Poststructural International Relations

The most common examples of comparison in politics are the works of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and Aristotle. They examined different polises and identified a number of political systems characterizing the type of political rule exercised in each polis . However, the main task that they were trying to achieve is not to identify the types of government but instead to identify the best form of government, therefore their work mostly contains normative evaluations. This pattern existed throughout human history that it went even beyond the realm of reality into the realm of the abstract boundaries, instances can be given from political literature such as Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and also George Orwell’s ‘1984’, and also from academic literature such as Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and Fukuyama’s End of History. All these works present different forms of governing most of them in a polemical way in favour for a specific type of gov...

Revolutionary violence is a manifestation of political violence. Political violence is a subset of political action which includes both non-violent means such as elections and referendums, and violent means such as terrorism, revolution, civil war and genocide. In this regard, revolutionary violence is similar to terrorism as it is a form of communication through violence (Schmid, 2004) . Communication through violence takes place when other, non-violent, means of communication do not bring the expected outcome. Both forms of communication, violent and non-violent, are means in order to bring about change. Arendt defines revolution as “inextricably bound with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew” (Arendt, 2006, p. 18) . Emancipation, on the other hand, as Pieterse put it out as an explanatory term (Nederveen Pieterse, 1992) , and there are various approaches to emancipation either as empowerment or as resistance. What is fundamental in regards to emancipation i...