Moral Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty

Abstract

Global geographies are in flux. As political boundaries become increasingly ambiguous, academic discourses such as comparative politics and international relations, appear increasingly inadequate. However, it is less the case that these traditional political discourses have been made invalid by changes in the terrains to which they were thought to refer, than it is that the extended period of relative geopolitical stability during the Cold War discouraged reflection on the spatial predicates of these discourses’ intelligibility. State-centric political discourses approached adequacy only in their capacity to legitimate the authority of the state system. They helped contain ethical and political conversations with the problematics that served the centralizing authorities of states and the state system. Thus, they were complicit in reproducing modernity’s dominant, territorial imaginary.

I am indebted to Arjun Appadurai, Carol Brockenridge, Mark denham and Terry Nardin for suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.