| Abstract | International Relations (IR) has been transformed via its movement beyond the liberal imaginaries of the 1990s. This strange death of liberal IR, analysed here, enabled IR to transition from a discipline of lack – a discipline that was ‘pre-liberal’, struck in the timeless ‘state of nature’ – to a discipline of fullness that is ‘after IR’/‘beyond critique’. One alleged to be able to assimilate the world in ways that liberalism could not, going beyond the Eurocentrism of universal subject/object cuts and liberal binaries. IR, the liberal discipline in a non-liberal world, was famously theorised as a discipline lacking conceptions of progress, justice and ethics and as poor in relation to political theory. This article analyses the transition to ‘after IR’ as a discipline of plenitude and possibility, registering a world of uncertainty and contingency, where everything is possible except the articulation of any critical alternative to this world as it appears. |
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