Thinking from the margins or the peripheries (be they geographical, epistemological, cultural, or political) of International Relations has traditionally been discouraged by disciplinary discourses that have sought to take command of what it means to be true, objective, normal, valid, just, or simply topical. This control of meaning at the center of the discipline has been done on allegedly scientifically verifiable, or empirically manifest, or theoretically relevant methodological and ontological grounds. As Michel Foucault has argued, beyond so-called scientific, normative, or intellectual reasons advanced to impose a dominant voice at the center of a discipline (any discipline), what is at stake in the control of the center?and the corollary silencing of the margins?is a disciplinary decision over what can be said or pronounced and how it can be said or pronounced. More than producing truths, disciplines and those who position themselves at their centers are interested in the production, management and perpetuation of the ?true,? that is to say, of that discursive domain where certain linguistic, rhetorical, and narrative criteria established as normatively essential by some voices in the discipline must be used and reproduced in all sorts of explanations. Moving beyond Foucault, and bringing in the supplementary figures of thinkers like Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, one could say that ideology and hegemony are never far behind such discursive controls often found at the center of disciplines. One also would have to recognize that such hegemonic controls also require ideological exclusions. In other words, the formation of a periphery or margin on ideological bases is a necessary part of enterprises interested in imposing dominant or hegemonic languages and accompanying regimes of truth. This paper argues that the current practice and theory of IR at the center (in the geographic West?and the United States above all?but also through the supposedly pressing contemporary empirical and conceptual issues that the discipline is said to have to deal with) provides yet another obvious instance of hegemonic discursivity put to the service of ideological distancing and silencing. What I call tabloid geopolitics is a dominant discursive formation, increasingly adopted by so-called mainstream IR scholars in the West mostly, that claims to be able to make sense of?and perhaps provide solutions to?the problems faced by the world of IR in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the US war in Iraq. Adopted by scholars of all theoretical stripes (from classical realists to die-hard idealists), tabloid geopolitics is particularly aggressive in its discursive exclusion of the margins of the discipline as it urges, sometimes openly, at other times more softly, but in all cases ideologically, scholars, students, and even lay people concerned with the fate of the ?free world? in an age of global terror to only focus on a few, essential, supposedly vital issues, such as the preservation of democracy, the destruction of terrorism, and the propagation of Western style neoliberal freedoms. The hegemony over discourse (what can be said or not said after 9/11, for example) emphasized by tabloid geopolitics not only occludes marginal voices but, moreover, sometimes integrates some of those voices or alternate possibilities into that which must be abjected, attacked, or even annihilated in the context of the global war on terror. Thus, this paper argues, critical thinking/voicing in IR coming from so-called margins?whatever they may be?must be involved in practices that seek to redefine what the margins or peripheries can mean or look like (and what they can say too) so that distancing, silencing, or even destruction by the tabloid geopolitical center can be challenged... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]