View article

Critical and poststructural theories were introduced to global politics in early to mid-1990s. Since then there has been a proliferation of critical thinking in global politics with Derridean and Foucauldian approaches being the most popular. While psychoanalysis made its appearance and gained in popularity alongside other critical approaches to international politics in mid-1995, it has never become one of the “go to” theories. However, since 2010 psychoanalysis has been slowly reemerging on the global politics scene. If initially psychoanalytic approaches focused on a number of different theorists such as Castoriadis, Jung, Freud, and Lacan, the most recent thinking draws most significantly on the contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis and thinkers such as Žižek, Butler, or Kristeva, all of whom heavily rely on Lacan. In postcolonial studies a distinct psychoanalytic account was also developed by Frantz Fanon …