Yang Han publishes article in European Journal of International Relations

Yang Han, DPhil candidate in the Department of Politics and International Relations, has published an article on 'Banal Modernity: a Logic of  Hierarchization in International Relations' in the European Journal of International Relations. Yang Han writes:

'In this article, I raise a notion of "banal modernity" and argue that actors in international relations often assign the relative positions of one’s own nation (or oneself) vis-à-vis others against a set of imaginaries of modernity in the mundane and quotidian aspects of everyday life – how clean the streets are in one society, how punctual and well-mannered the people are, and so forth. This observation informs my theory of "banal modernity as a logic of hierarchization". In particular, I highlight that social discrimination practices (often based on categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity and culture) are often informed commonly by banal modernity. Banal modernity offers the vocabulary and grammar that facilitate these practices.

This article importantly offers critical IR scholars another way to make sense of the intersecting forms of hierarchization in International Relations and highlights another crucial aspect of modernity that is often overlooked – the banality.

I am currently working on other articles that theorize the postcolonial, especially what I call a contradiction between development and solidarity, as well as on the intertwinement of race and modernity in the Chinese contexts.'