Critical Investigations into “Human, All Too Human” IR

Abstract

Daniel Jacobi and Annette Freyberg-Inan, eds. (2015). Human Beings in International Relations . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 394 pp., £64.99 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-11625-2). Building on the 2012 special forum published in the pages of this journal, Human Beings in International Relations is a comprehensive edited volume that zooms in on a concept that is central to world politics and the discipline of International Relations (IR): the human. In disciplinary accounts, human beings appear in “manifold terminological shapes and forms: as actor, agent, subject, individual, person, body/being, self, mind, psyche” (8) and perhaps most prominently as human nature. Despite its centrality and its conspicuity to the practice and knowledge of world politics, however, as the editors Jacobi and Freyberg-Inan point out, the human remains an obscurity, a mystery—a “ homo absconditus ” (7)—due to a lack of general and systematic engagement with the concept and its role within the disciplinary accounts of world politics. It is this lack of sustained interrogation into the human that the edited volume seeks to address by bringing together contributions that grapple with the main question formulated as “ how, why and with which consequences do IR theories (not) deal with the human in the study of world politics?” (2). With its focus on the absent present human of world politics, the edited volume is indeed a timely intervention given the manifold ways in which the human and humanity are themselves cast as questions in the contemporary era. As developments in technology and advances in life sciences (from genetics to neuroscience) perturb preconceived naturalness of “the human” and as the very possibility of species extinction—the end of the human as such—raises the stakes, it becomes all the more pertinent to probe into the politics of the human and humanity. Within the discipline of IR, growing literature on human emotions and bodies as well, as new materialist approaches that decenter the human, adds to the timeliness of such a systematic … acalkivik{at}itu.edu.tr