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Conclusions: Engaging with the Ethico-Political

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The Nation/State Fantasy

Abstract

This chapter summarises this book’s main arguments, namely the rise of the fantasy of nation/state congruency and the ideal of homogeneous societies, however defined and practiced, as constitutive of the ‘modern international’. Drawing on Rancière, this chapter engages with the ethico-political, thus exposing the exclusionary and violent dimensions of ‘policy’ and ‘politics’ that arise from our regime of congruency. This means that by exposing ethico-political implications one could also take the political as an ethical space, precisely because it is, as Arendt argued, a ‘gap between past and future’, a space in which the present can be changed. This chapter concludes with three main ethico-political implications and advocate rethinking our dependence on the ideal of societal homogeneity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Consider also how the biopolitical lens ignores the history of racial violence, war, slavery and genocide, or indeed the continuous practices of settler colonial societies. As Howell and Richter-Montpetit (2018) argue, Foucauldian-based security analyses and biopolitics in particular read in/security through the Foucauldian and Eurocentric lens of the never secured human such that their ‘claim that life cannot be secured’, Howel and Richter-Montpetit (2018) argue, ‘fails to take account of how—conceptually and materially—the idea of human life is an effect of racism and colonialism’.

  2. 2.

    For recent discussions of GPIs see the Symposium in International Organization 73(3): 491–643.

  3. 3.

    Needless to say, as I explicate in other parts, that the logic of congruency also operates ‘internally’. The logic or what Puar (2017) defines as the ‘right to maim’ takes place not only in the borderland as such, but also within cities (in the West Bank, in the USA) around racial and civilizational borders, so to speak.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social, Political and Global Studies, Keele University, Keele, UK

    Moran M. Mandelbaum

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Mandelbaum, M.M. (2020). Conclusions: Engaging with the Ethico-Political. In: The Nation/State Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22918-4_8

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