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published online 5 August 2011Millennium - Journal of International StudiesSaul Newman

Crowned Anarchy: Postanarchism and International Relations Theory

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MILLENNIUMJournal of International Studies

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

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DOI: 10.1177/0305829811417229mil.sagepub.com

Corresponding author:Saul Newman, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.Email: [email protected]

Article

Crowned Anarchy:1 Postanarchism and International Relations Theory

Saul NewmanGoldsmiths, University of London

Abstract In this article I will explore the paradoxical relationship between anarchism and realism in International Relations (IR) theory. I will do this in an oblique way by uncovering an uncomfortable complicity shared by that existentialist and heretical realist, Carl Schmitt, with his ideological arch-enemies the anarchists. In their diametrically opposed positions on the state, both Schmitt and the anarchists reveal the absolutism of the state in the sovereign moment of exception, and its reliance on a figure of anarchy which at the same time destabilises it, blurring the division between inside and outside and opening up a genuinely revolutionary moment. Here the notion of anarchy is used to deconstruct realism, while at the same time suggesting a move beyond anarchism itself towards a post-foundationalist anarchism or ‘postanarchism’. Anarchy reveals the contingency and inconsistency of hegemonic identities in IR, as well as the autonomy of the political which is vital to understanding contemporary movements of resistance to statism and capitalism.

KeywordsCarl Schmitt, IR theory, post-anarchism

If confronted with the nihilism of a centred order, which prevails everywhere through the use of modern means of mass destruction, anarchy appears to a desperate humanity not only as the lesser evil, but instead as the only effective remedy.

(Carl Schmitt)2

1. I borrow this expression from Gilles Deleuze and his notion of univocal being: ‘Univocity of being thus also signifies equality of being. Univocal being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy’. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 37.

2. Carl Schmitt, Donoso Cortés in gesamteuropäischer Interpretation (Köln, Greven: Verlag, 1950). I am grateful to Amedeo Policante for his translation of this quote cited in the Italian version (Donoso Cortés [Milano: Adelphi, 1996], 13).

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2 Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Realist and neo-realist conceptions of the international system centre on the figure of anarchy: the international order, it is said, is akin to the Hobbesian state of nature in which the absence of a sovereign creates a situation of competition and antagonism among self-interested sovereign states. The structural effect of this anarchic condition is to produce a balance of power between these masterless entities haunted by the constant spectre of insecurity.3 What is presupposed in this account is the fundamental distinction between inside and outside, in which the sovereign state is internally ordered, existing within recognisable, stable borders, and confronts its competitors on an external field which is inherently disordered and ungoverned.4

It is not my intention here to contest this theoretical model by offering an alternative; by emphasising, as various liberal and Kantian cosmopolitan paradigms do,5 the extent to which international cooperation and economic globalisation are creating the possibilities for a new transnational order. There is little to suggest that globalisation is producing a new international civility in this way, and, while a cosmopolitan and global human rights vision of the world might be in many ways more attractive than the so-called realism of nation-state competition, the fact that this humanitarian discourse often coincides with the movements of transnational capital, while also legitimising, in a highly perverse way, new forms of imperialism, should make us a little less sanguine about this idea. Indeed, one is tempted to recall the dictum invoked by Carl Schmitt – the ‘realist’ dictum that he so strangely takes from the lips of the anarchist Proudhon: ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’.6

Rather, and as the above reference suggests, I want to contest the realist paradigm in a more oblique way by exploring what is silenced, repressed and distorted by the figure of ‘anarchy’ that is central to it – the revolutionary tradition and political theory of anarchism.7 After all, realism seems to completely subvert the original meaning and implications of anarchism. Rather than condemning, as the anarchists did, the sovereign state as illegitimate and unnecessary, parasitic upon social life, the realists regard the sovereign state as necessary and, therefore, legitimate. Rather than the state of nature narrative being exposed as a pernicious lie, as it was for the anarchists, it is for the

3. Characteristic of this position is Kenneth Waltz. See Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).

4. Such conceptual assumptions have been challenged in important ways by critical IR theory and postmodernism. See R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro, International/Intertextual: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1989).

5. See, for example, Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

6. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54.

7. We should not be too surprised that this seemingly obvious connection has rarely been made. Indeed, Alex Prichard shows how the evolution of IR as a discipline has been based on a foreclosure of anarchism from its debates. Recently, however, there have been some important attempts to redress this omission. See the forum ‘Anarchism and World Politics’, edited by Alex Prichard, in Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 2 (2010). See also Alex Prichard, ‘What Can the Absence of Anarchism Tell Us About the History and Purpose of International Relations?’, Review of International Studies 33, no. 2 (2010): 1–23.




Newman 3

realists the fundamental ontological truth of social relations and the axiomatic basis of the state order. Rather than claim, as the anarchists did, that the condition of war can only be overcome once the sovereign state has been transcended, the realist tradition maintains that the sovereign state is necessary for both internal pacification and for the ‘bracketing’ of war externally. So, for the anarchists, anarchy, or the absence of government, is not only a genuine social possibility, but the supreme ethical goal of humanity. For the realists, on the other hand, anarchy is a catastrophe internally – indeed, a stable sovereign is the very condition for the internal–external division – and, externally, it is the inevitable and dangerous condition that states, preoccupied with their own security, have to contend with. The ‘anarchical society’,8 for the anarchists, would be a society of cooperation, peaceful coexistence, equality and free association. For the realists, also, anarchy is a situation of freedom and equality of a sort, but this is precisely its problem: from the Hobbesian perspective, the combination of liberty and equality among individual entities is exactly what makes peaceful coexistence and cooperation between them impossible.

Yet, we can also recognise a strange proximity between anarchism and realism. Both perspectives focus on the problem of sovereignty: one seeks to abolish it, the other to affirm it, but nevertheless the sovereign state is central to their analyses. Moreover, anarchism, in its critique of power, embodies a certain ‘realism’:9 the sovereign state is cloaked in various obfuscating ideologies and legitimising discourses – God or the social contract – but if we strip these away we find a mechanism of domination based on conquest and violence. And do not the realists make a kind of virtue out of acknowledging and affirming – unlike those naive idealists – the brutal realities of power? Furthermore, both the anarchists and the realists would be equally suspicious of any notion of a world government: for the former, this would simply be an extension and universalisation of everything that is pernicious about the state; for the latter, it is either a structural impossibility or a dangerous illusion which, as Schmitt believed, would unleash violence on an unparalleled scale.10

In this article I will examine more closely this paradoxical relationship between anarchism and realism in order to develop an alternative and more radical conception of anarchy. The argument put forward here is that the best way to counter the doctrine of realism is not by promoting an alternative (more rational, moral, humane, cooperative, peaceful etc.) ontological order, as certain proponents of anarchist IR do,11 but rather to show how realism deconstructs itself through its complicity with the dangerous, unpredictable figure of anarchy. The argument proceeds in three stages. Firstly, I will show how realism, while it claims to be based on the ‘reality’ of anarchy, does not in fact

8. An ironic reference to Hedley Bull’s famous work of the same title: The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977).

9. A similar point is made by Ronald Osborne about Noam Chomsky’s anarchism as a ‘left realism’ which also focuses on the primacy of state power, although obviously from a critical perspective. See ‘Noam Chomsky and the Realist Tradition’, Review of International Studies 35 (2009): 351–70.

10. See Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europeaum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003).

11. See, for instance, Adam Goodwin, ‘Evolution and Anarchism in International Relations: The Challenge of Kropotkin’s Biological Ontology’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 417–37; and Richard Falk, ‘Anarchism without “Anarchism”: Searching for a Progressive Politics in the Early 21st Century’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 381–98.





take this reality seriously, and, indeed, it relies on a highly idealised assumption of a pacified domestic political order (as opposed to the anarchic world outside), a political order behind whose calm visage anarchists unmask the continuity of social war. Secondly, this inconsistency in realism is revealed through an exploration of the existentialist realist, Carl Schmitt, who engages in a subterranean dialogue with the anarchists whom he recognises as his true ideological enemies. Schmitt’s affirmation of sovereignty is based on a disavowal of and, at the same time, a proximity to the spectre of anarchy. This is revealed in two moves in Schmitt’s thought: the anarchic moment of the state of exception, which is both the clearest expression of sovereignty and, at the same time, its moment of greatest peril and uncertainty; and, furthermore, the inconsistency of Schmitt’s notion of the ‘pluriverse’ whose anarchic principle of differentiation stops at the state’s borders. On the contrary, anarchy insists on the internalisation of the pluriverse. Anarchy is thus a deconstructive figure whose undecidability and ontological contingency is precisely dangerous to realism. Yet, perhaps this also has implications for anarchism itself. Therefore the third part of the argument explores what might be seen as the anarchic moment in anarchism. I propose that if indeed we are to take anarchy seriously, then we have to entertain the possibility of an ontological anarchism rather than merely a political anarchism. Anarchism, in other words, should not see itself as a science of social relations based on the firm foundations of humanity, reason and morality. Rather, I maintain that an anarchist approach to IR finds its strongest affinity with post-positivist, post-foundational and poststructuralist perspectives. Thus, the project of taking anarchy in IR seriously is given theoretical expression through what I call postanarchism, which affirms a contingent space of political action without ontological guarantees.

Why Anarchism?

My aim is not to present anarchism as a respectable paradigm of IR theory; it is not to claim anarchism’s place at the table of the discipline alongside realism, liberalism and Marxism. Rather, I find it more productive to affirm anarchism’s position as a political heresy, as being somehow outside ‘mainstream’ political theory. This is to reflect, in some ways, anarchism’s historically marginalised status, even within the radical political tradition. It was anarchism’s uncompromising rejection of state sovereignty, its implacable hostility to all forms of political authority and its claim that the socialist revolution should be libertarian in form as well as aim, that put it at odds even with revolutionary Marxism and Leninism.12 So anarchism is, in part, the critical conscience of revolutionary politics, cautioning it to be on its guard against its own latent authoritarianism and statism. For this reason, anarchism can be considered the ethical horizon and limit condition of radical politics.

It is in thinking about anarchism in this way that we can best approach the question of its implications for IR theory. For instance, the cosmopolitan idea necessarily draws upon some vision of post-sovereignty and the ethical transcendence of the state that is

12. See Bakunin’s account of the dispute between the anarchists and Marx over questions of state power and political organisation, which led to his expulsion from the First International. ‘The Excommunication of the Hague’, La Liberté, 5 October 1872. Cited in Daniel Guérin, No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005).




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central to anarchism; and, indeed, anarchism embodies a distinctly cosmopolitan ethos. Similarly, the field referred to as critical IR theory, in its interrogation of the logic of securitisation and sovereignty, in its deconstruction of the conceptual borders of the state and of the inside–outside binary, and in its appeal to some sort of emancipatory politics, also conjures up – often without acknowledging – the spectre of anarchism. Indeed, Andrew Linklater comments on the influence of the anarchist critique of the state on various poststructuralist and critical theory perspectives that have been taken up in IR theory: ‘These anarchist sentiments resonate with recent critiques of the state’s monopoly powers, exclusionary national identities and totalising political logics which invite further analysis of citizenship in a post-Westphalian society of states.’13

Lastly, many contemporary forms of radical activism – particularly those associated with movements of resistance to neoliberalism and global capitalism – embody practices, aims and organisational principles which can only be described as anarchist: they are often organised horizontally and in a decentralised ‘networked’ fashion, engage in direct decision-making, reject traditional models of representation and leadership, and seek autonomy from the state.14 It is important to apprehend what is politically significant and innovative about these movements: they embody a potential transformation of international politics by situating the political relationship outside the order of the state and in opposition to it. I shall return to this point later.

A Politics of Anti-Sovereignty

Given this resonance with both contemporary activist movements and recent theoretical developments in IR, it is important to look more closely at some of the main implications of anarchism. Central to anarchism, first, is the refusal of the legitimacy of the sovereign state. Anarchists reject the idea of centralised political authority, and claim that life can function perfectly well without being governed. This is the most radical claim that anarchism makes, and it is what separates it from the mainstream of political theory which, even in its liberal forms, is based on the assumed necessity of sovereignty. For anarchists, on the other hand, government is not only seen to be unnecessary, but as actually having a corrupting and destructive influence on social relations. Governments

13. Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of Political Community: Ethical Foundations of the Post-Westphalian Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 196.

14. There is an extensive literature on this topic. See Mark Rupert, ‘Anti-Capitalist Convergence? Anarchism, Socialism and the Global Justice Movement’, in Rethinking Globalism, ed. Manfred Steger (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 121–35; Geoffrey Pleyers, Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); and Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, eds, Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). See also recent work on autonomous spaces and indigenous collectives, for example: Paul Chatterton, ‘Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-management and the Common’ (pp. 897–908), and Gustavo Esteva, ‘The Oaxaca Commune and Mexico’s Coming Insurrection’ (pp. 978–93) in Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography 42, no. 4 (2010); and Alex Kasnabish, Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (London: Zed Books, 2010). At the same time, it is important to be somewhat sceptical about the paradigm of ‘global civil society’, a notion that is often rather vapid and ambiguous, yet which is becoming more prominent in IR. See Scott Turner, ‘Global Civil Society, Anarchy and Governance: Assessing an Emerging Paradigm’, Journal of Peace Research 35 (1998): 25–42.





interfere with society in artificial ways, disrupting its natural processes and arrangements; the state is an encumbrance upon society, excessively regulating the lives of people, exploiting and oppressing them, stealing their resources, limiting their freedom, and disrupting organic communal practices and ways of life. For Bakunin, that self-proclaimed ‘fanatical lover of liberty’, political institutions are ‘hostile and fatal to the liberty of the masses, for they impose upon them a system of external and therefore despotic laws’.15

This critique of the state implies a fundamental scepticism about the ways in which political authority seeks to justify itself. Anarchism rejects the social contract, which it regards as an ideological mystification, an ‘unworthy hoax’ and an ‘absurd fiction’, to use Bakunin’s words.16 Rather than having given our consent to government, government has been violently imposed upon us through conquest, or through various kinds of trickery, deceit and political fraud. So, in the anarchist analysis, state power is stripped of the ideological garbs and rituals of consent, and what remains is a machine of domination, accumulation and violence. As Bakunin dramatically put it, ‘the State is like a vast slaughterhouse and an enormous cemetery, where under the shadow and the pretext of this abstraction (the common good) all the best aspirations, all the living forces of a country, are sanctimoniously immolated and interred’.17 The state’s power is based not on consent but on conquest – the violent capturing of autonomous social relationships. It was this process of state capture which, moreover, fostered more hierarchical and unequal forms of society, and led to domination by political, religious and economic elites.

Anarchism therefore reveals a violent genealogy of sovereignty that perceives warfare at the heart of state power. It is here that one finds a striking similarity with Michel Foucault’s interest in counter-histories of sovereignty which are articulated from the partisan perspective of those who have been violently subordinated to the state: in opposition to the discourse of the philosopher and jurist (one might also include here the political ‘realist’) which sings the praises of the sovereign and covers him in glory, but whose function is precisely to forget the violent conquests upon which his rule is based, the one who speaks from the ‘historico-political’ or partisan position is still engaged in a struggle against the sovereign and seeks to remind us of battles newly forgotten. This is the discourse that says:

No matter what philosophico-juridical theory may say, political power does not begin where war ends.… War has not been averted…. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular.18

In unveiling the continuity of war behind the machinery of the state, this counter-sovereign discourse also characterises anarchism’s position on sovereignty. Let us call this position one of ‘hyper-realism’: in showing that the sovereign state is founded on conquest rather

15. Mikhail Bakunin, Political Philosophy: Scientific Anarchism, ed. G.P. Maximoff (London: The Free Press 1953), 240.

16. Ibid., 165.17. Ibid., 207.18. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France 1975–76, trans. David

Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 50.




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than consent, this clearly undermines liberal pretensions about the state, and indeed any sovereign legal order, national or international, being based on justice or rational agree-ment. However, in showing that this warfare actually continues, that it rages perpetually behind the machinery and cogs of state power, the anarchist perspective also undermines the realist position which seeks to contain and eventually put a stop to civil war by exter-nalising it beyond the state’s borders. In other words, the emergence of the sovereign state does not put a stop to war but simply captures it, calibrates it through law and gov-ernment, and turns it against society. So it is not that society has been pacified, that the civil war has ended or that we have passed from the violence of the state of nature to the peaceful coexistence of civil society. Anarchism, in exposing the continuity of civil war under government, is more ‘realist’ than realism itself: as it shows, realism does not take the ontological reality of war seriously, just as Hobbes, in imagining that the sovereign puts an end to civil war, engages in a strange kind of idealism and utopianism.19 The discourse of realism – basing itself, at least in part, on the Hobbesian notion of anarchy20 – might be seen as a radical forgetting of war: its image of the internally stable sovereign confronting other sovereigns on the field of international anarchy rests upon a foreclo-sure of the possibility of internal war. Realism depends upon the assumption of social peace, enabling war to pass from the interior of societies to the external world beyond the borders of the nation state; a movement which allows borders to be retroactively consti-tuted and the whole binary of inside–outside, friend–enemy21 to be established. Anarchist realism – if we can call it that – shows that this externalisation of war is merely a subli-mation of an ongoing social war, and therefore the ontological foundations of the sover-eign become unstable and the inside–outside binary becomes indistinct and blurred: if sovereign peace is perpetual war, then what is there to distinguish the internal order of sovereignty from the ‘anarchic’ world outside?

19. As Foucault suggests, Hobbes, so far from being the thinker of war, tries to eliminate and avoid the problem of war, to make us forget the real war – not the mere shadow theatre of representations referred to as the ‘war of all against all’ – at the foundations of sovereignty. See Society Must Be Defended, 97.

20. Hobbes’ ontology of the anarchic state of nature, in which individuals engage in egoistic and violent competition over power and resources, forms, for many realists, the basic image of the international order. As Hedley Bull says: ‘we are entitled to infer that all that Hobbes says about the life of individual men in the state of nature may be read as a description of the condition of states in relation to one another’. ‘Hobbes and International Anarchy’, Social Research 48, no. 4 (1981): 717–38. Hobbes’ along with Thucydides and Machiavelli, are usually considered the philosophical foundation stones of the political realist tradition (see Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 13–15). Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty as established through the elimination (or rather externalisation) of war, as well as his fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature, also influenced Carl Schmitt’s thought, allowing him to formulate the political relation of friend–enemy (see The Concept of the Political, 65). See also Louiza Odysseos’s discussion of the importance of the Hobbesian ethos of survival (in the state of nature) to the ‘relational schema’ in the international realm (‘Dangerous Ontologies: The Ethos of Survival and Ethical Theorizing in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 28 [2002]: 409). It is important to note, however, as Walker points out, that despite the centrality of the ‘Hobbesian tradition’ in IR theory, there is a certain degree of ambiguity about how easily Hobbes’ thought fits into the realist paradigm (see Inside/Outside, 110–12).

21. This Schmittian distinction between friend and enemy is another way of articulating the inside–outside binary (see The Concept of the Political, 26).





In drawing this conclusion and in destabilising the inside–outside binary in this way, anarchism necessarily sees itself as a transnational politics. In opposing the sovereign political order of states, it also opposes the international order of wars, alliances, agreements, détentes, strategies, diplomacy – this whole phantasmagorical scene of elites, totally abstracted from the lives of ordinary people. Indeed, rather than international politics being ‘anarchic’ as the realists claim, it is highly ordered, structured around the interests of political and economic elites whose true enemies are not one another, but rather the revolutionary capacities of the international working class.22 This is why nationalism, according to Bakunin, so conveniently intervenes to divide the international proletariat.23 Against the nationalist principle – notwithstanding his acknowledgement of national rights for people suffering under imperial rule – Bakunin asserts the principles of universal solidarity and justice: ‘Every one of us should rise above the narrow, petty patriotism to which one’s own country is the center of the world, and which deems itself great in so far as it makes itself feared by its neighbours.’24

So, looking at international relations through an anarchist prism is to adopt a parallax gaze, from which transnational revolutionary movements and politics appear as privileged over the power politics of sovereign states. Bakunin wrote extensively about the world order, and particularly the European state order in the 19th century, but this was always from the partisan perspective of a revolutionary working class which would no longer recognise national borders and would unite against states and capitalism. The focus of Bakunin’s writings is on the revolutionary politics of the First International rather than the strategic calculations of Germany, Russia or the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his fidelity is to the revolutionary Communards of Paris who in 1871 committed glorious sacrilege by demolishing the Vendôme column in a declaration of war against one’s own state and nation and in solidarity with other revolutionists around the world.25 The powers of the old order were in any case already fading, according to Bakunin, and were at their last gasp; the hopes for humanity lay with a new sort of transnational mass organisation whose aim would be the destruction of the state order and the building of a decentralised, free society. Even though states are weak and tottering, they still need a little push into oblivion: ‘But States do not crumble by themselves; they are overthrown by a universal international social organization.’26

We find similar anti-nationalist and anti-statist sentiments among other anarchist thinkers. William Godwin, for instance, believed ideas of nationalism and patriotism violated reason and were simply deceits that divided rather than united people. In a spirit of enlightened cosmopolitanism, Godwin argued that it was more reasonable to hold loyalty to mankind above loyalty to one’s country. War and militarism were irrational, immoral and a corruption of civic life; moreover, they could not be justified by the old balance of power

22. Bakunin describes the formation of an international alliance of reaction in the period 1815 to 1830: ‘Thanks to the Holy Alliance [between the monarchs of Prussia, Russia and Austria], reaction was internationalized, and, in consequence, uprisings against it also took on an international character’ (see Statism and Anarchy, ed. Marshall Shatz [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 120).

23. See Bakunin, Political Philosophy, 325.24. Ibid.25. See Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, 19.26. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, 375.




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argument.27 In contrast to the motifs of competition and insecurity among sovereign states central to the realist tradition, anarchism emphasises the possibilities of cooperation and solidarity between workers and ordinary people across national borders. Indeed, cooperation and solidarity are seen as intrinsic to humanity. Kropotkin even sought evidence of this in evolutionary biology, where he observed that, in contrast to crude interpretations of Darwinism, cooperation was as much evident as competition within animal species. Rather than the brutal struggle for the survival of the fittest, there was evidence of the contrary instinct of mutual aid. We inherit this instinct for sociability from the animal world, Kropotkin argued, and it is expressed in all sorts of cooperative and voluntary social practices and organisations.28 Cooperation, sociability and mutual aid, rather than competition, insecurity and violence, are thus the starting point for any sort of social and political analysis; they serve as the basis for modern systems of morality,29 and also suggest the possibility of alternative forms of social organisation that transcend the state.

Schmitt and the Spectre of Anarchism

There is perhaps little wonder, then, that anarchism has been excluded from the mainstream IR tradition: in its political analyses, its ethical claims and its proposed alternatives, anarchism – similarly to poststructuralist, feminist and critical IR approaches – fundamentally calls into question the state-centric international order and demands that we think beyond it. It is this hostility to the sovereign state that inevitably brings anarchism into conflict with Carl Schmitt, the conservative legal theorist who sought to defend the sovereign state as an existential principle and as the only viable basis for an international order. However, while Schmitt’s strong defence of the principle of state sovereignty – and thus his association with the realist tradition, particularly in light of his influence on Morgenthau30 – would seem to rule out any common ground with anarchism,31 what is interesting is the way that his affirmation of sovereignty is so extreme that we find here a strange correspondence with anarchism, whose rejection of this principle is equally radical. Rather than simply expound the differences between realist and anarchist approaches to IR, I find it more productive (and more subversive of realist ideology) to explore, through Schmitt, realism’s uncomfortable proximity to its disavowed other, anarchism.

27. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1793]), 516.28. See Peter Kropokin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, ed. Paul Avrich (New York: New York University,

1972).29. Peter Kropotkin, Ethics: Origin and Development, trans. L.S. Friedland (New York: Tudor Publishing,

1947), 14.30. Schmitt’s influence on Hans Morgenthau is well documented. See William E. Scheuerman, Morgenthau:

Realism and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); and Jan-Willem Honig, ‘Totalitarianism and Realism: Hans Morgenthau’s German Years’, Security Studies 5, no. 2 (1995): 283–313. Here it should be noted, however, that I see Schmitt as something of a heretical realist, whose political thought, if we trace its path carefully, leads to a moment of deconstruction in realism. I therefore find it more interesting and productive to approach realism in a more oblique way, through its more marginal figures.

31. Here Alex Prichard explores the evolution of the IR discipline precisely through Schmitt’s and Morgenthau’s rejection of the anarchism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the radical pluralism of Harold Laski. See ‘What Can the Absence of Anarchism Tell Us?’.





Schmitt seems to recognise in the anarchists his true ideological enemy, whose position on the state is the mirror image of his own. He acknowledges that the anarchists are the most extreme opponents of both religion and sovereignty – the two concepts that Schmitt links together; and in discussing the differences between the religious reactionary and defender of absolutist sovereignty, Donoso Cortes, and anarchists like Bakunin and Proudhon, Schmitt conjures up an ontological confrontation between the figures of authority and anarchy, akin to the confrontation between God and the Devil: ‘That extremist cast of mind explains why he [Cortes] was contemptuous of the liberals while he respected atheist-anarchist socialism as his deadly foe and endowed it with a diabolical stature.’32 Unlike the liberals, those interminable negotiators, anarchists make no bones about taking up the partisan position and declaring their hatred of God and the state. The conservative – and here Schmitt is talking through Cortes – thus recognises and even admires his true enemy. Indeed, this dangerous spectre of anti-sovereignty or anarchy seems to haunt Schmitt, so much so that it would appear that he not only sees in anarchism his arch-foe, but perhaps also recognises a troubling complicity with it; an uncomfortable proximity with a politics that seems so radically distant from his own.

Where might this convergence lie, then? And what can it tell us about the limits of current conceptions of international politics? Despite their radical opposition, Schmittian realism and revolutionary anarchism share a similar notion of the sovereign state of exception. That is to say, both see the state of exception – which Schmitt characterises as the moment in which the sovereign suspends the constitution and acts outside the law33 – as central to the operation of the state. While they draw different normative conclusions from this – the anarchists see the exception as the dark and condemnable truth of state power, whereas Schmitt affirms it as the crowning moment of pure sovereignty – both are dismissive of the liberal position which tries to disguise or disavow the exception by clothing state power in the language of legality and constitutionalism. Anarchists, in other words, share with Schmitt a certain stark realism on the question of state power, in contrast with liberal idealism; both see the state as necessarily absolutist. Thus, Schmitt is able to say, once again referring to a reactionary line of thought that is also his own: ‘Authority and anarchy could thus confront each other in absolute decisiveness and form a clear antithesis: De Maistre said that every government is necessarily absolute, and an anarchist says the same’.34 This confrontation is based on two radically opposed images of human nature: for Schmitt, the virtue of the genuine conservative is to see human nature as inherently evil, thus necessitating an absolute sovereign; whereas anarchists see human nature as inherently good, thus making the absolute sovereign an intolerable and unnecessary imposition upon society. The reactionaries and anarchists gaze at one another and see their diametrical opposite.

Moreover, for Schmitt, the anarchist confronts the reactionary on the question of the political decision, but here, once again, is revealed a paradoxical complicity. The reactionary hails the decision as the sole prerogative of sovereignty and its highest expression; in contrast, and precisely because the decision is so fundamentally linked to

32. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 63.

33. Schmitt: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’, Political Theology, 5.34. Ibid., 66.




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sovereignty, the anarchist, it is claimed, rejects the decision. However, Schmitt is careful to point out that the anarchist does not, like the liberal, avoid or perpetually postpone the decision; rather, and precisely because of this shared absolutism, the anarchist decides against the decision. For Schmitt, this is a paradoxical position, leading to what he characterises as authoritarian anarchism on the part of Bakunin.35 I have a somewhat different reading of this seemingly paradoxical formula of the decision against the decision; I prefer to reformulate it in terms of an anti-political politics, or a politics of anti-politics, something that is central to anarchism and which, as I shall show later on, is no contradiction at all.

What is curious about Schmitt’s notion of the decision and the state of exception is that it is structurally akin to anarchy; it draws, inevitably if unwillingly, on a certain anarchy, while at the same time trying to ward it off. Schmitt does his best to separate the state of exception from anarchy: ‘Because the state of exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if not of the ordinary kind.’36 So for Schmitt, the state of exception is about the maintenance of order beyond law – indeed, his point is that law and order can ultimately only be maintained through a periodic suspension of the law. However, does this situation of being outside the law – of going beyond or transgressing it – not also invoke a kind of anarchism? Furthermore, does it not also expose state power in all its nakedness, stripped of its legal ideologies, a situation in which state power is at once intensified and vulnerable? So it would seem that while, for Schmitt, the state of exception is declared to protect against anarchy, to restore order, it has to at the same time draw upon anarchy; it has to resemble anarchy, invoke its extra-legality, in order to defeat it.

However, the state of exception, as a form of unlimited power, an anarchy of power, is also a dangerous moment for the sovereign, running the risk of engendering a different kind of anarchy which destabilises power’s own foundations. Can we not say that the exception is always a double-edged structure which potentially opens up the possibility for a genuinely insurrectionary, anarchic moment? All revolutions and insurrections are moments of exception in the sense that they – at times violently – suspend or destroy the established politico-legal order, introducing a radical rupture, an element of contingency, openness and undecidability. Is this not precisely how Walter Benjamin understands ‘divine violence’ – the event, the genuine moment of exception, which breaks out of the continual oscillation between ‘lawmaking’ and ‘law-preserving’ violence, out of the ‘false’ exception enacted by ‘mythic violence’ that simply re-establishes the order of law and power?

On the breaking out of this cycle maintained by mythic forms of law, on the suspension of law with all the forces on which it depends as they depend on it, finally, therefore on the abolition of state power, a new historical epoch is founded.37

35. Ibid.36. Ibid., 12.37. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds Marcus Bullock

and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp/Harvard University Press, 2004), 251–2. See also Colin Wright’s discussion of the structural similarities and differences between Schmitt’s notion of the exception, and Badiou’s notion of the revolutionary event: ‘the logic of the exception and the logic of





We should notice here the distinctly anarchist emphasis of this notion of divine violence (‘the abolition of state power’): here the exception, rather than producing a suspension of the law in order to enact and reinforce sovereign power, goes too far and pulls down the whole structure; the ‘mythic cycle’ of violence and law, the oscillation of anarchy – sovereignty that characterises the Schmittian exception, suddenly breaks down and reveals a genuine moment of anarchism.38 Realist theorists therefore have to know that when they invoke anarchy as the existential basis of political life and the international order, they are playing with fire: they unwittingly summon up the Devil, recognised long ago by Cortes (and Schmitt) as the dangerous enemy of sovereignty, and thus open up an ontological and political space for a different and more radical form of anarchy which shakes sovereignty to its core.

In exploring the paradoxical contiguity with anarchism in Schmitt’s thought, we can begin to perceive the uncertainty and ambiguity at the heart of the realist paradigm. The astonishing quote from Schmitt, cited at the beginning of this article, reveals this difficulty: ‘If confronted with the nihilism of a centred order, which prevails everywhere through the use of modern means of mass destruction, anarchy appears to a desperate humanity not only as the lesser evil, but instead as the only effective remedy’. Can Schmitt, the high priest of sovereignty, really be saying that when confronted with an overwhelming, totalising order, that anarchy is not only the lesser evil but also the only remedy? Here Schmitt is warning of the dangers of an emergent totalising world order whose hegemony would be suffocating, and which would admit of no outside, no exteriority, no differentiation from its stifling uniformity. His argument is against a new nomos, a new ordering of the world – based on liberalism and humanitarian law – something that would, unlike the previous Westphalian order of sovereign nation states and bracketed wars, be all-encompassing, and would, with the aid of modern technologies, unleash terrifying wars against the ‘enemies of humanity’.39 The only defence against this, for Schmitt, is to defend the idea of a ‘pluriverse’ of sovereign nation states, the old anarchic principle of differentiation and plurality which would act as a ‘katechon’ or ‘restrainer’ against the claustrophobia of this new world order.

I have no interest here in endorsing the rather fashionable and somewhat facile thesis that, in the context of the current global wars fought on behalf of ‘humanity’ and

the event can be distinguished, respectively, in terms of their relation to the conservative violence that maintains the status quo on the one hand, and the revolutionary or, as Benjamin describes it, the “pure” violence that overturns the status quo on the other’. ‘Event or Exception? Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or, Towards a Politics of the Void’, Theory & Event 11, no. 2 (2008).

38. This dangerous proximity between the sovereign exception and the genuinely anarchic/anarchist exception (heralded by the notion of ‘divine violence’) is also confirmed by Giorgio Agamben, who argues that Schmitt’s Political Theology may be seen as a response to Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, and that his theory of the exception can be understood as the attempt to ward off the dangerous, radical possibilities of ‘divine violence’: ‘it is in order to neutralize this new figure of a pure violence removed from the dialectic between constituent and constituted power that Schmitt develops his theory of sovereignty’. See State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54.

39. This argument runs through Schmitt’s other major works, The Concept of the Political and The Nomos of the Earth.




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‘civilisation’, Schmitt’s dark predictions have been vindicated;40 while the claim is in part correct, the problem with this argument is that it ends up reaffirming – in the name of a ‘critical’ approach to IR or some progressive left politics – the same old conservative realist argument for sovereign states.41 I think it more interesting to invert Schmitt’s argument and actually turn it against him. That is to say, if pluralism and differentiation are preferable in the international order, then why should they not be preferable in the domestic order as well? If a global sovereign is a dangerous and illegitimate proposition, then why should a domestic sovereign be considered necessary and legitimate? If political totalisation is bad at the international level, then why is it good at the domestic level? If anarchy is desirable externally – if, indeed, it is mankind’s ‘only effective remedy’ – then why is it not also desirable internally? In other words, this binary division, whereby the international order should be anarchic and plural, whereas the domestic order should be ordered and uniform, is simply insupportable. If international sovereignty is violent, oppressive and totalitarian, then surely this is equally the case with domestic sovereignty; if a global order is oppressive of nation states, denying them their difference and plurality, then surely the nation state in turn is oppressive of those living under its control. So, Schmitt offers us no good reason for sustaining this conceptual opposition between outside and inside; he offers us no coherent reason why a pluriverse should only operate between sovereign states, not within them – thereby disrupting the very ontological condition of sovereign states – and why a world government is necessarily any worse than a domestic government. This is a question that thinkers on the left who adopt Schmitt as a defender of pluralism and differentiation, cannot answer. By contrast, we could say that anarchism takes this logic of pluralisation seriously and extends it into the domestic order as well, calling for a disordering of both orders, and thereby disturbing the conceptual limits that separate the domestic from the international. If we may be permitted to slightly rephrase Schmitt’s quote, then: if confronted with the nihilism of a state order, which prevails everywhere through the use of modern means of mass destruction, anarchy appears to a desperate humanity not only as the lesser evil, but instead as the only effective remedy. The only way to use Schmitt is to show how he deconstructs himself, giving rise to an anarchy that he seeks to tame but cannot ultimately control.

40. See, for instance, Louiza Odysseos and Fabio Petito, ‘Carl Schmitt’, in Critical Theorists and International Relations, eds Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (London: Routledge, 2009), 305–16; and William Rasch, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt and the New World Order’, South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 2 (2005): 177–83.

41. Here I am thinking in particular of Chantal Mouffe and William Rasch, who, in different ways, defend Schmitt’s ideas on sovereignty, the ‘pluriverse’ and the balance of power against various conceptions of liberal cosmopolitanism and transnational radical activism. See Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), and ‘Carl Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World’, South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 2 (2005): 245–51; and Rasch, Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004). For a critique of neo-Schmittian positions, see Peter Hallward, ‘Beyond Salvage’, South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 2 (2005): 237–44.





An-archy

In the previous section, we saw how, through this engagement between Schmitt and anarchism, anarchy emerges as a radically deconstructive figure – slippery and unpredictable – which can no longer be mastered or contained within the realist para-digm. In collapsing Schmitt’s distinction between internal order and external anar-chy, and by disrupting the infernal machine of law and exception, anarchy is precisely that which exceeds and jeopardises realism. Anarchy wears the crown it has seized from sovereignty. What has also been revealed in the dialogue between Schmitt and the anarchists is what might be seen as a moment of ontological contingency within anarchism itself – in the anti-political political moment (or what Schmitt calls the decision against the decision), and in the insurrectionary moment expressed in Benjamin’s notion of divine violence.

My aim in this section is to develop this idea of ontological contingency or ontological anarchy – by which I mean a disruption of stable foundations, structures and identities – and to explore the implications of this for anarchism itself. One of the limitations in certain contemporary applications of anarchism to IR is the attempt to construct anarchism as a model of order or ‘governance’, one that presents an alternative vision to realist state-centrism.42 This is partly motivated by a desire to turn anarchism into a ‘science’ of international relations, into a ‘discreet approach to world politics’, as Prichard puts it;43 in other words, into a respectable paradigm that serves as a coherent alternative to realism.44 This raises an important question – is anarchism primarily a theory of order? While this is no doubt an important aspect of anarchism, does it not neglect the equally important dimension of insurrection, anti-authoritarianism and revolutionary disorder invoked in Bakunin’s ‘urge to destroy’ (which for him was also a ‘creative urge’) – in other words, the moment of contingency, indeterminacy and rupture, the radically exceptional moment (Benjamin’s divine violence) that I see as central to the category of anti-political politicals?

It is here that I would like to unravel anarchism a little in order to reveal this truly anarchic moment. This would involve a deconstruction of the ontological foundations of classical anarchism, which was a political philosophy shaped by the positivist discourses of Enlightenment humanism and rationalism. Classical anarchism was thus both a revolutionary politics, and a science of society and human nature: it imagined that it could reveal, through scientific and rational enquiry, the immanent objective truth of human relations – that of sociability – obscured beneath the crushing order of power and the obscurantism of religion and ‘idealist philosophy’. Bakunin, for instance, spoke of ‘immutable’ natural laws that were scientifically discernible, and whose unfolding

42. See, for instance, Scott Turner’s argument that anarchism’s alternative vision of social relations as one of cooperation rather than egoistic competition informs a new model of global ‘governance’ based on the capacities of global civil society rather than states (‘Global Civil Society’).

43. Prichard, ‘What Can the Absence of Anarchism Tell Us?’, 1.44. This desire for respectability is so great as to impel Richard Falk to urge us to drop the name ‘anarchism’,

even while adopting its principles, and to instead promulgate a ‘stealth anarchism’ – such is the fear of reinforcing negative stereotypes about anarchists in the mind of the public. An anarchism that dare not speak its name? See ‘Anarchism without “Anarchism”’.




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determined social progress and the course of human freedom.45 Kropotkin saw the possibilities of human sociability, cooperation and mutual aid as being derived from a ‘permanent’ biological instinct that was evident in animal species: ‘The social instinct innate in men as well as in all the social animals – this is the origin of all ethical conceptions and all the subsequent development of morality.’46 Murray Bookchin, a modern exponent of this sort of scientific approach – which he refers to as ‘dialectical naturalism’ – sees the possibilities of a rationally ordered society embodied within a sort of social totality that is immanent within nature, and whose dialectical unfolding will produce a flowering of human freedom.47

There is the idea, then, of a rational social objectivity – a sort of natural organism – that is somehow immanent in human relations, containing the seeds of liberation and forming the ontological ground for a new kind of rational and moral order that will replace the state. This, moreover, forms the ontological basis for a normative critique of the realist IR paradigm, and for the development of an alternative conception based on cooperation and decentralisation. So, for instance, Adam Goodwin uses Kropotkin’s evolutionary theory of mutual aid to suggest an alternative ontology of international relations to the realist one of egotistical competition. However, in arguing against the reductionist and essentialist foundations of realism – its basis in ontological individualism which he sees as deriving from a distortion of Darwinism – does not Goodwin simply propose in its place another kind of essentialism, one of biological sociality and complexity rather than atomistic, competitive individualism? According to Goodwin, ‘the paramount positioning of sociality within Mutual Aid Theory opens the door to the possibility of a holist biological ontology’.48 We see here an attempt not to free IR from deep ontological foundations, but, on the contrary, to simply reground it from one set of essential foundations to another – from individualism to sociality.

In my view, however, contemporary anarchism, as well as IR, should resist this scientific gesture. Indeed, IR theory has benefited precisely from a critique of this sort of positivistic approach49 – and particularly from the interventions of poststructuralism, which is a critique of deep ontological foundations and essentialist identities. Is it necessary, then, as Goodwin claims, for social theory to ‘begin with ontological assumptions’? Is it not more productive to show how these ontological assumptions – which often limit and constrain thought and politics – are deconstructible? This is exactly how I have approached anarchism – through a deconstruction of its ontological foundations in biology, science, universal rationality – showing how anarchism does not need these deep foundations to be politically valid.50 Central to this post-foundational or

45. See Bakunin, Political Philosophy, 94.46. Kropotkin, Ethics, 45.47. Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Paolo Alto,

CA: Cheshire Books, 1982), 31.48. Goodwin, ‘Evolution and Anarchism in International Relations’.49. See Steve Smith’s critique of the positivism in IR theory in ‘Positivism and Beyond’, International

Relations Theory: Positivism and Beyond, eds Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); also Jim George and David Campbell, ‘Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly 34 (1990): 269–93.

50. See Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (Lanham,





postanarchist move is what I call the ‘anarchy principle’ – in other words, a kind of anti-ontological ontology or an ‘ontological anarchy’.51 This has little to do with the realist understanding of ‘anarchy’, which, as we have seen, is simply an essentialist vision of human relations as atomised and individualistic. On the contrary, ontological anarchy – or an-archy – is what makes foundationalism of this kind impossible. It is a deconstruction of the authority of all ontological foundations. Taking anarchy seriously means to recognise the way it unsettles all stable identities and ontologies. Below, I will outline two specific understandings of an-archy, exploring their resonance for IR theory.

Firstly, an-archy as the absence of rational first principles. This refers to Reiner Schürmann’s argument about the ‘withering away’ of arché invoked in Heidegger’s idea of the closure of metaphysics. Unlike in metaphysical thinking, where action has always to be derived from and determined by a first principle, ‘“anarchy” … always designates the withering away of such a rule, the relaxing of its hold’.52 Importantly, Schürmann distinguishes this notion of ‘anarchy’ or the ‘anarchy principle’ from the anarchism of Proudhon, Bakunin and others, who sought ‘to displace the origin, to substitute the “rational power”, principium, for the power of authority, princeps – as metaphysical an operation as there has been. They sought to replace one focal point with another’.53 In other words, classical anarchists sought to abolish political authority, yet they invoked another kind of authority in its place, the epistemological authority of science and the moral authority of society; thus, in place of the state emerges a more rational form of social organisation. By contrast, according to Schürmann:

The anarchy that will be at issue here is the name of a history affecting the ground or foundation of action, a history where the bedrock yields and where it becomes obvious that the principle of cohesion, be it authoritarian or ‘rational’, is no longer anything more than a blank space deprived of legislative, normative, power.54

Anarchy, in this sense, would destabilise the ontological ground of both realism and anarchism. We can see here the anti-authoritarian potential of this anarchic gesture; it involves a questioning of the sovereignty of all guiding principles. Such foundations are thus deprived of normative power, and they can no longer easily serve as a natural basis for the establishment of a new system of rules and institutions. This does not mean that post-sovereign forms of politics are impossible, simply that in posing the question of political alternatives we cannot necessarily rely on what we believe to be the authority of natural laws, absolute moral principles, biological foundations or a universally under-stood rationality.

Yet, we cannot leave it at that. Anarchy has to be more than simply a displacement or deconstruction of the sovereign authority of first principles; it has also to involve some

MD: Lexington Books, 2001); and The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

51. See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 1991).

52. Reiner Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy, trans. Christine-Marie Gros (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 6.

53. Ibid.54. Ibid.




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sort of ethical dimension. Sovereignty can only be transcended in the name of some sort of ethical horizon – whether it is equality, freedom, justice or solidarity, or whatever. But the question is how to think about this ethical dimension of anarchy without falling back onto first principles. This brings forth a second understanding of anarchy, that deriving from Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the ethical terrain emerges through an encounter with the other in his or her sheer exteriority. It is, moreover, something deeply unsettling to the ego because the other cannot be reduced to our rational idealisations or assimilated into our structures of consciousness, so conditioned as they are by logos. Thus, the encounter with this outside produces something like a disequilibrium or delirium. Indeed, for Levinas, the encounter is ‘an-archical’ in the sense that it unsettles the ‘sovereignty’ of the self-transparent, self-coinciding ego. However, this notion of anarchy cannot be reduced to some notion of disorder – ‘disorder is but another order’;55 rather, it is what breaks down the realist binary of sovereignty–anarchy altogether. Indeed, Levinas suggests that the disorder of the ‘state of nature’ is always a construction of the existing political order itself, and it functions as the ontological supplement to the order of the state. For Levinas, then, anarchy means something entirely different: it refers to the sense in which we are disturbed or destabilised by the encounter with the other. This is an ethical moment because it imposes upon us a radical ethical responsibility for the other.

It is not too difficult to see how this notion of anarchy might be applied to international relations. It is clear, first, that the ethical relation of self–other simply cannot be assimilated to Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, which for him is central to the political relationship and reinforces the sovereign boundaries of the nation state in opposition to an external threat.56 Levinas’s anarchic relationship is not one of enmity in this sense, nor is it one of an equilibrium between two equally matched opponents; rather, it is better thought of as a radically asymmetrical relationship between a sovereign identity that seeks to protect its borders against an excluded other who, precisely in its powerlessness, manages to throw this identity into disequilibrium, imposing upon it an ethical demand that opens it up to what is beyond itself. Therefore, the ethical encounter with the other is what makes sovereignty, understood as a self-enclosed, independent identity, impossible. As Jim George puts it: ‘This significantly reframes the traditional notion of subjectivity and responsibility in that now the identity of the ethical subject is constituted, not via is autonomy and independence from Otherness, but in its obligation to and responsibility for others.’57 Therefore, the realist paradigm of self–other/egoism– anarchy is fundamentally challenged through this alternative Levinasian understanding of ethical anarchy.

Moreover, for Levinas, the ethical encounter is traumatic, disturbing, uncomfortable, even violent, a forcing of the presence of the other onto the self in such a way that its freedom is limited. The anarchy of the encounter is therefore not a moment of freedom conceived in the strictly individualist sense. However, for Levinas, this autarchic individualist freedom is really no freedom at all because it often leads to a kind of imperialist subjectivity and thus to the domination of the other. So, according to Levinas,

55. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Substitution’, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 91.56. See Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26.57. Jim George, ‘Realist Ethics, International Relations, and Post-modernism: Thinking Beyond the Egoism–

Anarchy Thematic’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 24 (1995): 195–223.





the ethical encounter produces a freedom of a different kind: ‘Substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself, where the ego suffocates in itself due to the tautological way of identity’.58 What is being proposed here, then, is a freeing of the subject from a fixed identity and the borders to which it has hitherto been confined, and therefore a different kind of freedom which is not dependent on security and the limitation of the freedom of others – as in the realist paradigm.

In a number of ways, then, Levinasian anarchy works to undo the structure of sovereignty. I would argue that, in doing so, it also generates a new understanding of the politico-ethical moment as that which exceeds the structures of sovereignty and which disturbs it from the outside. But it is what also prevents the totalisation, or self-identity, of any form of politics, even a revolutionary politics. It is thus not something easily reducible to a politics of anarchism:

It would be self-contradictory to set it up as a principle (in the sense that anarchists understand it). Anarchy cannot be sovereign like an arche. It can only disturb the State – but in a radical way, making possible moments of negation without any affirmation.59

So, anarchy is not in itself a politics; it does not propose a particular form of social organisation, nor even any specific political strategy. Yet, rather than being inimical to anarchism, I see anarchy as a useful way of supplementing it. Anarchy keeps alive a very necessary tension or moment of suspension between ethics and politics, preventing one from being eclipsed by the other. We can understand anarchy as that which opens politi-cal practices and discourses to an ethical questioning as to their own limits and exclu-sions, or their tendencies towards theoretical rigidification and institutionalism. Even post-state institutions ought surely to be subject to a continual ethical interrogation, or, in Foucault’s terms, to ongoing ‘practices of freedom’.60 Anarchy is therefore anything but apolitical; indeed, we could say that it is precisely in its separation or autonomy from sovereignty that it is political.

Conclusion: Postanarchism and International Relations

The intervention of ontological anarchy thus contributes not only to post-positivist and poststructuralist approaches to IR, but also, I would suggest, to an anarchist politics, in the sense of freeing it from its reliance on ontological foundations and essentialist categories. Indeed, we could go further and say that post-foundationalist anarchism – or postanarchism – is the clearest and most coherent political expression of poststructuralism. As I have argued elsewhere, poststructuralism is inspired by an anti-authoritarian, ‘anarchist’ ethos – a critique of all authoritarian institutions, not only political, but discursive and

58. Levinas, ‘Substitution’, 114.59. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague and London: Nijhoff,

1981), 194, emphasis in original.60. See Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethics of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in Ethics:

Subjectivity and Truth, Essential Works 1954–1984, Volume 1, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin, 2002), 281–302.




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epistemological – which produces an open space of political contingency.61 Indeed, the opening up of this ‘anarchic’ space, in which existing political paradigms, institutions, discourses, identities and practices are potentially destabilised, is what Jenny Edkins sees as poststructuralism’s main contribution to IR theory: it reveals the dimension of ‘the political’, reminding us of the contingency and historicity of our current ways of practising and conceptualising politics. Poststructuralism thus works towards, Edkins argues, a ‘repoliticisation’ of IR, a field that has been hegemonised by discourses and paradigms that have naturalised their own ontological foundations, making us forget the contested and contingent basis of this settlement: ‘To enact a repoliticization requires an acceptance of the impossibility of ontological fullness.’62 Resisting ontological fullness – in other words, resisting the sovereignising gesture of grounding identity in essential foundations and self-enclosed totalities – is, as I have shown, the operation performed by anarchy.

However, how should we understand postanarchism politically in an IR context? What sorts of alternative politics does it engender? In thinking about this question, the figure of autonomy becomes central, and one can point here to the myriad micropolitical practices, ethical experiments and insurrectionary spaces that are the most important and striking aspect of a global (and local) politics of anti-capitalism.63 However, by autonomy, I do not mean a fully achieved situation of freedom and independence, but rather an ongoing project, a continual invention and experimentation with new practices of freedom, conducted associatively, producing alternative ethical relations between the self and others.64 I would argue that this project of autonomy is precisely how we should understand the politics and ethics of (post)anarchism.

Let us consider once again Schmitt’s claim that the anarchist, rather than avoiding the decision, decides against it: however, rather than regarding this as a contradiction, I see the decision against the decision (or the anti-decision decision) as pointing to a new configuration of politics, one that I have characterised as the politics of anti-politics. In its rejection of state power and its shunning of involvement in parliamentary politics, anarchism often characterised itself as an anti-politics. Indeed, Bakunin called for ‘the total abolition of politics’,65 by which he meant the destruction of state power, as opposed to the Marxian ‘political revolution’ which sought to take over state power. And yet at the same time, Bakunin, along with the other anarchists, went into considerable detail in discussing revolutionary tactics and the organisation and the mobilisation of people, which are, of course, political questions. This is no contradiction but, rather, expresses, as Bakunin put, the desire to ‘pursue politics of a different kind’,

61. See Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan.62. Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder,

CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 141.63. See Daniel Murray, ‘Democratic Insurrection: Constructing the Common in Global Resistance’,

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 461–82. For a discussion of some of these practices of everyday resistance in an IR context, see also Chris Rossdale, ‘Anarchy Is What Anarchists Make of It: Reclaiming the Concept of Agency in IR and Security Studies’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 2 (2010): 483–501.

64. Foucault refers to ethical practices of freedom as a ‘patient labour giving form to our impatience for liberty’. See ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, Ethics: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984: Volume 1, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 319.

65. Bakunin, Political Philosophy, 113–14.





and he talks about the need for people to ‘organize their powers apart from and against the state’.66 We need to think about what this organising of our powers ‘apart from and against the state’ might mean today. It can mean nothing else than a politics of autonomy. So the contribution of anarchism is to resituate the political dimension away from the state and the principle of state sovereignty; the space of the political is now claimed outside the state and against it. The moment of the decision – that which for Schmitt is central to sovereignty, and thus at the heart of the political – now becomes the decision against the state. (Post)Anarchism is a rejection of the statist institutionalisation of politics, and the exploration of what politics might mean beyond the grasp of the state. The state, so far from being the appropriate space of the political, is nothing but a machine of depoliticisation. The message that we take from (post)anarchism is this: the autonomy of the political – the central concern of Schmitt – means nothing if not the politics of autonomy.

In this article I have explored three different – yet interlinked – meanings (Should we say ‘images’?67) of anarchy. Firstly, anarchy as it is understood in realism, as that which presupposes the inside–outside, friend–enemy binary. This I have shown to be theoretically fraudulent – not because the liberals are right and that the world order is one of cooperation, but, on the contrary, because, as the anarchists contend, the social war continues to rage internally. Thus, the anarchy that Schmitt invokes to protect us from a totalising world order becomes, in the hands of the anarchists, the plea of a ‘desperate humanity’ against the totalising order of the state itself. Anarchy goes from being a concept that affirms sovereignty, to one that destabilises and undermines it. From this issues forth a second meaning: the necessary and exceptional moment of rupture in anarchist politics. Anarchists should not fear this spectre of anarchy, or shy away from its creative destructiveness, from its ‘divine violence’. Thirdly, anarchy (or an-archy) as the deconstruction of ontology: an ethical and contingent moment that opens up self-enclosed identities and unsettles predetermined orders, including those of anarchism itself. It is here that postanarchism emerges, not as a new paradigm, but as that which interrogates all paradigms, confronting them with the moment of contingency and autonomous action that is at the heart of the political.

Author Biography

Saul Newman (PhD UNSW 1998) is a Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research is in continental and poststructuralist political and social theory, and contemporary radical politics. He is the author of: From Bakunin to Lacan (Lexington Books, 2001); Power and Politics in Poststructuralist Thought (Routledge, 2005); Unstable Universalities (Manchester University Press, 2007); Politics Most Unusual (Palgrave, 2008); The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); editor of Max Stirner (Palgrave, 2011); as well as numerous journal articles. He is currently working on a new book, Agamben and Human Rights (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

66. Ibid., 377.67. An ironic reference to Waltz’s famous ‘three images’ view of international relations.




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