Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations

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Abstract
The voices of dissent proliferating in international studies over the past decade are frequently understood by negation, that is, in terms of their criticisms and refusals of positivist/empiricist commitments and political realist perspectives, so long dominant in the discipline. To understand contemporary discourses of dissent in this way, however, is to impose upon them an undue semblance of unity of perspective and purpose—one that mirrors the illusory unities of positivism and realism. It is to fail to acknowledge the variety of dissident voices that have called to account the given, axiomatic and taken-for-granted “realities” of prevailing disciplinary discourses. Concentrating upon what might be called the “agenda of dissent” in international studies, this paper celebrates that variety, that difference, among critical voices in international studies. In particular, it locates prominent themes in critical international relations thinking within the wider arc of debates in Western social theory—interdisciplinary, intercontinental debates whose questions include the Enlightenment concepts of history, rationality, and truth; the subject/object and agent/structure oppositions; the relationship between language and social meaning; the relationship between knowledge and power; the character and function of the human sciences; and the prospects for emancipatory politics today. These debates point to no necessary conclusion. They mandate no single position. Instead, they suggest the opening up of “thinking space,” a space of thought that is exploited by a variety of dissident voices who would speak in reply to the dangers and opportunities of political life in the late twentieth century.

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