Speaker: Karin Narita

Abstract

An outline of a theory of civilizationisms: Japanese conservatism and civilizational geopolitics

Karin Narita, Sheffield University

Over recent years, it has become clear that civilizational imaginaries have been a key force challenging the legitimacy and hegemony of the post-Cold War international order. While scholars have long critiqued the idea that we live in an age marked by ‘clashing’ cultures or civilizations, many actors have positively appropriated the language to varying political objectives. While such political appeals to civilization, or civilizationism, is not the sole preserve of illiberal or conservative politics, contemporary articulations of a ‘Japanese civilization’ have been articulated most readily by the Japanese right-wing. In Japan, the discourse of civilization in its varying guises have emerged at key geopolitical junctures, most recently with changing dynamics in East Asia since the end of the Cold War. Drawing on the civilizational imaginaries and identities espoused by conservative Japanese intellectuals, this paper analyzes the geopolitical utility of civilizationism in contemporary international politics. Civilizationist discourse does not necessarily replace distinctly nationalist and culturally particularist ideologies, but rather repackages these in the language of civilization. This paper argues that civilizationism gives exclusionary identity politics its purchase through interrelated spatial and temporal narratives. Against the perceived homogenizing force of the Liberal International Order, then, contemporary civilizationism allows heterogenous political actors to defend identity politics as a matter of geopolitics. To be clear, the paper does not seek to identify discrete civilizations nor does it analyse what constitutes a ‘civilization’ as a social formation. Rather, it seeks to re-conceptualise claims to civilizational identity and investigate why and how political meaning is derived.

Short bio

Name	Dr. Karin Narita
Position	Research Associate
Affiliation	Sheffield University, School of East Asian Studies
Research focus	intersections of Japanese/East Asian international relations, intellectual history, and studies of right-wing ideologies, Japanese Politics , International Relations
relevant Publications	Narita, Karin. 2024. “Return to utopia? Vision and practice of the Japanese right at Yasukuni shrine”, Journal of Political Ideologies. DOI: 10.1080/13569317.2024.2418189. [Online first]. Narita, Karin (2024). World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (with Abrahamsen, Rita, Drolet, Jean-François, Williams, Michael C., Vucetic, Srdjan and Gheciu, Alexandra) Narita, Karin (2021). “Travelling Theory and its Consequences: José Ortega y Gasset and Radical Conservatism in Post-Cold War Japan”. Millennium, 49(3), 556-576. Narita, Karin (2020). “Confronting the International Political Sociology of the New Right”. International Political Sociology, 14(1), 94-107. (with Abrahamsen, Rita, Drolet, Jean-François, Gheciu, Alexandra, Vucetic, Srdjan, Williams, Michael C.)