Post Structuralism In International Relations

Abstract:
The paper examined Post Structuralism within the context of International Relations, despite the fact that, post structuralism actually give a number of general and constructive puzzle which can be administer in other to approach the study of international politics in a different directions. The paper structured as follows; Introduction, which covered pre-amble and general insight of post structuralism, the emergence of post structuralism which highlighted the development and assertion of structuralism and post structuralism in international relations. The paper further analyses the consequences and prospect of post structuralism in international relations and scholarly argument from Walker R.B.J in one hand and Campbell David in

Post structuralism is an approach attitude or ethos that pursues critique in particular ways. Because it understands critique as an operation that flushes out the assumptions through which conventional and dominant understandings have come to be. Post structuralism considered critique as an inherently positive exercise that establishes the conditions of possibility for pursuing alternatives. It is in this context that post structuralism make other theories of international relations one of its objects of analysis and approaches those paradigms with meta-theoretical question designed to expose how they are structured (Campbell, 2006:225)1.
Post structuralism found itself marginalized within international relations, that is large because those critical of it have misunderstood many of its central claims and have been anxious about the effect of following its meta-theoretical questioning to its logical conclusion (Campbell, 2006:

According to J. G. Merquior, (1987: 230)5 emphases that “the love hate relationship with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s.the period was marked by political anxiety, as students and workers alike rebelled against the state in May 1968, nearly causing the downfall of the French Government. At the same time, however, the support by the French Communist Party (FCP) for the oppressive policies of the USSR countries to popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism”.
Post structuralism offered a means to justify these criticism, by exposing the underlying assumptions of many western norms. Two key figures in the early post structuralist movement were Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. In a 1966 lecture “structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the Human Sciences”, Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. Derrida interpreted this event as a “decentering” of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified Centre, Derrida described this “event” as a kind of “play” (Anger Muller, 2014: