International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis

International Relations, Meaning and Mimesis is an innovative assessment of the uses of theory in making sense of international politics, opening up new pathways to thinking about the basics of the study area.

Insights drawn from an interdisciplinary corpus of critical scholarship are synthesized and brought to bear on key concepts such as sovereignty, the state, peace, law, justice, ethics, and supranationality. The mainstream characteristically dismisses the narrativity that accompanies these concepts as derivative, tending to treat meaning attributable to them as static. The work shows how problematic this disdain of mimesis (exchange, reproduction, imitation) is and how this mindset effectively incapacitates conventional theorizing in both predicting phenomena and providing a normative vision. Integrating the study of international politics into debates in the wider academia over meaning and mimesis, this ambitious work is fluent and accessible at the same time, with exceptional lucidity in presenting difficult philosophical notions.

A series of radical positions advanced in the book on theory and methodology not only address and call to account the mainstream imagination on international politics but also outline the implications of this critique for a host of specific issue areas, including peace research, normative theories, international law, and European studies.

Necati Polat is Professor in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, where he teaches international political theory, international law, human rights and the philosophy of social science.