Episode 28: Are We Living in a Simulation… of Sovereignty?

11 03 2023

PTJ and Dan discuss Cynthia Weber’s 1994 book, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange. Weber examines “the justifications for intervention offered by the Concert of Europe, President Wilson’s administration, and the Reagan-Bush administrations” and analyzes them via a combination of “critical international relations theory and foreign policy analysis.”

Topics include: why “sovereignty” was so important to critical and constructivist scholars in the 1990s, Jean Beuadriard and International Relations, and the Reagan presidency.

Also mentioned in this episode, inter alia, are Andrew Abbott’s Time Matters: On Theory and Method, R.BJ. Walker’s Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, and Cynthia Weber’s “Performative States” (Millennium, 1998).

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