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Julian Reid

University of Lapland, International Relations, Faculty Member

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Julian Reid is known for his research on the biopolitics of war, critique of liberalism, and seminal deconstruction of resilience. Educated in London (B.A., First Class Honours, 1996), Amsterdam (M.Phil. 1998) and Lancaster (Ph.D., 2004), he has taught International Politics and International Relations at the Universities of London (SOAS and King’s College), Sussex, and Lapland, where he has been the Professor of International Relations since 2010. He was Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor in Politics at the University of Bristol (UK) between 2013 and 2014 and Research Fellow in the Global Forum at Virginia Tech (USA) in 2017. In 2025 he is Research Fellow in the Kate Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). His books are Biopolitics of the War on Terror (2006); The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (2009, coauthored with Michael Dillon); Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (2014, coauthored with Brad Evans); The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability (2016, coauthored with David Chandler); Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (2019, coauthored with David Chandler). He has edited collections on Postcollectivity (2024, with Agniezska Jelewska and Michal Krawczak); The Biopolitics of Development (2013, with Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar, 2013) and Deleuze & Fascism (2013, with Brad Evans). His research has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Finnish Academy, and the Kone Foundation. His work has been translated into several languages including Korean, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, Slovenian, and Bulgarian.

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Александр Сергунин

Saint-Petersburg State University

Daniela Liggett

University of Canterbury/Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha

University of Turku

University of Tartu

Dorothée Cambou

University of Helsinki

Aileen A . Espiritu

University of Tromsø

School of Philosophy and Letters - University of Buenos Aires

Linda Fernandez

University of Latvia

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Calls for Papers by Julian Reid

Call for papers NOS-HS exploratory workshop: Resilience and Militarisation

Workshop: Politics of Hope, Copenhagen, November 2017

This workshop seeks to bring researchers together to discuss the politics of hope. This era of en... more This workshop seeks to bring researchers together to discuss the politics of hope. This era of environmental, economic and social insecurity has seen burgeoning references to 'hope' as a strength to draw on, a counterforce and a means to achieve empowerment, signaling a growing interest in how hope features in social, political and legal struggles. Studies have elaborated on how hope works as a resource supposedly enabling individuals and communities to alter their conditions whether they are refugees, indigenous peoples, the poor or activists. Others argue that neoliberalism offers hope and hopefulness to those it is unable or unwilling to offer anything else: populations affected by poverty, climate change or colonization are to rely on hope as a driver that could lead to a better life and more security in the future. The workshop will focus on the ways in which power features in discourses of hope and hopefulness. We welcome papers from a broad range of angles, including, for example, political science, philosophy, sociology, literature, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, law and jurisprudence, that discuss the interplay of power relations and hope. The workshop will address questions such as: How does the promise of progress entailed in political and legal processes construct hope and what kinds of power relations are these constructions of hope based on? Can hope and the promise of change produce new configurations of power? Does hope and the promise of better things to come allow unequal power relations to continue? Who are the subjects seen as being in need of hope and hoping? How should we interpret the dynamics between giving political and legal hopes and delaying –often endlessly – their fulfillment? And, if hope is a contemporary vehicle for power, can one resist it by refusing or abandoning the hope proffered? Theoretical, empirical and methodological papers reflecting these questions and other relevant themes are welcome. The deadline for abstracts (max. 300 words) is 20 October 2017. Please send your abstract to Marjo Lindroth (marjo.lindroth@ulapland.fi) and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen (heidi.sinevaara-niskanen@ulapland.fi).

Edited Volumes by Julian Reid

Postcollectivity: Situated Knowledge and Practice

Koninklijke Brill bv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Req... more Koninklijke Brill bv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/ or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill bv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Cover illustration: Courtesy of artist Elżbieta Kowalska.

Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present

Deleuze & Fascism: Security, War, Aesthetics

Book Chapters by Julian Reid

Postcollectivity: New Ways of Gathering and Practicing in Times of Crises

Postcollectivity, 2024

Postcollectivity, 2024

Resistance, today, has an image problem. What is it, where is it, who does it, to whom and what a... more Resistance, today, has an image problem. What is it, where is it, who does it, to whom and what and how? How do we know what is resistance and what is not? Each of these questions is a question of the image of resistance. Research in the social sciences on resistance commonly points to the limits of our imaginaries when it comes to the question of resistance, and the ways in which those limits lead us to the issue of form. A recent article by the geographer Sarah Hughes provides a classic example. She complains of the "predetermination of form that particular actions or actors must assume" to be considered as resistance (Hughes 2020, 1). She points out what it is we risk missing or ignoring in having succumbed to such "predeterminations of form", and then proceeds to revisit fundamental assumptions at work in concepts and practices of resistance, before making an argument for an engagement with a wider understanding of resistance, one that does away with traditional images of resistance, as linear, intentional, oppositional forms of agency, to focus instead on new, different and better ones, such as incoherence, multiplicity, becoming and emergence. The basic idea is that the emergence of alternative forms of life are held back by resistance once resistance is shut off from these alternatives on account of the limits of the imaginaries framing it (Povinelli 2011, 14). "Traditional framings" of resistance are seen as problematic in these literatures, as new "intersectional" framings are championed (Taylor 2017, 20-21). The struggle over the image, form, and frame of resistance is all about making it more "accessible" to its own potentials (Taylor 2017, 14), as theorists of resistance call for a mobilisation of the imagination to release images of resistance from the confines of the myths which condition it. This kind of problematisation of form is not confined to resistance. Much has been made in recent years of how 'the West' in its entirety has been shaped by a certain understanding of the origins of forms. The anthropologist, Philippe Descola, has argued that what defines the West, and what distinguishes it from other civilizations, is its belief in what he calls "the heroic model of creation"; the idea, that is, of "production as the imposition of form upon inert matter" (Descola 2014, 323). Descola demonstrates the peculiarity and cultural specificity of this idea, discussing how foreign it is to, for example, Chinese culture, but more especially to that of the Indians of Amazonia, for who there is no

Technologies of Disappearance

States of Disappearance, 2023

Aphanisis" is a term that Jacques Lacan used to describe a particular process of interest to psyc... more Aphanisis" is a term that Jacques Lacan used to describe a particular process of interest to psychoanalysis, what he explained as the emergence of the subject in its disappearance. 1 Lacan openly borrowed and developed this term from another, less well-known analyst, Ernest Jones, a Welshman and friend of Sigmund Freud. Jones used the word, which derives from the Greek, to describe the fundamental and in some cases pathological "fear of seeing desire disappear." 2 This is the simple fear, perhaps, of being unable to get it up, or of being castrated, or simply of being deprived of sexual enjoyment. With Lacan, however, the term became a way of describing something more complex, less rooted in sexuality, but nevertheless concerning desire − for it was in disappearance that Lacan located the very emergence of the subject as such. He thought about disappearance not simply as a source of fear, or a problem to be solved, but also as an act, a movement, a manifestation, crucial to the subject's coming-to-be. 3 It is a game, he argued, that we first enter into as children with our parents when the phantasy of one's own disappearance is the first object that we learn to bring into play in answer to the question of whether these persons charged with our care can afford to lose us. 4 When the desire that founds the subject is intuited to be, merely, the desire of the big Other, then the subject, to emerge as itself, has to somehow make itself disappear. 5 At least, I take that to be what Lacan means − that disappearance is a kind of practice (and a way, as Michel Foucault would later put it), first invented by the Greeks, of caring for the self. 6

The Image of Terror

The work of Gilles Deleuze was dedicated in a fundamental sense to a particular political problem... more The work of Gilles Deleuze was dedicated in a fundamental sense to a particular political problem, that of the production of what he described as a new type of 'people to come'. This would be a people distinct from the historical peoples produced by nation-states, institutions, laws and social contracts; a people different to those dreamed of and made possible by the many different ideological projects of the modern era. It would be a people defined indeed by a positive destruction of the conditions of possibility for those various projects, brought together by a desire not to change the world in order to make it a better place, but to see the world for what it really is, in all its incoherence and brokenness. This would be a people, he argued, no longer concerned as such with the problem of how to act but precisely with how to see, and how especially to see the intolerability of the world as it is revealed to be, once we start to privilege sight over action, and open our perception to the poverty and forms of oppression which otherwise passes us by (Deleuze 2005; Deleuze 1989; Reid 2013). This new people, this 'people to come', expressed in effect, Deleuze argued, a new typology on which to base its struggle against poverty and oppression, that of 'the seer', and a new kind of imaginary on which to form political community, a community of seers possessive of the collective perception of the intolerability of present social relations and defined by a common will to destroy them and remake those relations anew (Reid 2013).

On Endurance: The Politics of Being Between Pain and Boredom

Contemporary Meanings of Endurance, 2022

Critical Studies of the Arctic, 2022

This chapter addresses the concept of biopolitics and its implications for how power is theorized... more This chapter addresses the concept of biopolitics and its implications for how power is theorized in the Arctic. There is a long history of state intervention in the life of Arctic populations, especially in the lives of indigenous peoples, on account of the ways in which their lives are seen to require care and development. Critics deploy the concept of biopolitics to argue that these interventions are not designed simply to care for indigenous peoples in compassionate ways, but that Arctic states use care as a strategy of legitimation for interventions which function to extend state control over 'risky' populations. These are instances of biopower-the exercise of political power within a population in which care for the life of that population simultaneously extends state control over that population for security reasons. This chapter builds on the research of scholars of biopolitics in the Arctic to examine how this problematic currently plays out in policy-based responses to the suicide crisis in Arctic indigenous communities. The argument is that the problem of suicide in the Arctic is constructed in ways which function to develop biopolitical strategies of rule over indigenous peoples.

Narrating Indigeneity in the Arctic: Scripts of Disaster Resilience Versus the Poetics of Autonomy

Arctic Triumph: Northern Innovation and Persistence, 2019

The capacity to inhabit and cope with living in disastrous environments is what social scientists... more The capacity to inhabit and cope with living in disastrous environments is what social scientists widely label resilience. It is a capacity that peoples inhabiting the Arctic are especially renown for, and one that is attributed in particular to indigenous peoples living here. Indeed policy makers, concerned as they currently are with attempting to formulate policies designed to help people cope with the coming era of disasters portended by climate change, are attracted to indigenous peoples of the Arctic on account of their perceived abilities to live in a state of permanent disaster. The ability to adapt to disastrous events is seen to be the key component of the life-worlds of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, such as the Eurasian Sámi people, which inhabits Arctic Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and the resilience of the Sámi is said to be a living testimony of their strength. Within the Academy, anthropologists are currently being mobilised to provide ethnographic studies of the practices and forms of knowledge that enable the Sámi to do so. As such the Sámi are held to be a model for the rest of humanity, faced as it is with a coming era of climate disasters and global ecological catastrophe. Rather than join in with the chorus of celebration concerning Sámi resilience in the Arctic, this chapter will critique the strategic and colonial rationalities shaping it. Knowledge around resilience, concerned as it might seem to be with promoting the rights and empowerment of the Sámi, is constitutive of processes for the production and disciplining of their indigeneity, rather than being simply a deep ethnographic description. This disciplining of the Sámi, as well as every other target population in the Arctic, by proponents of resilience, forces them into accepting the necessity of a future laden by disastrous events. As such this chapter urges critical thinkers and practitioners concerned with indigenous politics in the Arctic to be more circumspect when confronting claims about the inherent resilience of indigenous peoples living here. It argues for the necessity of examining resilience as an element within a narrative strategy for the scripting of the Arctic and the life-worlds of indigenous peoples inhabiting it, rather than an expression of the agency of indigenous peoples as such.

Securing the Imagination: The Politics of the Resilient Self

As a culture we are saturated today by discourses around the need to develop the self. In fact di... more As a culture we are saturated today by discourses around the need to develop the self. In fact discourses around selfhood can be seen to be driving wider social and political discourses around development on a more or less global scale. The discourse on 'the resilient self' is a case in point. Leading psychologists of resilience claim responsibility not just for developing the concept from its psychological origins into the international political and social framework it has now become, but for the peace and reconciliation in former war-torn countries where resilience is now said to exist. Within resilience, however, lurks another property and capacity of the self, that of imagination. Imagination is said by psychologists to play a crucial role in the recovery, for example, of human beings from traumatic experiences and their development of resilience. For abused children, especially, recovery and development are said to require the work of imagination, as hurt creates the images of a better future and the pleasure of such images becomes linked with painful realities, enabling them to withstand the present. It is even possible, some psychologists of resilience maintain, that the torment of the present heightens the need to imagine a future and thus increases the very powers and potentials of imagination itself. How, then, to theorise and understand the work which imagination performs on social and political scales? In this chapter I want to consider, critique and extend such psychological accounts of the function of imagination for the purpose of developing a better understanding of the politics of resilience. Images are, I argue, while untrue and in a certain sense inferior to the real, nevertheless things which human beings need in order to be able to act collectively upon the real, and to change the very nature of their political and social circumstances. But while resilience provides scope for the function of imagination in enabling human beings to survive, it is nevertheless, as a discourse, also based upon a highly circumscribed imaginary, the limits of which are defined T&F PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

The Living Space of the Image

There is no image of space, nor space of images, except the living space which subverts the very ... more There is no image of space, nor space of images, except the living space which subverts the very division on which space depends for its human comprehension, settlement, and exploration. The space co-substantial with the life of images is neither that of the interiority explored by Bachelard and still eulogized by his disciples including Sloterdijk, nor that of the exterior championed by Foucault. It is the inside-outside which theorists of space and images come close to, now and then, without being able to either penetrate or escape from. It is an imageless space, or at least a space for which no human image suffices. It is a space which reveals the impossibility of reconciling relations between human life and imaginal life. The space of the image attracts but it is a space which human cannot hold. It is a space of illness, and yet, also, of felicitous affect, allowing a glimpse of the forever out of time and space which particular images, and what Deleuze described especially as time-images, reveal; the space, that is, where subjectivity is made, as much as human life is lost; the living space of the image.

Neoliberalism, Development and Resilience

Occupying God’s Shadow: Nietzsche’s Eirōneia

The (Human) Subject of Security

Fighting States of Subjection

How we understand the nature of the subject of liberalism's War on Terror has fundamental implica... more How we understand the nature of the subject of liberalism's War on Terror has fundamental implications for how we understand the subject of struggle against this war. The subject of liberal war does not fight simply in order to destroy another subject, but to produce subjects who will in turn reproduce the order for which its war is waged.

Fascism in All its Forms

The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present

by Julian Reid, Sandro Mezzadra, and Ranabir Samaddar

Call for papers NOS-HS exploratory workshop: Resilience and Militarisation

Workshop: Politics of Hope, Copenhagen, November 2017

This workshop seeks to bring researchers together to discuss the politics of hope. This era of en... more This workshop seeks to bring researchers together to discuss the politics of hope. This era of environmental, economic and social insecurity has seen burgeoning references to 'hope' as a strength to draw on, a counterforce and a means to achieve empowerment, signaling a growing interest in how hope features in social, political and legal struggles. Studies have elaborated on how hope works as a resource supposedly enabling individuals and communities to alter their conditions whether they are refugees, indigenous peoples, the poor or activists. Others argue that neoliberalism offers hope and hopefulness to those it is unable or unwilling to offer anything else: populations affected by poverty, climate change or colonization are to rely on hope as a driver that could lead to a better life and more security in the future. The workshop will focus on the ways in which power features in discourses of hope and hopefulness. We welcome papers from a broad range of angles, including, for example, political science, philosophy, sociology, literature, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, law and jurisprudence, that discuss the interplay of power relations and hope. The workshop will address questions such as: How does the promise of progress entailed in political and legal processes construct hope and what kinds of power relations are these constructions of hope based on? Can hope and the promise of change produce new configurations of power? Does hope and the promise of better things to come allow unequal power relations to continue? Who are the subjects seen as being in need of hope and hoping? How should we interpret the dynamics between giving political and legal hopes and delaying –often endlessly – their fulfillment? And, if hope is a contemporary vehicle for power, can one resist it by refusing or abandoning the hope proffered? Theoretical, empirical and methodological papers reflecting these questions and other relevant themes are welcome. The deadline for abstracts (max. 300 words) is 20 October 2017. Please send your abstract to Marjo Lindroth (marjo.lindroth@ulapland.fi) and Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen (heidi.sinevaara-niskanen@ulapland.fi).

Postcollectivity: Situated Knowledge and Practice

Koninklijke Brill bv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Req... more Koninklijke Brill bv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/ or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill bv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Cover illustration: Courtesy of artist Elżbieta Kowalska.

Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present

Deleuze & Fascism: Security, War, Aesthetics

Postcollectivity: New Ways of Gathering and Practicing in Times of Crises

Postcollectivity, 2024

Postcollectivity, 2024

Resistance, today, has an image problem. What is it, where is it, who does it, to whom and what a... more Resistance, today, has an image problem. What is it, where is it, who does it, to whom and what and how? How do we know what is resistance and what is not? Each of these questions is a question of the image of resistance. Research in the social sciences on resistance commonly points to the limits of our imaginaries when it comes to the question of resistance, and the ways in which those limits lead us to the issue of form. A recent article by the geographer Sarah Hughes provides a classic example. She complains of the "predetermination of form that particular actions or actors must assume" to be considered as resistance (Hughes 2020, 1). She points out what it is we risk missing or ignoring in having succumbed to such "predeterminations of form", and then proceeds to revisit fundamental assumptions at work in concepts and practices of resistance, before making an argument for an engagement with a wider understanding of resistance, one that does away with traditional images of resistance, as linear, intentional, oppositional forms of agency, to focus instead on new, different and better ones, such as incoherence, multiplicity, becoming and emergence. The basic idea is that the emergence of alternative forms of life are held back by resistance once resistance is shut off from these alternatives on account of the limits of the imaginaries framing it (Povinelli 2011, 14). "Traditional framings" of resistance are seen as problematic in these literatures, as new "intersectional" framings are championed (Taylor 2017, 20-21). The struggle over the image, form, and frame of resistance is all about making it more "accessible" to its own potentials (Taylor 2017, 14), as theorists of resistance call for a mobilisation of the imagination to release images of resistance from the confines of the myths which condition it. This kind of problematisation of form is not confined to resistance. Much has been made in recent years of how 'the West' in its entirety has been shaped by a certain understanding of the origins of forms. The anthropologist, Philippe Descola, has argued that what defines the West, and what distinguishes it from other civilizations, is its belief in what he calls "the heroic model of creation"; the idea, that is, of "production as the imposition of form upon inert matter" (Descola 2014, 323). Descola demonstrates the peculiarity and cultural specificity of this idea, discussing how foreign it is to, for example, Chinese culture, but more especially to that of the Indians of Amazonia, for who there is no

Technologies of Disappearance

States of Disappearance, 2023

Aphanisis" is a term that Jacques Lacan used to describe a particular process of interest to psyc... more Aphanisis" is a term that Jacques Lacan used to describe a particular process of interest to psychoanalysis, what he explained as the emergence of the subject in its disappearance. 1 Lacan openly borrowed and developed this term from another, less well-known analyst, Ernest Jones, a Welshman and friend of Sigmund Freud. Jones used the word, which derives from the Greek, to describe the fundamental and in some cases pathological "fear of seeing desire disappear." 2 This is the simple fear, perhaps, of being unable to get it up, or of being castrated, or simply of being deprived of sexual enjoyment. With Lacan, however, the term became a way of describing something more complex, less rooted in sexuality, but nevertheless concerning desire − for it was in disappearance that Lacan located the very emergence of the subject as such. He thought about disappearance not simply as a source of fear, or a problem to be solved, but also as an act, a movement, a manifestation, crucial to the subject's coming-to-be. 3 It is a game, he argued, that we first enter into as children with our parents when the phantasy of one's own disappearance is the first object that we learn to bring into play in answer to the question of whether these persons charged with our care can afford to lose us. 4 When the desire that founds the subject is intuited to be, merely, the desire of the big Other, then the subject, to emerge as itself, has to somehow make itself disappear. 5 At least, I take that to be what Lacan means − that disappearance is a kind of practice (and a way, as Michel Foucault would later put it), first invented by the Greeks, of caring for the self. 6

The Image of Terror

The work of Gilles Deleuze was dedicated in a fundamental sense to a particular political problem... more The work of Gilles Deleuze was dedicated in a fundamental sense to a particular political problem, that of the production of what he described as a new type of 'people to come'. This would be a people distinct from the historical peoples produced by nation-states, institutions, laws and social contracts; a people different to those dreamed of and made possible by the many different ideological projects of the modern era. It would be a people defined indeed by a positive destruction of the conditions of possibility for those various projects, brought together by a desire not to change the world in order to make it a better place, but to see the world for what it really is, in all its incoherence and brokenness. This would be a people, he argued, no longer concerned as such with the problem of how to act but precisely with how to see, and how especially to see the intolerability of the world as it is revealed to be, once we start to privilege sight over action, and open our perception to the poverty and forms of oppression which otherwise passes us by (Deleuze 2005; Deleuze 1989; Reid 2013). This new people, this 'people to come', expressed in effect, Deleuze argued, a new typology on which to base its struggle against poverty and oppression, that of 'the seer', and a new kind of imaginary on which to form political community, a community of seers possessive of the collective perception of the intolerability of present social relations and defined by a common will to destroy them and remake those relations anew (Reid 2013).

On Endurance: The Politics of Being Between Pain and Boredom

Contemporary Meanings of Endurance, 2022

Critical Studies of the Arctic, 2022

This chapter addresses the concept of biopolitics and its implications for how power is theorized... more This chapter addresses the concept of biopolitics and its implications for how power is theorized in the Arctic. There is a long history of state intervention in the life of Arctic populations, especially in the lives of indigenous peoples, on account of the ways in which their lives are seen to require care and development. Critics deploy the concept of biopolitics to argue that these interventions are not designed simply to care for indigenous peoples in compassionate ways, but that Arctic states use care as a strategy of legitimation for interventions which function to extend state control over 'risky' populations. These are instances of biopower-the exercise of political power within a population in which care for the life of that population simultaneously extends state control over that population for security reasons. This chapter builds on the research of scholars of biopolitics in the Arctic to examine how this problematic currently plays out in policy-based responses to the suicide crisis in Arctic indigenous communities. The argument is that the problem of suicide in the Arctic is constructed in ways which function to develop biopolitical strategies of rule over indigenous peoples.

Narrating Indigeneity in the Arctic: Scripts of Disaster Resilience Versus the Poetics of Autonomy

Arctic Triumph: Northern Innovation and Persistence, 2019

The capacity to inhabit and cope with living in disastrous environments is what social scientists... more The capacity to inhabit and cope with living in disastrous environments is what social scientists widely label resilience. It is a capacity that peoples inhabiting the Arctic are especially renown for, and one that is attributed in particular to indigenous peoples living here. Indeed policy makers, concerned as they currently are with attempting to formulate policies designed to help people cope with the coming era of disasters portended by climate change, are attracted to indigenous peoples of the Arctic on account of their perceived abilities to live in a state of permanent disaster. The ability to adapt to disastrous events is seen to be the key component of the life-worlds of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, such as the Eurasian Sámi people, which inhabits Arctic Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and the resilience of the Sámi is said to be a living testimony of their strength. Within the Academy, anthropologists are currently being mobilised to provide ethnographic studies of the practices and forms of knowledge that enable the Sámi to do so. As such the Sámi are held to be a model for the rest of humanity, faced as it is with a coming era of climate disasters and global ecological catastrophe. Rather than join in with the chorus of celebration concerning Sámi resilience in the Arctic, this chapter will critique the strategic and colonial rationalities shaping it. Knowledge around resilience, concerned as it might seem to be with promoting the rights and empowerment of the Sámi, is constitutive of processes for the production and disciplining of their indigeneity, rather than being simply a deep ethnographic description. This disciplining of the Sámi, as well as every other target population in the Arctic, by proponents of resilience, forces them into accepting the necessity of a future laden by disastrous events. As such this chapter urges critical thinkers and practitioners concerned with indigenous politics in the Arctic to be more circumspect when confronting claims about the inherent resilience of indigenous peoples living here. It argues for the necessity of examining resilience as an element within a narrative strategy for the scripting of the Arctic and the life-worlds of indigenous peoples inhabiting it, rather than an expression of the agency of indigenous peoples as such.

Securing the Imagination: The Politics of the Resilient Self

As a culture we are saturated today by discourses around the need to develop the self. In fact di... more As a culture we are saturated today by discourses around the need to develop the self. In fact discourses around selfhood can be seen to be driving wider social and political discourses around development on a more or less global scale. The discourse on 'the resilient self' is a case in point. Leading psychologists of resilience claim responsibility not just for developing the concept from its psychological origins into the international political and social framework it has now become, but for the peace and reconciliation in former war-torn countries where resilience is now said to exist. Within resilience, however, lurks another property and capacity of the self, that of imagination. Imagination is said by psychologists to play a crucial role in the recovery, for example, of human beings from traumatic experiences and their development of resilience. For abused children, especially, recovery and development are said to require the work of imagination, as hurt creates the images of a better future and the pleasure of such images becomes linked with painful realities, enabling them to withstand the present. It is even possible, some psychologists of resilience maintain, that the torment of the present heightens the need to imagine a future and thus increases the very powers and potentials of imagination itself. How, then, to theorise and understand the work which imagination performs on social and political scales? In this chapter I want to consider, critique and extend such psychological accounts of the function of imagination for the purpose of developing a better understanding of the politics of resilience. Images are, I argue, while untrue and in a certain sense inferior to the real, nevertheless things which human beings need in order to be able to act collectively upon the real, and to change the very nature of their political and social circumstances. But while resilience provides scope for the function of imagination in enabling human beings to survive, it is nevertheless, as a discourse, also based upon a highly circumscribed imaginary, the limits of which are defined T&F PROOFS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

The Living Space of the Image

There is no image of space, nor space of images, except the living space which subverts the very ... more There is no image of space, nor space of images, except the living space which subverts the very division on which space depends for its human comprehension, settlement, and exploration. The space co-substantial with the life of images is neither that of the interiority explored by Bachelard and still eulogized by his disciples including Sloterdijk, nor that of the exterior championed by Foucault. It is the inside-outside which theorists of space and images come close to, now and then, without being able to either penetrate or escape from. It is an imageless space, or at least a space for which no human image suffices. It is a space which reveals the impossibility of reconciling relations between human life and imaginal life. The space of the image attracts but it is a space which human cannot hold. It is a space of illness, and yet, also, of felicitous affect, allowing a glimpse of the forever out of time and space which particular images, and what Deleuze described especially as time-images, reveal; the space, that is, where subjectivity is made, as much as human life is lost; the living space of the image.

Neoliberalism, Development and Resilience

Occupying God’s Shadow: Nietzsche’s Eirōneia

The (Human) Subject of Security

Fighting States of Subjection

How we understand the nature of the subject of liberalism's War on Terror has fundamental implica... more How we understand the nature of the subject of liberalism's War on Terror has fundamental implications for how we understand the subject of struggle against this war. The subject of liberal war does not fight simply in order to destroy another subject, but to produce subjects who will in turn reproduce the order for which its war is waged.

Fascism in All its Forms

The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present

by Julian Reid, Sandro Mezzadra, and Ranabir Samaddar

The Neoliberal Biopolitics of Resilience and the Spectre of the Ecofascist State

Towards an Affirmative Biopolitics: The Importance of Theorizing the Relations between Life and Error Polemologically

Re-appropriating Clausewitz: The Neglected Dimensions of Counter-Strategic Thought

Resilience: Towards an Interdisciplinary Synthesis?

The concept of resilience is increasingly influential across the sciences but discussions of its ... more The concept of resilience is increasingly influential across the sciences but discussions of its significance between different fields of science remain underdeveloped. In the social sciences there is much debate as to the value of resilience, and while some proponents of the concept are enthusiastic about it, many have dismissed it as an element of the ideology of neoliberalism. In the life sciences by contrast, and especially in the field of neurobiology, the message concerning resilience has been much more upbeat and yet also more profound. To the extent that it is rare to encounter research which questions the basic ontology of the concept. This gulf in perspectives and approaches between the social and the life sciences raises important questions. Why is there so much critique of resilience in the social sciences and so little in the life sciences? Is it possible to build bridges between the biological affirmation of resilience and its social scientific critique? This article explores potential answers to these and related questions.

Thinking as if Already Dead: The Imaginal Life of Gilles Deleuze

Courage in the Anthropocene: Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of the Present

The Philosophical Forum, 2023

In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant attracted attention for his criticisms of colonialism, th... more In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant attracted attention for his criticisms of colonialism, that problematized the established boundaries between civilization and barbarism, and chastised English colonialism in particular. Some years later, however, in his lectures on Anthropology, he ventured some oddly racist views, concerning the specific differences between European and Indigenous peoples. Kant's racism is by now well documented. However less attention has been paid to the peculiarities of that racism, and especially its foundations in a theory of virtue. His racism comes to light especially in his discussions of the virtues of patience and courage, and in passages which have rarely been subject to critical scrutiny still to this day. This article starts out from an analysis of the functions of Kant's concepts of courage and patience in his account of European versus Indigenous difference, with a view to interrogating the politics of virtue in the present, where this discussion is reoccurring in new guises. What Kant considered courage has now been devalorized, while what he considered patience is now valorized. This reversal of perspectives on what counts as virtuous has occurred in correlation with a reversal in western perspectives on Indigeneity. Such that contemporary accounts of courage are correlated with contemporary accounts of Indigeneity. These reversals of perspective must be understood in context of the transformation which philosophical anthropology has undergone under the duress of the Anthropocene. Contemporary works by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Jonathan Lear are of great relevance to this correlated transformation and will be discussed here. The article analyses what both Chakrabarty and Lear understand by courage today, its relevance to the Anthropocene, and points out the limitations of their theories. Ultimately the article argues for a rethinking of the definition of courage as a political virtue of the Anthropocenic present.

"Reziliens Ukrajna" és a háború narratívái Európában

Replika, 2023

Az egyik fő narratíva, amelynek révén (legalábbis a nyugati világban) az ukrajnai háborút keretbe... more Az egyik fő narratíva, amelynek révén (legalábbis a nyugati világban) az ukrajnai háborút keretbe foglalták, Ukrajna rezilienciája volt. Például Antony Blinken, az Egyesült Államok külügyminisztere a BBC-nek adott, 2022. március 5-én megjelent interjújában az orosz katonai erők ellen harcoló hétköznapi ukránok "rendkívüli rezilienciáját" dicsérte (BBC 2022). A nyugati média tele volt az ukránokat az orosz invázióval járó rendkívüli viszontagságokkal szemben "reziliensnek" minősítő híradásokkal (Sauer 2022). Közben olyan képek keringtek, amelyeken a civil ukránok ellenállnak az orosz katonai erőknek, Molotov-koktélokat dobálnak az ellenséges tankokra és orosz katonai járművekre vizelnek (India Herald 2022). Ikonikus módon a Time magazin március 28-i számának borítóján, amelyen "A reziliens Ukrajna" főcím szerepelt, egy ukrán menekült gyermekről készült 45 méteres fotó képe látható, amelyet több mint száz ember tartott fel a lvovi operaház előtt (Time 2022). Mindezek hozzájárultak az Ukrajna kiemelkedő rezilienciájáról alkotott kép elterjedéséhez. Maguk az ukránok is továbbírták ezt a narratívát azzal, hogy hangsúlyozták saját rezilienciájukat. Ahogyan egy ukrán politikai elemző, Roman Rukomeda fogalmazott: "[Ez a] háború nagy megvilágosodás az ukránok számára önmagukról és rezilienciájukról. Következetesen alábecsültük a jellemünket, a kölcsönös támogatásra való készségünket, az egymás iránti empátiánkat és értékeinket" (Rukomeda 2022).

The Religious Left

Educational Philosophy & Theory, 2022

The essay addresses the rise of what we elect to call 'the religious left'. Documenting the colla... more The essay addresses the rise of what we elect to call 'the religious left'. Documenting the collapse between radicality and religiosity as identity politics embraces moral absolutism, the essay offers a critique of the culture wars and the ensuing flight from political confrontation. Attending in particular to the failures of the left, which we recognise as being a failure of the political imagination, so we turn a critical eye on claims of authenticity and the accelerated embrace of narratives of vulnerability and victimisation in a post-liberal world. The result is an inward-looking political imaginary, which is as suffocating as it is debilitating. The university in crisis Growing up in the post-industrial wastelands of Margaret Thatcher's Britain exposed the underclasses to the raw realities of power politics and structural violence. The pace of change introduced to every aspect of the social system was such that the term 'revolution' seemed both appropriate and denigrated in the very same moment (Stewart, 2013). Thatcher, following the example already set by Pinochet in Chile, found ideological solace in the works of Milton Friedman (e.g. 1962) and Friedrich Von Hayek (e.g. 1944) to set in place the first comprehensive neoliberal assault on the United Kingdom's social State. She found a particular ally with this mission in Ronald Reagan who, in equal measure, used the economic stagnation of the previous decade to instigate widespread social reforms in the United States. Such change invariably demanded a market savvy authoritarianism. No coincidence that Thatcher voiced her support and admiration for dictatorships, most notably the Apartheid regime in South Africa, openly calling Nelson Mandela a 'terrorist' , while overseeing the sales of arms to suppress popular uprisings around the world. The 'Iron lady' as some affectionately called her ruled with an 'Iron Fist'. She also exposed most fully, in sometimes celebratory fashion, the fundamental deception writ-large that neoliberalism and democratic principles are mutually exclusive. Democracy in fact proved to be an unnecessary impediment or critical distraction to the real business of political rule. As is well documented, Thatcher's Britain was shaped by the contours of an ideological war (Hall, 2021; Hall & Jacques, 1983). Education policy in particular was central to the domestic assault 1. Neoliberal reforms marched hand in hand with a consolidation of power made possible by the onset of a 'national curriculum' that promoted an ethos of competition. This was complimented by widespread institutional reforms aimed at introducing market driven incentives

Outrageous: Defending the art of free expression

NEW PERSPECTIVES, 2021

This essay makes a critical defence of free expression through the spirit of outrageousness. Draw... more This essay makes a critical defence of free expression through the spirit of outrageousness. Drawing upon the ideas of Oscar Wilde, along with artists such as Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Gilbert and George and Jake and Dinos Chapman, it looks beyond the current attempts to reduce the question of freedom to quintessential liberal tropes. In doing so, the paper both offers a critique of the moral absolutism that's taken over certain sectors of the so-called 'radical left', while demanding more political appreciation for creatives and those with the abilities to reimagine the human subject. Such a critique not only suggests the need to rethink the meaning for freedom beyond the play of libertarians, but it also calls forth a new political subjectivity who appears timely and yet timelessthe much maligned and theoretically ignored figure of the infidel, who allows us to break free from moral entrapments.

Constructing Human Versus Non-Human Climate Migration in the Anthropocene: The Case of Migrating Polar Bears in Nunavut

Anthropocenes: HUMAN, INHUMAN, POSTHUMAN, 2020

Critical anthropology is currently awash with research aimed at disabling human exceptionalism, a... more Critical anthropology is currently awash with research aimed at disabling human exceptionalism, alignment with indigenous knowledge, decolonisation of thought, and the taking of the posthuman turn. Meanwhile states with settler colonial histories, such as Canada, also seek to align policies with indigenous knowledge and seek reconciliation with indigenous peoples. This article examines this trend by analyzing the conflict occurring in Nunavut between the Canadian state and Inuit communities living there, over the migration of polar bears. In this context, indigenous knowledge clashes with the rationalities and policies of the state. Claiming support from biological science, the state argues that the migration of the bears indicates their threatened status, while the Inuit argues it to be an expression of polar bear resilience. What does this clash of rationalities tell us about the integrity of the posthuman turn, given that its legitimacy depends on claims of alignment with indigenous knowledge and interests as well as opposition to western science and colonial state power? States with colonial histories, including Canada, as well as international organisations including the United Nations, are at pains these days to stress the extent to which their policy responses to the climate crisis are informed by indigenous knowledge. However, the construction of indigenous knowledge in the policies of colonial states, as much as in critical anthropology, is rendered problematic by the analysis offered in this article. Were Inuit knowledge and perspectives on the climate migration of polar bears to be taken seriously, different policies and different approaches, based on the privileging of the human over and against the interests of the animal would have to prevail.

Becoming Indigenous: the 'speculative turn' in anthropology and the (re)colonisation of indigeneity

Postcolonial Studies, 2020

The Indigenous have become central to contemporary critical and governmental imaginaries as the W... more The Indigenous have become central to contemporary critical and governmental imaginaries as the West tries to cope with planetary crises imbricated in the legacies of modernity and settler colonialism. As such, Indigenous methods and practices are increasingly constructed as offering futural possibilities for 'becoming' rather than belonging to the archives of an underdeveloped past. Central to this transformation has been the speculative or ontological turn in anthropological discourse, which we argue has opened up new possibilities for a Western and colonial appropriation of indigeneity. This turn is the subject of this article and is critically engaged with to pursue a number of avenues which problematise this form of 'ontopolitical anthropology'. The reduction of Indigenous lives to the speculative 'other' of Western modernity inherently tends to reify or 'exoticise' Indigenous thought and practices or, as we state, to 'ontologize indigeneity'. This, we argue, is particularly problematic in the context where critical imaginaries of precarious 'life in the ruins' tend to affirm contemporary governmental approaches rather than challenge them. Ironically, rather than opening up alternative possibilities, these approaches reduce the reality of Indigenous struggles and sufferings to a mere foil for the speculative imaginaries of a privileged white Eurocentric academic elite.

PEDAGOGIES OF THE POOR: RESISTING RESILIENCE IN EASTERN EUROPE AND BEYOND

This article illustrates the different ways in which the poor are being put to work, in defence o... more This article illustrates the different ways in which the poor are being put to work, in defence of a global neoliberal order by global economic institutions concerned with constructing them as resilient subjects, as well as by opponents of neoliberalism concerned with galvanizing the revolutionary potentials of poor people. In spite of the apparent gulf between neoliberalism and its revolutionary opponents, the poor find themselves subject to remarkably similar strategies of construction by both proponents and opponents of neoliberalism today. This predicament of the poor is particularly vexed in Eastern Europe where strategies of resilience are fast developing, and critical legal theory has so far offered little resistance to this trend. Turning against this tide, this article considers how we might reimagine poverty and conceive its politics beyond and against clichéd images of the poor as resilient subjects. Through an analysis of the work of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr, it argues for the necessity of images capable of conveying the intolerability of the conditions in which the poor continue to live, as well as the contingency of those conditions; images that serve as interventions on narratives which would reduce the poor to a life of mere resilience.

'Ensnare the Language': Imagination and Resilience in Indigenous Arts of the Self

No Foundations, 2019

The subjugation of the indigenous imagination has been central to the settler colonial project hi... more The subjugation of the indigenous imagination has been central to the settler colonial project historically. Indigenous peoples have had to deploy their own arts of imagination in order to fight back against processes of dispossession and denigration. Today, however, the politics of conflicts over the image of indigeneity are in some ways quite different to what they have been historically. Indigenous artists are encouraged and supported to present images of themselves by settler colonial states in search of 'reconciliation'. In diverse artistic and political contexts an image of indigenous peoples as 'resilient', capable of bouncing back from and coping with adversities, is growing in force and power. In this article I discuss this particular way of imagining indigeneity, in terms of 'resilience', and argue that it is deeply problematic. Contrary to the popular assertion that resilience is inherent to indigenous ways of being, I argue that it is a colonial concept, projected onto indigenous peoples as a means to sustaining settler colonial relations of power. The article does so by connecting and problematizing various images of indigenous resilience, in North America especially, and contrasts them to images of indigenous resistance deployed by Suohpanterror, an 'artivist' group active in Finnish Lapland, which offer an entirely different and radically hostile imaginary to that of settler colonialism.

"We the Resilient": Colonizing Indigeneity in the Era of Trump

Resilience, 2019

This article addresses the functions of resilience in the political struggles of indigenous peopl... more This article addresses the functions of resilience in the political
struggles of indigenous peoples against colonialism. In particular it
analyses the discourse of indigenous resilience, which has grown
in the United States, following the election of Donald Trump as
President. It looks at how indigenous resistance to Trump has
been constructed as a feature of their ‘resilience’, tracing the
sources of that discourse, revealing its dubious origins, which
while involving the mobilizations of indigenous peoples at
Standing Rock, owe to a complex range of different interests,
involving profit-seeking corporations, artists, colonial knowledge,
and neoliberal ideologues. The paper compares the development
of the discourse of indigenous resilience in the US with that which
is growing in the Arctic. Calling into question the rationalities
shaping the discourse in both regions, the paper argues for a
rejection of the concept on account of its implicit racism and
compliancy with neoliberal colonialism.

The Cliche of Resilience - Governing Indigeneity in the Arctic

Arena Journal, 2018

Foucault and the imagination: the roles of images in regimes of power and subjectivity

The roles of imagination have been largely missed in Foucauldian litera-tures on subjectivity and... more The roles of imagination have been largely missed in Foucauldian litera-tures on subjectivity and constitutive practices of care for the self. His late inquiries into the practices by which the ancients pursued subject-formation have been situated, largely, within the ongoing debate over the relativity of his philosophical position on the question of the subject as such. In actuality imagination is crucial, I argue, for a Foucauldian understanding both of the processes of subjection by which western regimes have sought to govern human life as well as the practices by which we can nevertheless constitute ourselves as free subjects. The relationships between these processes of subjection and practices of freeing up the subject are not binary, however, and the different functions of imagination in these practices are complex. Liberating imagination requires, as argued here, hostility to the function of the image in constitution of the regimes that subject it.

RECLAIMING POSSESSION: A CRITIQUE OF THE DISCOURSE OF DISPOSSESSION IN INDIGENOUS STUDIES

Indigeneities are widely constructed as emanating not only from the experience of dispossession i... more Indigeneities are widely constructed as emanating not only from the experience of dispossession in the historical past, but as ways of being in the world which are grounded positively in dispossession, and which in being so offer themselves as antagonistic alternatives to Western ways of being, grounded aggressively as they are in possessiveness, of land, of self, and of others. This essay argues that the opposite is true; that the present condition is one of being governed by regimes of power the strategy of which depends on the production of dispossessed and non-possessive subjects. The task is to reject these discourses of entrapment and reclaim possession for ourselves. In doing so much can yet be learned from minor traditions of thought and practice among indigenous peoples, both mythic and real, which, in contrast to today’s dominant discourses on indigeneity, insist on the integral importance of possession as a foundation for political subjectivity. Whether indigenous or non-indigenous, the task is the same; avoid being trapped by power, learn instead to hunt power, and cultivate the ultimate freedoms of autonomy and self-possession.

A Political Genealogy of Dance: The Choreographing of Life and Images

This article provides a genealogical critique of the history and modernity of dance. In doing so ... more This article provides a genealogical critique of the history and modernity of dance. In doing so it establishes the political importance of dance as an art not principally of the body and its biopolitical capacities for movement, but of images and imagination. It traces the development of dance as an art of imagination, lost and buried in the works of Domenico da Piacenza, Jean-Georges Noverre, and Loïe Fuller, as well as its counter-movement expressed in the work of Rudolf Laban. It also locates contemporary dance within this political conflict by exploring new works, especially those of Ivana Müller, which call upon beholders to use their imaginations through the evocation of histories and memories. Such works can be understood to be deeply political, it will argue, because they work to transform society by creating time for a belief in the impossible. At its best, dance does not simply incite bodies to move but suspends movement, transforming the very image of what a body is capable of. These aims and practices of dance speak to contemporary concerns within political practice, theory, and philosophy for a reawakening of political imagination in times of crisis and neoliberal hegemony.

'Being in Being': Contesting the Ontopolitics of Indigeneity

by Julian Reid and David Chandler

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contempora... more This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the "ontological turn" in anthropology. Rather than seeing indigenous peoples as having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the ontological turn suggests that their importance lies in the fact that they constitute different worlds and "world" in a performatively different way. The radical promise this view holds is that a different world already exists in potentia, the access to which is a question of ontology-of being differently: 'being in being' rather than thinking, acting and world-making as if we were transcendent or "possessive" modern subjects. We argue that the ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but rather as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Thus, rather than "provincializing" dominant western hegemonic practices, such discourses of indigeneity extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.

CUNNING & STRATEGY

Exhausted by resilience: response to the commentaries

Climate, Migration and Sex: The Biopolitics of Climate-Induced Migration

To cite this article: Julian Reid (2014) Climate, migration, and sex: the biopolitics of climatei... more To cite this article: Julian Reid (2014) Climate, migration, and sex: the biopolitics of climateinduced migration, Critical Studies on Security, 2:2,[196][197][198][199][200][201][202][203][204][205][206][207][209] Relations between climate and migration have received a lot of attention of late, in policy literatures concerned with problematizing it as a source of threat to the security and stability of international order, but also from authors concerned with interrogating its discursive constitution from more critical and less-conservative angles. This paper contributes to the development of latter approaches by problematizing the relations between migration and climate as a phenomenon of biopolitics, tightly connected to theories and discourses on and of population, poverty, and sexual reproduction. The paper demonstrates the contrasting ways in which climate-induced migration is dealt with, not just between poor and nonpoor, but human and animal species, especially in terms of the ways in which their reproductive capacities are differentially targeted for biopolitical intervention. Showing how climate-induced migration is governed through the creation of differential modes of biopolitical intervention, the paper also explores how we might counter its pathologization. This requires recognizing the nature of the biopolitical aesthetic and imaginary that is at work in the problematization of climateinduced migration. Stepping outside the dominant framing of the phenomenon, the paper argues for the creation of a different political imaginary through which to welcome and celebrate the mixing of life that occurs when living things migrate and reproduce across climatic boundaries.

Interrogating the Sustainable Development-Resilience Nexus Biopolitically

Martial Indigeneity: Deconstructing "Decolonization" in International Relations

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 2023

Constructivists often criticize mainstream International Relations (IR) theories for their coloni... more Constructivists often criticize mainstream International Relations (IR) theories for their colonial approach to the cultures, knowledge, and agency of Indigenous peoples. Despite their intentions, constructivist approaches fail to decolonize IR. The constructivist construction of Indigenous peoples as embodiments of non-violence, cooperation, and empathy and as passive victims of violence should be replaced by a more nuanced approach to the roles of Indigenous people in war and violence-what this article calls "martial indigeneity.

Indigenizing NATO

Transatlantic Policy Quarterly, 2023

Opinion – ‘Resilient Ukraine’ and the Future of War in Europe

E-IR, 2022

In an interview given to the BBC, Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, praised the 'extraor... more In an interview given to the BBC, Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, praised the 'extraordinary resilience' of ordinary Ukrainians fighting Russian military forces (BBC News 2022). Indeed, the media is awash with descriptions of Ukrainians as 'resilient' in the face of Russia's invasion. Meanwhile, images circulate of Ukrainian civilians resisting Russian military forces, throwing molotov cocktails at Russian tanks, and urinating on Russian military vehicles. All of which contributes to the construction of a 'Resilient Ukraine'. The role of resilience in the Ukrainian struggle, however, is not just that of a handy soundbite for statesmen like Blinken, or a patronizing cliche for western journalists.

Los Angeles Review of Books

The Promise of Violence in an Age of Catastrophe

Branding the Revolution

The British comedian and arch provocateur, Russell Brand, has been causing quite a storm of late.... more The British comedian and arch provocateur, Russell Brand, has been causing quite a storm of late. Having mocked the corporatisation of global media networks on MSNBC in the United States, he proceeded to upset organisers of the GQ awards with a historical quip about one of their more illustrious sponsor's sordid fascist affinities, only then to have the audacity to make a public call for a 'revolution'. Announced in his guest editorial contribution to New Statesman, this latest provocation subsequently went viral (in excess of 1 million views) following an interview with Jeremy Paxman on the BBC Newsnight program.

The Political Subject, Neither Here Nor Now

Liberalism, I believe, has moved way beyond the security imperative which Foucault analyzed, so f... more Liberalism, I believe, has moved way beyond the security imperative which Foucault analyzed, so foundational to its historical origins, as the promise of security which appeared to legitimate it back then has been disintegrated by a catastrophic imaginary that promotes what I call in my forthcoming book with Brad Evans, Resilient Life, insecurity by design. This way of understanding liberalism, as a regime founded on promises and images, does not mean I am in denial of the reality of the catastrophic nature of the world we now inhabit and which liberal regimes themselves are responsible for. But it would be wrong to think we can distinguish between the realities of a world that liberalism has created and the imaginaries through which we, who seek a way out of it, are forced to make sense of it. Liberalism itself is a product of its own imaginary and we are now inhabiting its nightmarish effects, being ourselves, the good liberal subjects that we are. The catastrophic nature of the world we now find ourselves exposed and vulnerable to is of our own creation. It is a world which exists every bit as much in our heads as much as our heads are in this world, drowning in its images of impending disaster, species extinction, financial crises, and catastrophe effects. The image and reality of catastrophe are interfused in our heads and what we have learnt to call 'the world' is the manifestation of that interfusion.

Civil Disobedience From Nepal to Norway: Traditions, Extensions, and Civility

Journal of Resistance Studies, 2022

This is a very valuable new book which makes the reader think about a concept which is often used... more This is a very valuable new book which makes the reader think about a concept which is often used but not so often interrogated or opened up to critical discussion. As it reveals, both the spaces and practices of civil disobedience are incredibly diverse. The book takes us on a geographic journey, from Norway to Nepal and onto Taiwan, and in doing so discusses a wide range of different instances of civil disobedience, from practices concerned with issues of drugs harm, to indigenous struggles, to the contestation of regimes of immigration, as well as rights to refuge. It is also a book which destabilizes the traditional differences between the political left and right. Civil disobedience is not a pure concept or practice, as this book shows. It is not something we can either simply say 'yes, we need more of that' to, nor 'no, we don't need that' either. For civil disobedience is a thorny and ambiguous concept and practice, and one that leads at the very least to further questions. One of those questions is that of the relation of civil disobedience to culture, as well as to colonialism, and questionable distinctions between western and non-western cultures. In an early chapter of the book. Stellan Vinthagen tells the story of a group of Norwegians activists travelling to India in search of the holy grail of civil disobedience in the late 1960s. The development of civil disobedience in the Norwegian context owed a lot to the cross-fertilization of ideas and practices from East to West, and from India to the Nordic regions of Europe more especially. The influence of Gandhi was paramount in this story. Lest one get the idea, however, that civil disobedience was simply transferred from East to West, it is well worth dwelling on the arguments made by others that Gandhi developed his own ideas about non-violence, and resistance through civility and disobedience, on account of the influence of Christianity, as well as his readings of Tolstoy, Thoreau, and other figures within nominally western canons of thought and practice. Howard Caygill's book on Resistance has conveyed these complexities of Gandhi very well, as well as the complexity of the relations of violence to non-violence (Caygill 2013).

The Universal Adversary by Mark Neocleous - Review for Contemporary Political Theory

Resilience, Liberalism and Biopolitics

CALCULATED RISK

by Julian Reid and Barry Zellen

Intersec, 2023

Critiquing Resilience: Interview with Julian Reid

by Julian Reid, Shelby E Ward, and Caroline Alphin

SPECTRA met with Julian Reid at Virginia Tech on September 12, 2017. During the interview, we tal... more

Foucault Studies - An Interview with Julian Reid

Interview Q: What is Foucault´s distinctive contribution to your analysis of discourses and pract... more

The Rise of Resilience - Interview with Julian Reid in Truth-out

Tribuna - An Interview with Julian Reid

Political Preconditions: An Interview with Julian Reid

"THE WATER IS OURS! THE EARTH IS OURS!" A PEDAGOGY FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

The Indigenous Subject: Dispossessed, Perseverant, Resilient

Throughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deplo... more Throughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deployed by colonial powers to their own advantages and ends. Historically the indigenous have been represented as belonging to a past temporality in ways that legitimized colonial rule in the present and future. Today such representations of the indigenous as primitive and of the past are less prevalent or powerful. Anthropologists are more likely to be read berating the failure of their discipline to have challenged the teleological narratives underpinning the West's historical sense of superiority. The assumption that indigenous peoples should open themselves to the world is also challenged increasingly by the idea that the West has much to learn from the indigenous. It is the West, today, it is argued widely, which must open itself to the Indigenous in ways that not only recognize the rights of the indigenous to life but the superior value of their ways of life. In this lecture, and by way of contrast, Julian Reid casts a critical gaze upon this dramatic shift in fortunes of indigenous peoples. How, he will ask, is the decoloni-zation of western thought proceeding? What attributes of indigeneity do western theorists most ad-mire? Is this decolonization actually occurring and reflected in the policies of western states, institutions and social practices, or does it reflect a cynical manipulation of indigeneity and indigenous peoples by western powers?

Becoming Indigenous: The Ontopolitics of the Anthropocene

Becoming indigenous means different things to different constituencies of indigenous peoples as m... more Becoming indigenous means different things to different constituencies of indigenous peoples as much as it means different things to different exponents of indigeneity within the West. This seminar examines a dominant trend within indigenous critique and charts its relation to anthropocenic discourses on indigeneity whereby the virtues of indigenous peoples are conceptualized in terms of a capacity to cope with living in a state of perpetual crisis, or what is sometimes known as resilience. This is an image of the indigenous that powerful actors worldwide argue the west has much to learn from and which it must ultimately seek to embody. Too much of indigenous critique and too many indigenous critics have simply sought to take advantage of this situation and repeat this dominant mantra. There is much in indigene-ity and indigenous ways of life that gets left out of this discursive framing. In effect the frame functions to discipline indigenous peoples as much as the western populations who it is said must learn to live within it. Once we step outside this framing and engage with the many different realities of indigenous peoples, indigenous thinking, and indigenous practices, we encounter forms of thought and practice which directly conflict with this disciplinary frame, and which can contribute to an alternative pathway, not just for indigenous peoples, but humans everywhere

Becoming Indigenous - Chapter 1 Introduction

by Julian Reid and David Chandler

Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene, 2019

The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability

by Julian Reid and David Chandler

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, indi... more Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live?This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

Resilient Life - The Art of Living Dangerously.pdf

The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (uncorrected first proofs)

by Julian Reid and Michael Dillon

Reid argue that war under liberal terms has become biopolitical warfare, an act committed to prom... more

Biopolitics of the War on Terror

Foreword to Post-Politics in Context by Ali Riza Taskale

oriented around the problem of the pollution of natural environments on which living organisms re... more

Julian Reid on Foucault – applying his work on war, resilience, imagination and political subjectivity

by Julian Reid and KRISTIAN HAUG

Foucault Studies

spired by Foucault, especially 'the late Foucault' efforts on analyzing liberalism, neoliberalism... more spired by Foucault, especially 'the late Foucault' efforts on analyzing liberalism, neoliberalism and its integral biopower, explicates -for the very first time -how his examination of the subjects from war to resilience and sustainability to imagination to political subjectivity relies on, continues and diverts from Foucault's own thinking. By taking off in Foucault's thinking, one of Reid's ambitions -besides relentlessly criticizing illegitimate forms of use of power -has always been to push the borders of how we can think and create a healthy and justifiable human subjectivity.

Forum on Brad Evans and Julian Reid's Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously

Critical Legal Theory in Central and Eastern Europe: In Search of Method

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Iuridica

Critical legal theory emerged in the United States in the 1970s, at a time when Central and Easte... more Critical legal theory emerged in the United States in the 1970s, at a time when Central and Eastern Europe belonged to the Soviet bloc and was subject to the system of actually existing socialism. Therefore, the arrival of critical jurisprudence into the region was delayed. In Poland, the first texts on critical and postmodern legal theory began to appear at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. Lech Morawski’s monograph, characteristically entitled What Legal Scholarship Has to Gain from Postmodernism?, published in 2001, officially inaugurated a broader interest in postmodern legal theory. Adam Sulikowski has been the main representative of critical legal theory in Poland, developing a postmodern theory of constitutionalism. Other sub-fields of postmodern and critical legal theory, gradually developing in Central European jurisprudence, include such areas as law and literature, law and ideology, law and neocolonial theory, as well as feminist jurisprudence. There is...

Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the Relationship between War and Power

Alternatives Global Local Political, 2003

Pathology is no more than a branch, a result, a complement of physiology, or rather, physiology e... more

Governança liberal global: biopolítica, segurança e guerra

Climate, migration, and sex: the biopolitics of climate-induced migration

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 21624887 2014 943578, Aug 28, 2014

Dangerously Exposed: The Life & Death of the Resilient Subject

Resilience International Policy Practice Discourse, 2013

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or ethical call ... more What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political question being asked by ideologues and policy makers who want us to abandon the dream of ever achieving security and embrace danger as a condition of possibility for life in the future. As this article demonstrates, this belief in the necessity and positivity of human exposure to danger is fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’. Resilience demands our disavowal of any belief in the possibility to secure ourselves and accept that life is a permanent process of continual adaptation to dangers said to be outside our control. The resilient subject is a subject which must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, and not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility. However, it is a subject which accepts the dangerousness of the world it lives in as a condition for partaking of that world and which accepts the necessity of the injunction to change itself in correspondence with threats now presupposed as endemic. This is less than acceptable. Not only is it politically catastrophic, it is fundamentally nihilistic. Identifying resilience as a nihilism that forces the subject to wilfully abandon the political, we argue for a wholesale rethinking of the question of what a politics of life is and can be.

The biopolitics of the war on terror : life struggles, liberal modernity and the defence of logistical societies

Special Issue: Deleuze and Guattari and International Relations

Circulatory life: 9/11 as architectural catastrophe and the hypermodernity of Terror

Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies, 2006

Logistical life: war, discipline, and the martial origins of liberal societies

Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies, 2006

Interrogating the Neoliberal Biopolitics of the Sustainable Development-Resilience Nexus

International Political Sociology, 2013

Governança liberal global: biopolítica, segurança e guerra

Governança liberal global: biopolítica, segurança e guerra

Julian Reid on Foucault – Applying his Work on War, Resilience, Imagination, and Political Subjectivity

by Kristian Haug and Julian Reid

Foucault Studies , 2017

In this interview Julian Reid, distinguished author and professor of International Relations at L... more In this interview Julian Reid, distinguished author and professor of International Relations at Lapland University Finland, elaborates on his use, continuation and alterations of Michel Foucault’s work. Reid being his entire academic career – which includes the publishing of six books and co-editing the journal, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses – heavily in- spired by Foucault, especially ‘the late Foucault’ efforts on analyzing liberalism, neoliberalism and its integral biopower, explicates – for the very first time – how his examination of the subjects from war to resilience and sustainability to imagination to political subjectivity relies on, continues and diverts from Foucault’s own thinking. By taking off in Foucault’s thinking, one of Reid’s ambitions – besides relentlessly criticizing illegitimate forms of use of power – has always been to push the borders of how we can think and create a healthy and justifiable human subjectivity.

Julian Reid on the Rise of Resilience

by Kristian Haug and Julian Reid

Today, everything must become resilient: governments, people, cities and countries in the develop... more Today, everything must become resilient: governments, people, cities and countries in the developing world. And whatever is "resilient" is in consequence of this very quality, something good or better than before (...) Julian Reid critically examines the impact of resilience on our lives and its relation to the world.

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