Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

This chapter ties together the narratives presented in the book’s three substantive chapters to provide an overview of the conceptual history of ethnicity. The chapter then unpacks the ideological functions performed by this concept in service of the international order, and recaps how the emergence of ethnicity contributed to both the negation and preservation of imperial hierarchies. Drawing inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s discussion of ‘nomos’, the chapter concludes by proposing a speculative notion of ‘ethnos’ as the foundational ordering of beings.

Environmental violence is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society's most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. However, culture could interact with environmental violence beyond the supplementary role it has assigned in the model of environmental violence following Galtung's typology. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and environmental violence, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which our ways of production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. This chapter traces how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with environmental violence by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.

Chapter 10 elaborates on an epistemic mutation that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and that Foucault missed. It is this that opened that conceptual universe within whose frameworks the theories analyzed in this book could emerge. This, thus, provides fundamental tools to understand the structure of those theories, as well as the problems they found to account for the issue of conceptual change. Finally, it discusses how this new episteme, in turn, starting dissolving, thus raising the issue of the constitutive incompleteness of systems. It will mark the transition from phenomenology to postphenomenology and from structuralism to postructuralism, which entailed, in turn, a new radical redefinition of the concept of the temporality of conceptual formations. Derrida´s criticism played a key role here. Lastly, as this chapter shows, this transformation, as the other epistemic mutations previously studied, traverse the whole thinking of the period, comprehending both the natural sciences and the humanities. It thus allows us to draw meaningful connections among the different areas of knowledge.

Chapter 3 carries out a critical review of environmental strategies, from reactive postures, such as pollution control, to the most proactive and advanced ones, such as pollution prevention and product stewardship. In doing so, the literature review shows the main theoretical streams used to frame different environmental strategic positionings, such as the institutional theory, the natural resource-based view, a new stakeholder theory or the microfoundations of strategy. To carry out a critical review of existing typologies of environmental strategies, they are deconstructed into their main features and dimensions following two research traditions: strategy (defenders, prospectors, analysers and reactors) and innovation (exploitation, exploration and ambidexterity). We conclude that these conventional approaches can be catalogued as ‘business-as-usual’ environmental strategies and finally present a disruptive alternative called the regenerative strategy.

This chapter tackles postmodern and poststructuralist outlooks on ethics and how these have impacted educational theory. To fulfill this task, the chapter indicates how such outlooks differ from other perspectives on the relationship of philosophy, education, and ethics. After some basic definitions, clarifications, disclaimers, and caveats that familiarize the reader with the related discourses and their challenges, the chapter shows how postmodern/poststructuralist basic assumptions beneath the corresponding ethics differ from other perspectives on (educational) normativity. Then the chapter discusses the distinction between the ethical and the moral that makes the impact of postmodern/poststructuralist ethics on educational theory most visible. It concludes with critical remarks on the current status of this impact and on the challenge of rethinking educational ethics “after post-isms”.

This chapter gets to the heart of why the disciplinary imagination of international law is only able to see deterritorialisation without reterritorialisation, by excavating the content of the orthodox concept(s) of territory and scrutinising the spatial assumptions. For it is how territory is understood that forces the production of aterritorial functionalist account of law. The chapter reviews the standard definition(s) of territory before deconstructing the characteristics and qualities of the concept of territory. These include: that territory is only states’; that territory is imagined in a two-dimensional, flat, jigsaw-like form; that the physical referents are analytically prioritised over the social; that territory tends to be imagined as homogeneous, uniform, and contiguous ; that territory is bound by a particular technology and representation of borders; and that territories are relatively static. The final sections delve into the signification of territory and outline five different uses for territory in the discourse, before exploring how territory has mediated legal theoretical understandings of sovereignty.

This chapter describes the range of cognitive perceptions about the body, drawn from ethnographic narrations of various cultures, with specific emphasis on South Asia, revealing a startling plurality of views and worldviews about it. These perceptions are both informed by and influence practices related to the body, especially those of gendering, hierarchization, and sexuality and exploitation. The intersection of the way bodies are conceptualized to the power hierarchies existing in any situation illuminates how bodies are both constructed and destroyed, explaining why some bodies are considered dispensable while others are considered as precious. The modern market and the commodification of the body leads to its final disintegration and dissolution as marketable parts, dehumanizing it to an ultimate nonhumanity. All these perspectives and practices are contextualized within historical, political, and material fields of power, giving them a dynamic character. The chapter also summarizes some of the key anthropological theorizations and philosophical interrogations about the body, tracing the discourse from classical to the recent postmodern and feminist perspectives.

Traditional logic dominates Western thinking by centering thinking on propositions and thereby restricting the meaning of "being" to its derivative, categorial meaning. In Heidegger’s view, it fails in this way to realize the promise of a philosophical logic, one that is capable of tracing traditional logic and thinking generally back to their foundation, i.e., the being/unconcealment of the logos from which they are derived. This chapter examines how, as a first step toward realizing that promise, Heidegger questions the supremacy of logic in Western thinking through a “critical deconstruction” of four theses underlying it: the thesis that judgment is the place of truth rather than vice versa, that the copula exhausts the meaning of "being," that nothingness originates from negation rather than vice versa, and that the predicative structure of propositions constitutes the essence of language. In conclusion, the chapter suggests that the construction ultimately accompanying Heidegger’s deconstruction is to be found, not in language as Dasein’s comportment, but in the revealing capacity of tautology to which he appeals in his final seminar (1973).

Since the Ogdoad, the Ennead, and the Source are described as beyond verbal description, how can written language convey anything at all about this ultimate experience of gnōsis? Discussion of oral transmission by means of logos, dissemination of written treatises, and the paradoxes of hermeneutics as understood in terms of Deconstruction (Derrida) and Hermeneutics (Gadamer).

Chapter 3 builds on the findings of Chapter 2, i.e. that populists’ rule may work as a driver of illiberal change in democracy and the economy. It identifies two variables by means of which the scenarios concerning the impact populists’ government may have on competition law system can be determined. The first variable is related to the dismantling of checks and balances as well as the rule of law, both of which are inherent to a liberal democracy. The second variableis related to the state-centered character of an economy and economic patriotism. These two variables give rise to four possible scenarios of populists’ government’s influence on a competition law system: the deconstruction scenario, marginalization scenario, atrophy scenario, and limited impact scenario.

This chapter starts off by discussing the roots of historical anthropology in ‘people’s history’ before the linguistic turn. It then traces the journey from the history workshop movements of the 1960s and 1970s to historical anthropology, focusing on European and Indian groups (the Subaltern Studies Group). It highlights the work of Ann Laura Stoler as an example of how historical anthropology led to new and exciting perspectives in historical writing with deep implications for the deconstruction of historical identities. Historical anthropologists brought with them a concern for the everyday, diversity, performance and resistance and they raised an awareness of the undeterminedness of the past. They also emphasised how collective identities were rooted in constructions of culture. Relating cultural values to practices, diverse theories of the everday examined different structures of power and the agency of ordinary people in resisting and re-appropriating these structures of power. Treating culture as fluid, plural and changing, it also contributed to the de-essentialisation of human identities. Emphasising mimetic processes and the interrelationship of diverse mimetically produced images, historical anthropology also contributed to the decentring of Western perspectives.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.

The introduction lays out the book’s aim as providing an investigation into the emancipation of the ECHR from an international agreement with a relatively weak enforcement structure into a sophisticated legal system. The introduction argues that researching supranationality under the Convention offers a fresh descriptive-analytical perspective on the ECHR as well as a deconstruction of the ECtHR’s authority. Carrying forward legal-institutional scholarship and studies on the domestification of the ECHR, it also introduces the idea of reviving the notion of Convention community. Lastly, the introduction provides an overview of the book’s structure and presents the line of argument and the methodology adopted in the different chapters.

The grammatically analyzed mode in which language is presented in Dante’s written vision illustrates the proclivity of writing to shiver and splinter meaning. Writing tends to partition and fissure the presumed wholeness of sense as it occurs originally in oral communication and in the indivisible event of intuitive understanding. It is precisely the mechanical and material, the artificial and mediated aspects of language – particularly its grammatical composition out of differentiated and coordinated parts of speech – that become conspicuous in Dante’s inspired vision of the transcendent “speech” of Scripture.Astonishingly, this anatomization of writing is plied to mediate an authentically divine vision. Endless mediation of the whole by its parts, in Dante’s vision of language, provides a plausible image of the infinity and eternity of God. Yet Dante’s deconstructive vision of writing anatomized into its parts and even disintegrating into apparent chaos opens a vista driving beyond the visible altogether. If the vision of God is presented concretely in the infinite mediations of language that Dante places on display, the logic of writing (écriture) is to dis-identify the object of the vision with anything positively given. Only the differences created by representation open a perspective upon the unmediated and the unrepresentable. Realizing an apophatic logic of ineffability, Dante claims an immediate vision of divinity in what these mediations are not – in the Im-mediate. He gives us an immediate vision of the divine Word in Scripture but dissolves it, then, into infinite mediation, leaving us oriented to the source of synthesis of the endless mediations in which our existence consists.