In an old joke, lately invoking the perverse wisdom of some archetypal pre-modern Celt, a request for directions to get ‘there’ inspires advice about the inadvisability of starting from ‘here’. In this book, I offer similar advice on the basis of a series of meditations on the constitutive distinction between political theory and international relations: between discourses that invoke an eternally present political community within and those that project an eternally absent community between modern sovereign states. I do so in two related senses.

Affirming the significance – though not the truth – of some of the most entrenched assumptions about the ‘realities’ of modern political life, I develop a sceptical stance about the possibility of understanding ‘world politics’ through the categories of modern theories of ‘international relations’. This stance permits me to explore some of the boundaries of a modern political imagination confronted with demands that we move ‘beyond’ a geopolitics of static fragmentation. Challenging these same assumptions, however, I offer a reading of modern theories of international relations as a discourse that systematically reifies an historically specific spatial ontology, a sharp delineation of here and there, a discourse that both expresses and constantly affirms the presence and absence of political life inside and outside the modern state as the only ground on which structural necessities can be understood and new realms of freedom and history can be revealed.