Universal Politics

Ilan Kapoor is a Professor of Critical Development Studies at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Toronto. His research focuses on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory and politics, participatory development and democracy, and ideology critique. He is the author of The Postcolonial Politics of Development (2008), Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity (2013), and Confronting Desire: Psychoanalysis and International Development (2020); and editor of the collected volume, Psychoanalysis and the Global (2018).Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College, and Editor of The Comparatist. He is the author of Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (2021), Zizek on Race Toward an Anti-Racist Future (2020), Theory's Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy (2018), Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question: Beyond the Jew and the Greek (2017), Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (2014), and Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism (2003). He has also published articles, edited volumes, and special journal issues on globalization, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural and trauma studies.

Overall, Kapoor and Zalloua's negative approach makes an important contribution to International Relations literature in a genuine academic spirit, for it challenges some of the most basic assumptions that implicitly sustain current debates about global affairs. Readers should be warned that some of their most basic certainties might be shaken.

• Chapter 1: Universal Politics Chapter 2: Universalisms Compared Chapter 3: Universal Versus Decentralized Politics Chapter 4: What a (Negative) Universal Politics Might Look Like Today Conclusion: After the System: the Challenges of a Universal Politics