Albert C. Cano
Fellow, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science
Tracing the political unconscious of global order and the violence it casts off
My research asks how the institutions and practices meant to establish peace come to reproduce the violence they set out to overcome, and how trauma and ideology sustain it. I approach these questions through Lacanian psychoanalysis, critical International Relations and cultural theory, grounded in fieldwork in Northern Ireland and Colombia.
An article from this research, on civilian suicidality in Northern Ireland, is in press at the European Journal of International Relations. At LSE, I have received two teaching awards and a nomination for the LSE Students’ Union Outstanding Teaching Award (2024-2025).
My book project, For the Greater Peace: Traumatopolitics and the Political Unconscious of Peacebuilding, argues that liberal peacebuilding undermines the peace it claims to promote because, like other political processes, it sabotages itself to contain the social order it was born from. This is its political unconscious. Traumatopolitics names the mechanism: by deferring trauma healing, a peace process never ends. The surplus violence this casts off, from mental health crises and rising suicide rates to affective polarisation and criminal coercive control, is then disowned as non-political, that is, treated as crime, or as a matter of private health.
Colombia opens onto wider work on Latin America, beginning with a new project on post-paramilitary far-right vigilantism and social cleansing.
From 2022 to 2024 I was Editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, where I co-edited a special issue on critical international relations. I also co-convene the British International Studies Association’s Emotions in Politics and International Relations (EPIR) Working Group.
Originally from Barcelona, Catalonia, I came to International Relations through philosophy and English studies, with degrees from the Universitat de Barcelona and the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). That training gives my work a philosophical and literary sensitivity, which I pursue directly in literary political theory, most recently on Lacan and Virginia Woolf.