Good Fences Make Safe Rulers: The Case for Non-cooperation with Academic Fence-builders.

This paper begins from reflection upon a very real fence and the imagined bridges constructing the theme of this year’s ISA conference. In preparation for the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, taking place on June 6th to 8th 2007, an enormous fence has been built around the little Baltic Sea resort. The fence is some 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) long, 2.4 meters (7.9 feet) tall, stabilized by 4,800 concrete slabs and crowned by four rows of barbed wire, which are, in turn, covered in thick rolls of razor-wire. 18,000 police officers and at least 1,100 military personnel will be deployed to safeguard the G8 proceedings. Authorities are preparing for mass arrests of protestors, and harassment of organizations supporting protest mobilization is already in full swing. In this paper this fence is viewed to symbolize the division of critique from power. The argument will be made, in line with the panel theme, that those academic approaches that are employed to buttress the defenses of power against critique should be contested. What is in order here is not bridge-building but the tearing down of fences for the sake of both exposure and access. The bulk of the paper will consist in a discussion of how and which academic approaches in our field contribute to the protective self-enclosure of politically dominant institutions and practices. The aim is to identify lingering epistemological and institutional obstacles to critically engaged IR scholarship. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]