidentes e divergentes entre as opinioes expressas. O mesmo se veio a verificar com a inclusao de alunos de diferentes faixas etarias, que, retratando diferentes etapas do desenvolvimento, possibilitaram um conhecimento diferenciado relativamente aos factores que caracterizam um professor eficaz, em funcao do nivel de ensino frequentado (superior versus secundario). Permitiu tambem uma comparacao de opinioes entre alunos e professores. Sintetizando os resultados relativos a opiniao dos professores, em funcao do nivel de ensino onde exercem funcoes, podem-se identificar como aspectos importantes para reflexao: a) para os professores do ensino superior o atributo mais relevante que caracteriza um professor eficaz refere-se aos “valores pessoais”, ja para os professores do ensino secundario e o “conhecimento especifico”; b) a “comunicacao
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider what war might look like as an institution of international hierarchy and argue that the legal regime advanced by the United States in the war on terror in effect globalises the legal hierarchy of civil war.
Abstract: The purpose of this article is to consider what war might look like as an institution of international hierarchy. This might not seem all that challenging because we have a long history of pre-Westphalian warfare to draw on. The first section of the article examines that history to demonstrate how war was gradually transformed from an institution of hierarchy to an institution of international society. The second and third sections of the article are perhaps more challenging because they unsettle English School perspectives on war. This is not simply a reference to the use in the third section of Carl Schmitt to help us understand the evolution of irregular warfare and what that means for normative relationships between combatants. It is also a reference to the argument of the fourth section, which is that the legal regime advanced by the United States in the war on terror in effect globalises the legal hierarchy of civil war. This argument is made with reference to the Military Commissions Act and the ca...
TL;DR: The authors examine the reasons behind Israel's and the international community's refusal to engage Hamas in the internationally sanctioned "peace process" and argue that more important than the strategic challenges Hamas is deemed to pose to this process, are the epistemological and ontological challenges the movement intrinsically poses to the dominant normative framework that underpins the process.
Abstract: This article will examine the reasons behind Israel’s and the international community’s refusal to engage Hamas in the internationally sanctioned ‘peace process’. It will be argued here that more important than the ‘strategic’ challenges Hamas is deemed to pose to this process, are the epistemological and ontological challenges the movement intrinsically poses to the dominant normative framework that underpins the process. In order to understand the roots of this challenge, I will employ the three-pronged approach of what Florian Hoffman refers to as ‘epistemological relativism’. This entails a ‘complexification’ of the normative framework on which the discourse of the peace process is based; a ‘de-exoticisation’ of the normative framework in which the Other — in this case Hamas — operates; and a ‘re-exoticisation’ of the normative framework on which the process is predicated, ‘showing its contingent and idiosyncratic nature’, and therefore creating a space in which the Other may be understood and engaged. The article will conclude by arguing that it is only once this process has been undertaken that we can begin to fathom the establishment of an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine, which is considered ‘just’ by all parties to the ‘conflict’.