Discursive and imagined problems of modern global politics

Abstract

Formal theories of international relations in the 20th century dominated in the studies of world policy. The collapse of the European continental empires, ideological separation of the world, two world wars, competition of authoritarianism and liberalism, crisis and fall of the socialist regimes all contributed to the revision of theoretical approaches in international relations studies. The collapse of the Soviet Union strengthened the illusion of the end of history and the triumph of universal values of liberalism, human rights and freedoms. The nationalistic, religious and ethnic conflicts of the 1990s and 2010s destroyed the hopes and optimism of liberals. The methodological and theoretical transformations of the humanities in the second half of the 20th century led to the erosion of traditional forms of knowledge about world policy, and the categories of ‘discourse,’ ‘imagination’ and ‘invention’ became universal for their analysis. The author analyses current international processes in the context of political imagination. The current statuses of the US and Russia are analysed as prescribed and imagined. World politics is imagined in terms of discourse. The dominance of Western centrism in the political, formal languages of the contemporary superpowers promotes the emergence of new actors which were earlier ignored. The process of the imagination and invention of the modern world is incomplete, and the numbers of the world’s leading actors are still unstable.