Friday, October 28, 2005

said

Nope, not the postcolonial theorist.

Thanks to my recent membership in the British International Studies Association, I receive news of SAID, the "Sovereignty and its Discontents" seminar. Their purpose is as follows:
It is clearly the right time to reassess the value and meanings of the concept of sovereignty. Trends in world politics are contradictory, and more fluid than they have ever been. The SAID workshop situates itself at the forefront of this debate, and aims to push the discipline of IR into the twenty-first century. (BISA News 8)
They even have a website.

SAID are pushing (perhaps even inspired by) my friend Bill Rasch's book, which likewise goes under the title of Sovereignty and its Discontents. But Rasch's perspective is basically Schmittian (albeit with all the caveats that such an assertion requires these days), while SAID's would seem to be much more conventional International Relations, with an emphasis on (a global?) civil society.

Anyhow, they have a whole number of texts uploaded to their website. I'll try to get through some of them one of these days.

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