Withdrawal from Immanuel Kant and International Relations

This book shows how the flawed orientation forming Immanuel Kant’s philosophical project is the same from which the discipline of International Relations (IR) becomes possible and appears necessary.

Tracing how core problems in Kant’s thought are inescapably reproduced in IR, this book demonstrates that constructive critique of IR is impossible through mere challenge to its Kantian traditions. It argues that confrontation with the Kantian character of IR demands fundamental withdrawal from their shared aims. Investigating the global limits inherent to epistemological and ontological commitments of Kant’s writings and IR, this interdisciplinary study interrogates the racism, sexism, coloniality, white male privilege, and anthropocentricism of both as sites from which such withdrawal may be initiated. Following queer and feminist examinations of how Kant and IR discipline a joint orientation through sex, gender, and sexuality, it indicates how withdrawal is possible. And, considering how Anishinaabe legal tradition opens freedom beyond the restricting horizons of Kant and IR, this book contemplates withdrawal from both as leading to a global unlimited.

An essential text for advanced undergraduate and graduate studies, this book will also be of strong interest to those studying the thinking and writings of Kant, neo- and post-Kantian scholarship, and IR theory.

Mark F. N. Franke is a professor in and the Director of the Centre for Global Studies at Huron University College and, until recently, was a long-time core faculty member in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, both in London, Ontario, Canada. Franke’s teaching critically engages with cultural, discursive, and ideological formations of subjectivity and social/political relations in worldwide systems, focusing on problems in forced migration, patriarchy, racism, spatial/temporal constructions, mobilities, law, coloniality, citizenship, and governmentality. He is the author of Global Limits: Immanuel Kant, International Relations, and Critique of World Politics (2001) and has published journal articles and book chapters on questions of refugees’ rights, hospitality ethics, politics of movement, politics of critique, neutrality, political geographies of displacement, electronic technologies managing human movement, Indigenous self-determinations in law, and pedagogies of experiential learning. Franke’s current programme of research studies the politics of bicycling, as a form of modernist mobility that opens possibilities in how social spacings are formed, focusing on objectives in feminist politics, queer activism, antiracism, transportation justice actions, decoloniality, environmentalism, and critical movements in architecture.