The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed

Against the neorealist claim that the “reflectivist” or postmodernist approach is a dead-end unless it merges with the “rationalist” conception of research programs, this essay argues that new technological and representational practices in world politics require not synthesis but theoretical heterogeneity to comprehend the rise of chronopolitics over geopolitics. The theoretical approaches of Baudrillard, Foucault, and Virilio are drawn upon to investigate three global forces in particular: simulation, surveillance, and speed. They have eluded the traditional and re-formed delimitations of the international relations field—the geopolitics of realism, structural political economy of neorealism, and neoliberal institutionalism—because their power is more “real” in time than space, it comes from an exchange of signs rather than goods, and it is transparent and diffuse rather than material and discrete. This essay offers an alternative, poststructuralist map to plot how these and other new forces are transforming the traditional boundaries in international relations between self and other, domestic and international, war and peace.