Institute of Advanced Study Fellows’ Public Lecture
Mary Manjikian:’Emergency Time, Crisis and the Role of the State: Reflections on the Past, Present and the Future’
28 February 2013, 5.30 – 6.30pm, Howlands Hall, Ustinov College, Durham University
Attendance to this event is free and open to all.
Abstract: Despite the turn towards postmodernism in IR theory, much of our theorizing in international relations still rests on implicit understandings about time, trajectories and teleologies. Our theories about democratization, the use of power and political development all rest on assumptions about the pace, timing, sequence and tempo of change. Many of these understandings about time form the basis for our normative judgements about state development – including the idea that a state is developing too quickly, too slowly or along the ‘wrong’ lines. These understandings also affect how we think about crisis – as a period which is somehow outside of time and where our temporal understandings are suspended or upended. In this lecture we consider two subjects: First, what do we know or think we know about time in IR theory today? Secondly, are there any “rules” which we can derive about the relationship between crisis, the increased tempo at which the state operates during an emergency, and the ways in which it affects state power?
Mary Manjikian is a visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study between January and March 2013. Dr Manjikian grew up in Schenectady, New York and attended Wellesley College (BA), Oxford University (MPhil) and the University of Michigan (MA, PhD). She is a former US foreign service officer and has lived and worked in the Netherlands, Russia, Germany and Bulgaria. She is currently Assistant Professor at the Robertson School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach. She teaches courses in international security, including Disaster Assistance Management, Terrorism, National Security and Intelligence. Her research deals with the politics and discourse of disaster, crisis, risk and threat. She is the author of Threat Talk: Comparative Politics of Internet Addiction (Ashgate: 2012), and Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End (Lexington: 2012). Her third book, Barring the Door: The Securitization of Property Squatting in Western Europe is forthcoming.