Since 2001, and the US response to international terrorism by launching an ill-defined and open-ended ‘Global War on Terror’, a striking debate (re)emerged within the discipline of International Relations (IR) about the global nature of American power, more specifically about the imperial character of the exercise of that power. In a discipline such as IR, forged on the heels of colonialism (cf. Schmidt 1998: 123-150, Long & Schmidt 2005), it is somewhat surprising that for several decades, little work had been produced within its mainstream on the topic of empires and imperialism1. Whatever the causes of this, two events were to change that sad state of affairs. One was the publication and unexpected success of the book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Hardt & Negri 2000), which received an unusually broad array of acclaim and critique, and became something of a global phenomenon in sales, slowly achieving that rare status of a ‘theory’ best-seller. The other trigger, barely a year apart, was September 11th and its aftermath. The response of the US government under George W. Bush helped re-launch the debate, and made empire a political buzzword once again (Eakin 2002, Ricks 2001). This was compounded by the influence of the so-called neo-conservatives within his administration – some of them vocal proponents of an imperial set of policies towards the rest of the world (Boot 2001, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Kagan 1998). To borrow Michael Cox's ironic and apt phrase, the empire was back in town (Cox 2003).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:512234 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Pinéu, Daniel Filipe Dos Ramos |
| Contributors | Jackson, Peter Darron ; Gol, Ayla ; Jones, Richard Llywelyn Wyn |
| Publisher | Aberystwyth University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/2160/3b368c44-fc8f-4fab-816b-64346cf8b599 |
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