Description
International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the role of bodies and bones and the politics of display at memorial sites, as well as the construction of space, I explore how practices of statecraft often rely on an exclusionary logic which renders certain lives politically qualified and others beyond the realm of qualified politics. I draw on the Derridean notion of hauntology to explore how the line between life and death itself is a political construction which sustains particular performances of statecraft. Utilizing ethnographic field work and discourse analysis, I trace the relationship between a logic of haunting and statecraft at sites of memory in three cases. Rwandan genocide memorialization is often centered on bodies and bones, displayed as evidence of the genocide. Yet, this display invokes the specter of genocide in order to legitimate specific policymaking. Memorialization of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border offers an opportunity to explore practices that grieve ungrievable lives, and how memorialization can posit a resistance to the bordering mechanisms of statecraft. 9/11 memorialization offers an interesting case because of the way in which bodies were vanished and spaces reconfigured. Using the question of vanishing as a frame, this final case explores how statecraft is dependent on vanishing: the making absent of something so as to render something else present. Several main conclusions and implications are drawn from the cases. First, labeling certain lives as politically unqualified can sustain certain conceptualizations of the state. Second, paying attention to the way statecraft is a haunted performance, being haunted by the things we perhaps ethically should be haunted by, can re-conceptualize the way International Relations thinks about concepts such as security, citizenship, and power. Finally, memorialization, while seemingly innocuous, is really a space for political contestation that can, if done in certain ways, really implicate the high politics of security conventional wisdom.
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Details
Title
- Ghostly politics: statecraft, monumentalization, and a logic of haunting
Contributors
- Auchter, Jessica (Author)
- Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor)
- Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member)
- Talebi, Shahla (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2012
Subjects
- International relations
- Political Science
- Body
- Haunting
- Memory
- Security
- statecraft
- September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001
- International relations--Psychological aspects.
- Memorialization--Political aspects.
- Memorialization
- Atrocities--Political aspects.
- Atrocities
- Collective memory--Political aspects.
- collective memory
Resource Type
Collections this item is in
Note
- thesisPartial requirement for: Ph. D., Arizona State University, 2012
- bibliographyIncludes bibliographical references (p. 278-293)
- Field of study: Political science
Citation and reuse
Statement of Responsibility
by Jessica Auchter