Language, Agency, and Politics
in a Constructed World
(M.E. Sharpe, 2003)

This volume examines the role and place of language in contemporary international relations theory, with particular attention to the relationship among language, power, and agency. The contributors, who represent different currents of thought, all highlight distinct linguistic and discursive strategies and explain how these at times compatible, at times divergent methods enable different political outcomes.

Rituals of Mediation: International Politics
and Social Meaning
(University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

In an era of increasing globalization, the cultural and the international have borders as permeable as most nations' -- and an understanding of one requires making sense of the other. Foregrounding the role of mediation -- understood here as a site of representation, transformation, and pluralization -- the authors engage two specific questions: How might we make theoretical and practical sense of transnational cultural interactions? And how are we to understand the ways in which the sites of mediation represent, transform, and remediate internationals? Accordingly, the authors consider international issues like security, development, political activism, and the war against terrorism through the lens of cultural practices such as traveling through airports, exhibiting art and photography, logging on the Internet, and spinning news stories.

Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping
(University of Minnesota Press, 1999)

Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping is a critical revisiting of UN interventions. Addressing the question "How do UN peacekeeping missions shape the contemporary vision of international affairs?" this book applies the notions of simulation and ideology to the practice and theory of international organization. Debrix focuses on the media strategies that give UN missions the appearance of effectiveness and that promote liberal ideologies of governance.

Prof. Debrix published his first book, Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping: The UN and the Mobilization of Ideology (University of Minnesota Press) in 1999. This book was a critical revisiting of the practice of peacekeeping in the 1990s. It also engaged issues of political ideology, media representations of military interventions, visual politics, and humanitarianism. Since the publication of this book, François Debrix has worked on a couple of edited volumes.

The first volume is titled Language, Agency, and Politics in a Constructed World (M.E. Sharpe, 2003). This edited book gathers a number of prominent post-positivist international relations scholars who analyze the interplay between linguistic productions, being/acting, and political meaning in several international relations contexts.

The second volume, Rituals of Mediation: International Politics and Social Meaning (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), is co-edited with Professor Cynthia Weber (University of Leeds). This book presents several critical interventions by scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds (communication, cultural studies, geography, international relations, political theory) in the domain of media representations, transformations, and pluralizations of international politics. Some of the mediated international scenes this volume examines are the airport, the US-Mexico border, the photography of famines, the internet, direct-mail retail catalogs, and art exhibits.

In addition to these two edited volumes, Prof. Debrix's work has appeared in several political theory, international relations, and popular culture journals such as Philosophy & Social Criticism, Peace Review, Third World Quarterly, Alternatives, Postmodern Culture, Strategies, Geopolitics, and New Political Science. He has also written several critical essays on current international events for critical leftist philosophical reviews in Japan such as Jokyo (Situation) and Associé 21.

Finally, over the past seven years, Prof. Debrix has translated (from French into English) many of Jean Baudrillard's essays for the journal C-Theory, a web-based international journal of theory, technology, and culture.