This book develops a discourse theory of crisis and change in global politics. Crisis is conceptualized as structural dislocation, resting on difference and incompleteness. Change is seen as the continuous but ultimately futile effort to gain a full identity. The incompleteness and contingent character of the social represents the most important condition for democratic politics to become possible and for a theory of crisis and change to become conceivable. In this new understanding, crisis loses its everyday meaning of a periodically occurring event. Instead, crisis becomes an omnipresent feature of the social fabric. It represents the absence of ground, of social foundation, and it rests within the subject as well as within the social whole.

Dirk Nabers is Professor of International Political Sociology at the University of Kiel, Germany. He has been Academic Director of the Hamburg International Graduate School for the Study of Regional Powers, and Senior Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies. He specializes in poststructuralism and sociology in IR.

Introduction .- 1. Crisis .- 2. Change .- 3. Reality .- 4. Difference .- 5. Hegemony .- 6. Discourse Analysis .- 7. Dislocation .- 8. Hegemony: Towards a discourse theory of crisis and change.