World Politics and the Cultural Turn

Abstract

The ‘cultural turn’ refers to a diffuse intellectual movement within the humanities and social sciences challenging orthodoxies concerning the possibility of objective, universal knowledge, although it is scarcely the first movement to do so. Its current influence is evident in the extent to which many contemporary studies are described not merely in terms of conventional disciplines such as history, geography, sociology or politics, but cultural history, cultural geography, cultural sociology and cultural politics, along with ‘cultural’ studies and the closely related field of ‘cultural theory’. Thus, as Peter Burke has pointed out, scholars who once thought of themselves as literary critics, art historians or historians of science are much more likely to describe themselves as cultural historians working on ‘visual culture’, the ‘science of culture’ and so on, while out on the street, ‘culture’ has become an everyday term used by people to indicate their community or general way of life.1 In the world of business we find the idea of ‘corporate culture’ advertising agents use ‘culture’ to create an allure for products and tour operators to market exotic cultures. And there is scarcely any form of identity politics, from that of the Orange Order in Northern Ireland to the emergent ‘deaf culture’, that doesn’t invoke a cultural basis to advance its claims or to defend its practices. In short, ‘everyone is into culture now’.2 KeywordsForeign PolicyWorld PoliticsComparative PoliticsWorld AffairPostcolonial TheoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.