Giorgio Agamben’s references to a ‘coming community’ keep readers hunting for its characteristics, specifically for prescriptions that would signal how its political culture might be developed and maintained. His ambivalence toward Augustine prevents him, as well as readers, from discovering contributions the prelate’s preferences for compassionate collectives – which especially mark his polemical treatises, correspondence, and sermons – might make to giving a shape to the coming community that comports with many of Agamben’s other politically significant remarks.

In Infancy and History Agamben (1993) suggests, following Benjamin’s footsteps, that true experience is only possible in infancy, a time that has not yet been expropriated by the bareness of modern life. The kind of potentiality that he attributes to infancy signifies the emergence of a new self, which, rather than moving into the mechanical domain of “work,” prefers to remain in the creative territory of “play,” where it is possible to transform old societal structures into new ones.

Agamben’s approach to play and its non-chronological temporality offers useful clues in revealing the dynamics of the increasing number of contemporary childhood narratives in Irish and Turkish literature, where characters resist the linear structure of the bildungsroman and the corresponding model of progress, eventually forming a culture of adolescents resistant to maturity. Focusing on some common features of these novelistic characters, such as playfulness, self-experimentation, and messianic idealism, this paper argues that the return of children to contemporary Turkish and Irish novel opens a new terrain of possibilities that offer liberation from the poverty of experience Agamben attributes to modern society.

Traditional approaches to questions about nomos in IR typically focus upon either its establishment and the formal structures that emerge through interaction within a clearly delineated spatial area, or an exploration of US hegemony in the post-2003 world. In this article I posit a different approach, building on the ideas of Giorgio Agamben, which grounds nomos as a spatialisation of the exception within conditions of neoliberal modernity. I suggest that within the global nomos are more localised nomoi. These localised nomoi are a consequence of the spatialisation of the exception and a fundamental tension between localisation and ordering. I argue that while sovereign power has been a source of contemporary scholarship, such explorations have paid scant attention to the regulatory power of normative values and their capacity to create order within space. Such norms allow for a greater awareness of how sovereign power can be mobilised in and of itself as a form of contestation. Locating such debates in the Middle East, I explore the concept of nomos to understand how struggle over the localisation and ordering of space helps us to better understand contemporary political life.

This article aims at positioning the agency of the displaced within the longue durée, as it is exposed in contexts of hospitality and asylum, by articulating its key modes: contingent, willed and compelled. Using the ancient world as its starting point, the article exposes the duplicity in conceiving of the current condition of displacement as transient or exceptional. As such, it argues for the urgent need of a shift in the perception of displaced persons from that of impotent victims to potent agents, and to engage with the new forms of exceptional politics which their circumstances engender.

Circus training can benefit children diagnosed on the autistic spectrum and their families. In 2010, as Head Trainer at Flipside Circus in Brisbane, Kristy Seymour developed a method for using circus as a therapeutic tool for children with autism. In this article, she and Patricia Wise work between experiential and theoretical positions to explore how circus can open up a new world to such children, enabling them to take risks physically and emotionally, and to stretch the capacities of their bodies in an environment that enriches their social development. Seymour and Wise deploy the idea of ‘chaosmos’ from Deleuze and Guattari, Pope, and others to argue that, counter-intuitively, children with autism benefit from the environment of creative chaos that attends circus. Through Agamben's work on being and singularity they discuss how circus values difference and inclusivity, building community in ways also captured by Probyn's notion of ‘outside belonging’. Kristy Seymour has worked for over sixteen years in contemporary circus as an aerialist, trainer, artistic director, creative producer, and choreographer. She has a significant profile in the youth circus sector, and is completing doctoral research on Australian contemporary circus in Griffith University's School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science. An Associate Professor in the same School, Patricia Wise is a cultural theorist whose publications range over cultural policy and urban studies, inflected by interests in spatiality, materiality and gender. This article reflects a parallel concern with cultural practices in communities of difference, as does a recent co-publication on the value of participatory music for the welbeing of detained asylum seekers.

Even though the notion of ‘world politics’ has become increasingly widespread in the discipline of International Relations, its deployment in the disciplinary discourse has been highly problematic. This article argues that the impasse of the discourse on world politics is owing to its commitment to a political ontology of identitarian pluralism, most forcefully articulated in the work of Carl Schmitt, which limits the political imagination to the binary opposition of the preservation of international anarchy and its hierarchical domestication in the world state. As long as politics is cast in identitarian terms, it is impossible to conceive of the universal dimension of political praxis other than in terms of the universalization of some particular content, i.e. as a hegemonic project. We shall then outline the pathway towards a non-identitarian understanding of world politics through an engagement with the universalist themes in the philosophy of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. We shall reconstitute the authors’ alternative to identity politics that rehabilitates the notion of universalism from ‘postmodern’ criticism and reconstructs the category of the universal in non-identitarian or generic terms of indiscernibility and ‘whatever being’. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical dimension of generic world politics as a radically egalitarian process of the emergence of the world community of ‘whatever singularities’.