Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations
Karin Fierke examines the phenomenon of self-sacrifice in international relations (IR), using it as a gateway to break down conventional analytical, spatial, and temporal categories (agency-structure, sovereignty and power, pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity) often used by IR scholars. Political self-sacrifice takes place at the site of the individual body. It flows outward to a broader group of settings: society, a state, and an international context. Fierke asserts that, from this, there are three dimensions of contemporary global politics that are in tension with one another as exposed by political self-sacrifice: the sovereignty of the state versus human rights, globalization, and the media as well as different levels-of-analyses co-existing in the act of self-sacrifice. The result is a “turning of the ‘game’ of anarchy on its head” (14).