"Authority, intervention, and the outer limits of international relations theory" in CALLAGHY,Thomas; KASSMIR, Ronald and LATHAM, Robert, Intervention & Transnationalism in Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001

Abstract

The social sciences and the humanities are presently littered with various concepts, phrases, vocabularies, idioms, and slogans that are intended to resituate how scholars think about the “global” and its relationship to a reconceptualized “local”. The utility of these concepts and frameworks is to be found not in their ability to be all things to all scholars, but rather in their capacity to highlight newly emergent structures in global politics, how those structures are created by and are responsible for new networks of actors, and the development of new discourses and practices that collapse and telescope the local and the global. This text explores the tendency of International Relations to collapse state, authority and territory. As far as that bundling makes it more difficult to understand complex global relationships and processes, it is necessary to pay attention to the recent contributions that unbundle these concepts generating new insights into the organization and practice of global politics, and specially to analyze the authority concept.