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Research The Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG) Research Research centres Centre for International Relations Research (CIRR) Chair Group on History and Theory of International Relations Research themes Modes of Reasoning

Modes of Reasoning

Sleep of reason produces monsters
Sleep of reason produces monsters

This strand of research focuses on understanding how order is established, maintained and transformed in different historical, geographical and intellectual settings. Although an emphasis is put on the ‘global’ dimension of governance, ideas of globality are not presupposed but interrogated. We raise questions that lead us to explore the rationalities that support current and historical forms of governance very widely conceived.

Past and current projects, as listed below, deal with how different rationalities of governance rely on particular ways of understanding and managing uncertainty through risk, how understandings of the ‘West’ and the ‘rest of the world’ are used to articulate contemporary forms of government and rule, how pre-modern and modern states in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are constituted and governed, how biographical and literary context helps understand the constitution of order, how understandings of space and of the politics of connectivity contribute to create geopolitical imaginaries, and how the politics of aesthetics matters in understandings of the world.

Central to this stream are the study of historical epistemology as a methodological approach to the understanding of orders of governance, and the interrogation of logics of inquiry, which inform and constrain research practice in the field.

Within this strand of research we convene The Groningen Lectures on Modes of Reasoning and the Workshops on Modes of Reasoning .

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Last modified:12 June 2019 10.11 a.m.