Pessimism in International Relations

Tim Stevens is Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK. He is the author of Cyber Security and the Politics of Time and co-author of Cyberspace and the State.Nicholas Michelsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK. He is the author of Politics and Suicide: The Philosophy of Political Self-Destruction.

• 1. Introduction: The Problems of Pessimism.- 2. Pessimism in International Relations.- 3. The Romance of Realism: Pessimism as Tragedy.- 4. Cassirer, Fatalism and Political Myth: Historical Lessons in the Consequences of Pessimism for International Relations.- 5. Liberal Pessimism: An Intellectual History of Suspicion in the Cold War.- 6. Productive Pessimism: Rehabilitating John Herz’s Survival Research for the Anthropocene.- 7. The Global Politics of Ugly Feelings: Pessimism and Resentment in a Mimetic World.- 8. Pessimism and the US Alt-Right: Knowledge, Power, Race and Time.- 9. The Pessimism of the Shipwreck: Theorising Migration in International Relations.- 10. The Pessimism Traps of Indigenous Resurgence.- 11. After Pessimism? Affirmative Approaches to the Anthropocene.- 12. Afterword: The New Pessimism in Twenty-First Century World Politics