Space, scale, and global politics: Towards a critical approach to space in international relations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Daniel Lambach
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Security Research ◽  
Spatial Approach ◽  
Arctic Security ◽  
Specific Concept ◽  
Broad Interest

Abstract Space matters for global politics but the treatment thereof in International Relations (IR) has been uneven. There is broad interest in spatial aspects across many research communities but only a nascent theoretical discussion and little cross-field communication. This article argues for a fuller engagement of IR scholars with sociospatial concepts and proposes a spatial approach to global politics based on four essential dimensions: a spatial ontology, the constructedness of space, a scalar perspective, and the interaction of materiality and ideas. As one possible way of integrating these aspects into a more specific concept, the article elaborates a framework of spatial practices and uses the example of Arctic Security research to illustrate the upsides of such a spatial approach for IR research.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zürn
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Political System ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Causal Mechanisms

This chapter summarizes the argument of the book. It recapitulates the global governance as a political system founded on normative principles and reflexive authorities in order to identify the legitimation problems built into it; it points to the explanation of the rise of societal politicization and counter-institutionalization via causal mechanisms highlighting the endogenous dynamics of that global governance system; and, it sums up the conditions under which the subsequent processes of legitimation and delegitimation lead to the system’s decline or to a deepening of it. In addition, the conclusion submits that the arguments put forward in this book are in line with a newly emerging paradigm in International Relations. A “global politics paradigm” is increasingly complementing the “cooperation under anarchy paradigm” which has been dominant for around five decades. The chapter finishes with suggestions of areas for further research.

Another Geopolitics? International Relations and the Boundaries of World Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regan Burles
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
Ecological Theories ◽  
Problems And Solutions ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Geopolitics has become a key site for articulating the limits of existing theories of international relations and exploring possibilities for alternative political formations that respond to the challenges posed by massive ecological change and global patterns of violence and inequality. This essay addresses three recent books on geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene: Simon Dalby's Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (2020), Jairus Victor Grove's Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019), and Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018). The review outlines and compares how these authors pose contemporary geopolitics as a problem and offer political ecology as the ground for an alternative geopolitics. The essay considers these books in the context of critiques of world politics in international relations to shed light on both the contributions and the limits of political ecological theories of global politics. I argue that the books under review encounter problems and solutions posed in Kant's critical and political writings in relation to the concepts of epigenesis and teleology. These provoke questions about the ontological conceptions of order that enable claims to world political authority in the form of a global international system coextensive with the earth's surface.

Family values? Sexism and heteronormativity in Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA) research

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen M. Kinsella ◽  
Laura Sjoberg
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
Security Research ◽  
Sex And Sexuality

AbstractIn this article, we focus on the subset of evolutionary theorising self-identified as Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA) within security studies and International Relations. We offer this accounting in four sections. First, we provide a brief overview of the argument that reproductive interests are the ‘origins’ of international violence. Second, we break down the definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality used in evolutionary work in security studies generally and in FEA specifically, demonstrating a lack of complexity in FEA’s accounts of the potential relations among the three and critiquing their essentialist heteronormative assumptions. Third, we argue that FEA’s failure to reflect on the history and context of evolutionary theorising, much less contemporary feminist critiques, facilitates its forwarding of the state and institutions as primarily neutral and corrective bulwarks against male violence. Fourth, we conclude by outlining what is at stake if we fail to correct for this direction in feminist, IR, and security research. We argue that FEA work misrepresents and narrows the potential for understanding and responding to violence, facilitating the continued instrumentalisation of women’s rights, increased government regulation of sexuality, and a more expansive form of militarism.

The invisible structures of anarchy: Gender, orders, and global politics

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Sjoberg
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political System ◽  
International System ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Multiple Orders ◽  
International Anarchy ◽  
The Invisible

This article argues anarchy is undertheorized in International Relations, and that the undertheorization of the concept of anarchy in International Relations is rooted in Waltz’s original discussion of the concept as equal to the invisibility of structure, where the lack of exogenous authority is not just a feature of the international political system but the salient feature. This article recognizes the international system as anarchical but looks to theorize its contours—to see the invisible structures that are overlaid within international anarchy, and then to consider what those structures mean for theorizing anarchy itself. It uses as an example the various (invisible) ways that gender orders global political relations to suggest that anarchy in the international arena is a place of multiple orders rather than of disorder. It therefore begins by theorizing anarchy with orders in global politics, rather than anarchy as necessarily substantively lacking orders. It then argues that gender orders global politics in various ways. It concludes with a framework for theorizing order within anarchy in global politics.

scholarly journals Education à l'image and Medienkompetenz : On the discourses and practices of film education in France and Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Henzler
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
German Film ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Film Education ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Media

This article compares the discourses, practices and politics of film education in France and Germany, and outlines their historical development. The discourses on film education in the two countries are fundamentally different: whereas German film education is anchored in the global politics of media education and around notions of Medienkompetenz (media competence), cinema in France is a field of art education centred on the transmission du cinéma (film mediation) or l'éducation artistique (art mediation). While the first initiatives in film education in both countries date back to the beginning of the twentieth century, this article explores how they developed in significantly different ways. In France, the establishment of film education was promoted and influenced by the culture of cinephilia, which imposed the notion of film as an art form. In Germany, film education – after having been pushed by the Nazi regime – suffered for a long time from sceptical attitudes towards the media and their ideological impact, and was formed by the critical approach of the Frankfurt School. This article details how history and the 'state of the art' of film education are interlinked with the different discourses and cultures of cinema in both countries, as well as the extent to which present political and educational practices draw upon long-standing historical and cultural traditions. In doing so, this article contributes to reflections upon film education at a wider European or international level, where similar debates around film or media literacy are taking place.

scholarly journals On Remembering Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969

Lateral ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Jayne Kimmel
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Third World ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Remarkable Event ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pandemic Response

This assembled interview centers both Elaine Mokhtefi and Le premier festival culturel panafricain d’Alger 1969 (PANAF), a festival which she organized and attended as a part of the Algerian Ministry of Information, noting it as an exemplary instance of the power of performance at the nexus of political ideology, activist history, and the subsequent nostalgia for that era of liberation. It is equally an attempt to overcome a distant relationship to each, reflecting on the potential of oral histories to open up new pathways through the past. This history—of entangled international relations negotiated under the guise of a festive performance, a complicated trajectory of global politics which culminated in a remarkable event of celebration and solidarity—remains understudied, a footnote to more “political” concerns of Third World agendas, decolonial reorderings, and capitalist critiques. Yet through Mokhtefi’s testimony, interwoven with searching tendrils of archival detail, we can see that this festival was not a superficial exaltation in extravagance, but a pivotal moment in foreign affairs. More importantly, through her personal history, we can trace the central role that women played in these politics, if often unacknowledged. Edited in 2020, it also counters the pejorative label of non-essential labor applied to most cultural activities during the contemporary pandemic response to COVID-19.

Understanding and Classifying Constructivisms

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
J. Samuel Barkin ◽  
Laura Sjoberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
International Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
The Social

The chapter discusses various ways that constructivism might be defined, and finds in them a tendency to make constructivisms into at once more than they are (by imbuing them with “naturally” associated politics) and less (by divorcing them from their roots as social theory). The chapter builds an argument that what constructivisms have in common is the ontological assumption of the social construction of international politics as expressed in methodology for doing International Relations research. This assumption should not be understood as taking specific ontologies, let alone methods, methodologies, or politics, as definitional of constructivism. Work can reasonably be described as constructivist if it builds on an ontology of co-constitution and intersubjectivity in the context of a particular set of methodological claims underlying a research exercise about global politics. This brackets what work might be called constructivist but does not associate constructivism either with any specific ontology or with any specific methodology.

scholarly journals Power in Global Nutrition Governance

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Louise Lie
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Power Analysis ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Global Partnership ◽  
Health And Nutrition ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
Discursive Power ◽  
Global Nutrition

Abstract Global public-private partnerships for health and nutrition have proliferated since the 1990s—a trend raising important questions about authority and legitimacy in global governance. Yet within the fields of international relations and public health, there has been only limited empirical research into the global politics and power dynamics behind such partnerships. This article explores how and why the Scaling Up Nutrition partnership was established. Drawing on interviews, observations, and document analysis, it demonstrates how public and private actors exercise combinations of instrumental, structural, and discursive power to normalize and institutionalize their interests and values at the global level. The study highlights as such the complexities behind the increased privatization of global nutrition governance and the importance of power analysis to uncover the normative contestations and asymmetries of power behind global partnership creation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document