Julian Reid

Throughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deployed by colonial powers to their own advantages and ends. Historically the indigenous have been represented as belonging to a past temporality in ways that legitimized colonial rule in the present and future. This book provides a cutting-edge, theoretically innovative, and analytically detailed response to significant developments occurring in the fields of indigenous governance. This book will explore the interfaces between power and indigenous critique by discussing widely articulated attributes of indigenous subjectivity. The book raises questions about the surfaces of contact between neoliberalism and indigeneity today. We know much by now about the long history of colonial violence that arose from the western desire to transform indigenous peoples on account of their perceived inferiority. We recognize and understand much less of the violence which arises from the purported desire to protect indigenous peoples and ‘the ontological alterity they are said to embody. Yet that is the form, this book asserts, which neoliberal violence towards indigenous peoples now takes.

Throughout the history of colonialism competing representations of the indigenous have been deployed by colonial powers to their own advantages and ends. Historically the indigenous have been represented as belonging to a past temporality in ways that legitimized colonial rule in the present and future. This book provides a cutting-edge, theoretically innovative, and analytically detailed response to significant developments occurring in the fields of indigenous governance. This book will explore the interfaces between power and indigenous critique by discussing widely articulated attributes of indigenous subjectivity. The book raises questions about the surfaces of contact between neoliberalism and indigeneity today. We know much by now about the long history of colonial violence that arose from the western desire to transform indigenous peoples on account of their perceived inferiority. We recognize and understand much less of the violence which arises from the purported desire to protect indigenous peoples and ‘the ontological alterity they are said to embody. Yet that is the form, this book asserts, which neoliberal violence towards indigenous peoples now takes.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford, is 500 years old in March 2017. This book is the first history of the College in over a century and covers the full chronological range from its foundation by Richard Fox in pre-Reformation Oxford to the present day. Corpus Christi was founded with self-consciously high intellectual ambitions in the Renaissance and, although it has sustained those ambitions better at some periods than at others, its intellectual pedigree has remained a constructive challenge throughout its history. Many of the great changes of English history from the sixteenth century onwards—the Reformation, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution—have had their repercussions and sometimes their participants within the College. The book weaves the history of the College together with the strands of internal domestic history, intellectual history, and the political and religious history of England and Europe.

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live? This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

Political practices, agencies and institutions around the world promote the need for humans, individually and collectively, to develop capacities of resilience. We must accept and adapt to the ‘realities’ of an endemic condition of global insecurity and to the practice of so-called sustainable development. But in spite of claims that resilience make us more adept and capable, does the discourse of resilience undermine our ability to make our own decisions as to how we wish to live? This book draws out the theoretical assumptions behind the drive for resilience and its implications for issues of political subjectivity. It establishes a critical framework from which discourses of resilience can be understood and challenged in the fields of governance, security, development, and in political theory itself. Each part of the book includes a chapter by David Chandler and another by Julian Reid that build a passionate and provocative dialogue, individually distinct and offering contrasting perspectives on core issues. It concludes with an insightful interview with Gideon Baker. In place of resilience, the book argues that we need to revalorize an idea of the human subject as capable of acting on and transforming the world, rather than being cast in a permanent condition of enslavement to it.

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence. In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence. In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

Newly available in paperback, this book overturns existing understandings of the origins and futures of the War on Terror for the purposes of International Relations theory. It demonstrates why this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life, but a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are a fundamental cause of the conflict. The question of the future of humanity is posed by this war, but only in the sense that its resolution depends on our abilities to move beyond the limits of dominant understandings of the human and its politics. Theorising with and beyond the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio and Negri, this book examines the possibilities for such a movement. What forms does human life take, it asks, when liberal understandings of humanity are no longer understood as horizons to strive for, but impositions against which the human must struggle in order to fulfil its destiny? What forms does the human assume when war against liberal regimes becomes the determining condition of its possibility? Answers to such questions are pressing, this book argues, if we earnestly desire an escape from the current impasses of international politics.

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to 'making life live'. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls 'the biohuman'. Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing. The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to 'making life live'. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls 'the biohuman'. Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing. The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

This is a book which completely overturns existing understandings of the origins and futures of the War on Terror for the purposes of International Relations theory. As the author shows, this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life against an enemy defined simply by a contradictory will for the destruction of human life as commonly supposed by its liberal advocates. It is a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being put to the test if not rejected outright. Seeking a way out of this conflict must in turn mean learning to question the limits of existing understandings of what constitutes human life and its political potentialities. The pursuit of such a line of questioning is integral to the biopolitical analysis developed in this book.