*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Critical International Relations was always a rum bunch. Marxists and Feminists, Queer Theorists and Decolonialists, Gramscians and Postcolonials, Frankfurt Schoolers and Poststructuralists. What tied all these academics together, and thus justified the use of Critical IR as a term to describe a disparate collection of scholars, was a rhetorical move. This rhetorical move implicitly supposed that minor theoretical positions share an emancipatory status within the discipline. There are, as I suggest in a 2021 article in the Journal of International Political Theory, reasons to suspect that this rhetorical move has passed its sell-by date in our current era. Critical IR as a collective term may be doing more harm than good to scholarship concerned with critiquing international issues, and to hopes to forge a better world through academic work.

This grouping of disparate theories first began to hang out together in the 1980s and 1990s, having come to a collective conclusion that the big bad discipline of IR was responsible for most of the nasty things out there in the world, war, exploitation, racism, and generic violence. Being part of Critical IR meant being on the other side. From the Margins, to ‘be Critical’ was to commit to smashing the discipline, exposing its weaknesses, knocking its treasured assumptions on the head, and mocking its cheap constructions. To be Critical was to fight the minor good fight against the major discipline, and by extension, to push back against Capitalism, Global War and Imperialism, one reification at a time.

Forty years later, anxiety echoes in the halls of Critical scholarship. It’s happening everywhere, in every academic discipline, but in the field of International Relations the squirming has reached fever pitch. It’s not hard to see why. After forty years of cracking open the reifications of a field of study lamented for being too statist, too focussed on militarism, implicitly capitalist, imperialist and anti-woman, Critical IR has effectively nothing to show for it. Nationalist hyper-masculine militarist states are ascendant. Indeed, they appear to offer the only organised international alternative to the global economic power-relations that still subsist, and the world is gazing into an ecological future that seems to ensure the next forty years will be far worse for the vast majority of people than the preceding forty. Those already suffering will be hit hardest. It is now largely agreed we are witnessing the post-cold war international order of US-led western hegemony unravelling in a disordered manner, with all the violent uncertainties that this entails.

It is time for Critical IR to ask itself some searching questions. Could it be that the practice of academic critique in IR is, in some complex ways, entangled with the international crises we live amongst, simultaneously economic, ecological, geopolitical, ethnonational, dissolving democracy and international order. Could it be that we, the academic forces of ‘right side’, may have made these crises worse or shaped them in some way? What have we actually been doing, and how is it related to what we think we have been doing since ‘Being Critical’ went mainstream in IR around two decades ago. For example, we might ask: What choices did we make in selecting our objects of criticism, and what were the effects of the choices we made? What have been the long-term implications of the styles of writing and presentation we have chosen for ‘critical’ work, and what public voice has that left us?

At the core of the crisis of critique in our discipline is the intellectual aesthetic that rose to dominance within professional scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, which generically valorised the peripheral hipster,........

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