Terrible security problem: an aesthetics approach and study of the Korean Nuclear Crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article develops aesthetics as a method in the study of international politics from and for the ‘love children’ in the colonial house of IR. I argue that the terrible as an aesthetic category captures the problem of violence and distortion in international politics particularly along imperial/anti-imperial, colonising/colonised lines of division. Denoting an extreme, the terrible captures how some political positions, actions, subjectivities and performances assault human sense and sensibilities that simultaneously construct boundaries. This affective form of violence requires conceptual-creative reckoning. The first section develops aesthetics as a method with a focus on the concept of caricatures to show how they are boundary events that create newness through distortion and exaggeration significant in moving beyond the entrapments of coloniality and imperial arrangements. The next two sections illustrate and extend this point through Korea as a place where Great Power politics play out. I first examine the prevailing caricatures of the Korean Nuclear Crisis and then empty out the state as a subject position in approaches to studying international politics. Together I show what is involved in moving beyond the violence matrix of international politics: everyday-level creative, reflexive strategies that more intimately face up to the political violence on auto-repeat.