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The challenges of contemporary political life cannot usefully be posed in terms of the dangers of an anarchy, whether supposedly natural or international: the dangers that are usually deployed to scare people into thinking the way forward must involve an historical shift towards universality and cosmopolitanism, or to persuade them that globalization involves a progressive shift towards an enlightened reason. On the contrary, the more pressing problem is to come to terms with the forms of universality, cosmopolitanism and globalization that have already produced and enabled (and have in turn already been produced and enabled by) a specific account of the necessary relation between universality and particularity within the modern subject, the modern sovereign state and the modern system of sovereign states.

R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World

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My overall argument, to put it briefly, is that anyone seeking to reimagine the possibilities of political life under contemporary conditions would be wise to resist ambitions expressed as a move from a politics of the international to a politics of the world, and to pay far greater attention to what goes on at the boundaries, borders and limits of a politics orchestrated within the international that simultaneously imagines the possibility and impossibility of a move across boundaries, borders, and limits distinguishing itself from some world beyond. The point, that is to say, is precisely the point, together with the lines which flow from it in order both to discriminate and to connect: to include, to exclude, to both include and exclude so as to constitute a complex array of inclusions of exclusions, and to affirm both the possibility and the impossibility of some world beyond this array of inclusions of exclusions.

R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World

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One of the difficulties of writing about this kind of material is that so much of the existing literature is concerned with an entirely false problem: that of escaping from the dreaded claim to 'political realism' that is so pervasive both in the construction of Anglo-American accounts to international relations and in popular understandings of what it means to engage in political life. As I have argued extensively elsewhere and will continue to insist here, the (multiple and contradictory) claim to political realism is a consequence of a prior set of idealizations, not least of the sovereign nation-state and of its necessary relation both the system of states and to the world. Setting up a discipline of international relations on the assumption that political realism has the status of the dominant intellectual tradition has encouraged claims that we need to contemplate idealizations that might allow us to get away from political realism; hence the famous opposition between realism and various forms of utopianism in the Cold War era and the elaboration of various appeals to cosmopolitanism more recently. Again the dead-end signs are clearly in view right next to the starting line. What must be put first, in my view, are the idealizations and substantivizations (especially of sovereignty, state, nation, subjectivity, history, reason, territory, law, liberty, equality, security, polis and cosmos) that have already come to be treated as real, as the necessary starting point of analysis, and as the normative ground on which to think about the legitimation of violence at the boundaries, borders and limits of modern political life, thereby encouraging further idealizations that can work only to legitimize a prior array of reified ideals.

R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World

As a structure of inclusions and exclusions, the modern international must itself have a constitutive outside; much like the modern subject and the sovereign state. It is, of course, 'the world' that must be identified somewhere and sometime beyond this politics of the modern international, in ways that must make any claim that we need to think about a move from the politics of the international to a politics of the world seem very puzzling indeed.

R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World

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Theories of international relations are more interesting as aspects of contemporary world politics that need to be explained than as explanations of contemporary world politics. As such, they may be read as a characteristic discourse of the modern state and as a constitutive practice whose effects can be traced in the remotest interstices of everyday life.

R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory

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