This concluding chapter reflects on the volume’s contributions to how we see, think, and do international organisations. The editors of this volume draw a sharp distinction between doing international organisations law and thinking about international organisations, and propose that the discipline must ‘start seeing international organisations differently’. Yet the sequence could just as easily be reversed: what one sees will inevitably be shaped by what one thinks, how one imagines the world, what one expects to see. This chapter begins with ‘ways of doing’ scholarship on international organisations – crudely divided into ‘deconstructivist’ and ‘(re)constructivist’ approaches – and proceeds to reflect on the diverse ways of seeing and thinking suggested by the preceding chapters, before making some tentative suggestions about possible ways forward.

When Roberto Dañino, former World Bank General Counsel, arrived in the institution, he found a department perceived to be at the verge of ‘marginalization’ – a dire state he diagnosed and soon attributed to the rigid ‘culture’ of legal practice. In tracing Dañino’s efforts to ‘make the department relevant again’, we get a glimpse of the situated, material, embodied institutional life of international law: the changes Dañino instilled were not manifested in formal legal sources but in the introduction of new cultural codes, professional prototypes (the ‘how to’ lawyer) and technical routines of risk management. In the domain of international institutional law – often oriented towards abstraction, comparison, or aspiration – such prosaic legal practices tend to be underplayed. This chapter signals two productive entry points for a turn to practice: (i) a focus on the shared and contingent criteria of competence – the ‘social grammar’ – that mark professional postures and performances, and (ii) a heightened attention for the practices of relationality, translation, and materiality through which law is composed – the string of ‘people and things’ that it assembles. This methodological orientation to professional scripts and material routines also offers a perspective on ‘critique’ that differs from familiar structuralist modes of analysis and intervention.

The chapter outlines key principles in Cognitive CDA, which inherits its social theory from CDA and from cognitive linguistics inherits a particular view of language and a framework for analysing language (as well as other semiotic modes). In connection with CDA, the chapter describes the dialectical relationship conceived between discourse and society. Key concepts relating to the dialogicality of discourse are also introduced, namely intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The central role of discourse in maintaining power and inequality is described with a focus on the ideological and legitimating functions of language and conceptualisation. In connection with cognitive linguistics, the chapter describes the non-autonomous nature of language, the continuity between grammar and the lexicon and the experiential grounding of language. The key concept of construal and its implications for ideology in language and conceptualisation are discussed. A framework in which construal operations are related to discursive strategies and domain-general cognitive systems and processes is set out. The chapter closes by briefly introducing the main models and methods of Cognitive CDA.

A capitalist market has been part of modern Russian literature since at least the early nineteenth century. Even during the Soviet era, the market was never entirely abolished. But when socialism fell in 1991, capitalism rushed in. This chapter focuses on the economic, social, and aesthetic consequences of the market in post-Soviet Russian literature. The book market boomed just as thick journals and legacy critics lost cultural authority, and as readers, publishers, and writers were pulled towards bestselling imports, largely western pulp. Drawn by success and fascinated by new forms, many authors innovated genre conventions, authorial performance, and audience interaction, using misdirection, mystification, and online and social media, among other strategies. Others mobilised the terms of capitalism to mount a critique of the illusory values of the new market society.

This chapter examines the relationship between “critique” as a mode of literary work and digital literary studies. It provides a brief genealogy of the origins of critique in early modern textual criticism and eighteenth-century disputes over autonomous criticism, and connects that genealogy to contemporary schools of critique. The debates over critique in digital literary studies are surveyed, along with a range of work in feminist, postcolonial, intersectional, Marxist, and other forms of cultural critique. It analyzes the recent turn to work in “postcritique” and allied theoretical modes, and indicates areas of shared interest as well as boundaries between digital literary studies and the cultures of critique.

This chapter considers the relevance of postcolonialism to the discipline of ‘international relations’ (IR). It argues that postcolonialism advances a powerful critique of traditional approaches to IR (see chapters on realism and liberalism) since it calls into question the discipline’s foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions. In particular, it challenges the dominant assumption that states are the basic units of IR and that we should examine the relations between these units in the context of an anarchical system. Postcolonialism refocuses our attention on the constitutive role played by colonialism in the creation of the modern world and sees international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical. It sees academic disciplines such as IR – and Western rationalist, humanist and universalist modes of thinking in general – as complicit in reproducing colonial power relations and seeks normatively to resist practices of colonialism in its material and ideational forms, whether political, economic or cultural.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

A radical is one who recommends fundamental reform. Since change of an essential sort can be effected by those who stand on either the right or the left of the political spectrum, radicalism is a diverse calling, descriptive of very different doctrinal positions indeed. However far apart we think these endpoints might be, they also possess certain characteristics in common. In this respect the left/right continuum is not linear, but circular, the extremes bending back like a key-ring to where they lie parallel, though still of course separate and opposed.

Kant did not initially intend to write the Critique of Practical Reason, let alone three Critiques. It was primarily the reactions to the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that encouraged Kant to develop his moral philosophy in the second Critique. In this brief introduction I outline some of the major events that took place in Kant’s development between the first and second Critiques. I illustrate that the story of the Critique of Practical Reason’s origin reveals that it is especially suited to being accompanied by certain background source materials that help illuminate its aims and contents.

The central concern in this chapter is on the place of values and morality in virtue science. Since the advent of psychology, a strict fact–value dichotomy has predominated, with almost all investigators adopting a disengaged observer stance. This dichotomy has been repeatedly critiqued by communitarians, hermeneuticists, philosophers, and psychologists. Few, if any, systematic defenses of the fact–value dichotomy exist. This chapter combines many of the strands of fact–value critique in a neo-Aristotelian position that emphasizes that science is, itself, value-imbued because it aims at a set of goods (e.g., knowledge, human welfare). The chapter concludes by suggesting how values and morality can be included in virtue science and psychology in a frank and illuminating manner. In support of this position, it enumerates four advantages of value inclusion, paramount among them that values can then be explicitly discussed and evaluated. Values can be fruitfully incorporated into virtue and psychological sciences by making the values explicit and including discussions and critiques of those views in open intellectual discourse (e.g., peer review).

This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.