International Relations from Lack to Plenitude: Critique and the Strange Death of Liberalism

International Relations (IR) has been transformed via its movement beyond the liberal imaginaries of the 1990s. This strange death of liberal IR, analysed here, enabled IR to transition from a discipline of lack – a discipline that was ‘pre-liberal’, struck in the timeless ‘state of nature’ – to a discipline of fullness that is ‘after IR’/‘beyond critique’. One alleged to be able to assimilate the world in ways that liberalism could not, going beyond the Eurocentrism of universal subject/object cuts and liberal binaries. IR, the liberal discipline in a non-liberal world, was famously theorised as a discipline lacking conceptions of progress, justice and ethics and as poor in relation to political theory. This article analyses the transition to ‘after IR’ as a discipline of plenitude and possibility, registering a world of uncertainty and contingency, where everything is possible except the articulation of any critical alternative to this world as it appears.