“Feminist” Theoretical Inquiries and “IR”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna M. Agathangelou ◽  
Heather M. Turcotte
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Gender Analysis ◽  
Political Economies ◽  
Inferior Status ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
And Gender

Feminist international relations (IR) theories have long provided interventions and insights into the embedded asymmetrical gender relations of global politics, particularly in areas such as security, state-nationalism, rights–citizenship, and global political economies. Yet despite the histories of struggle to increase attention to gender analysis, and women in particular, within world politics, IR knowledge and practice continues to segregate gendered and feminist analyses as if they are outside its own formation. IR as a field, discipline, and site of contestation of power has been one of the last fields to open up to gender and feminist analyses. One reason for this is the link between social science and international institutions like the United Nations, and its dominant role in the formation of foreign policy. Raising the inferior status of feminism within IR, that is, making possible the mainstreaming of gender and feminism, will require multiple centers of power and multiple marginalities. However, these institutional struggles for recognition through exclusion may themselves perpetuate similar exploitative relationships of drawing boundaries around legitimate academic and other institutional orders. In engaging, listening and writing these struggles, it is important to recognize that feminisms, feminist IR, and IR are intimately linked through disciplinary struggles and larger geopolitical struggles of world affairs and thus necessitate knowledge terrains attentive to intersectional and oppositional gendered struggles (i.e., race, sexuality, nation, class, religion, and gender itself).

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.

scholarly journals The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations

1999 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett ◽  
Martha Finnemore
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
International Institutions ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Constructivist Approach ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Dysfunctional Behavior ◽  
Constructivist Approaches

International Relations scholars have vigorous theories to explain why international organizations (IOs) are created, but they have paid little attention to IO behavior and whether IOs actually do what their creators intend. This blind spot flows logically from the economic theories of organization that have dominated the study of international institutions and regimes. To recover the agency and autonomy of IOs, we offer a constructivist approach. Building on Max Weber's well-known analysis of bureaucracy, we argue that IOs are much more powerful than even neoliberals have argued, and that the same characteristics of bureaucracy that make IOs powerful can also make them prone to dysfunctional behavior. IOs are powerful because, like all bureaucracies, they make rules, and, in so doing, they create social knowledge. IOs deploy this knowledge in ways that define shared international tasks, create new categories of actors, form new interests for actors, and transfer new models of political organization around the world. However, the same normative valuation on impersonal rules that defines bureaucracies and makes them powerful in modern life can also make them unresponsive to their environments, obsessed with their own rules at the expense of primary missions, and ultimately produce inefficient and self-defeating behavior. Sociological and constructivist approaches thus allow us to expand the research agenda beyond IO creation and to ask important questions about the consequences of global bureaucratization and the effects of IOs in world politics.

The Other in European self-definition: an addendum to the literature on international society

1991 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iver B. Neumann ◽  
Jennifer M. Welsh
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Billiard Table ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Cultural Variables ◽  
Vertical Division ◽  
Game Plan

The dominant role of the realist paradigm in international relations theory has left little room for the study of the role of cultural variables in world politics. The two central tenets of the realist theoretical game-plan—the primacy of the sovereign state system, and the autonomy of that system, from domestic political, social and moral considerations—focus our attention on the vertical division of the world into sovereign states, rather than on the horizontal forces and ties that cut across state frontiers. The result is the metaphor for the interaction of states as the mechanical one of the billiard table, with power politics as the primary dynamic.

17. Gender

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines the power of gender in global politics. It considers the different ways in which gender shapes world politics today, whether men dominate global politics at the expense of women, and whether international — and globalized — gender norms should be radically changed, and if so, how. The chapter also discusses sex and gender in international perspective, along with global gender relations and the gendering of global politics, global security, and the global economy. Two case studies are presented, one dealing with the participation of female guerrillas in El Salvador's civil war, and the other with neo-slavery and care labour in Asia. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether war is inherently masculine.

scholarly journals On the theopolitics of sovereignty: Carl Schmitt and the theopolitics of global orders

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 691-712
Author(s):  
Thomas Moore
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Critical Approaches

AbstractThis article considers how we can develop a reflexive reading of the theological contours of global politics through Carl Schmitt's account of sovereignty. In doing this it seeks to generate a critical architecture to understand the pluralistic registers of sovereignty within world politics. This article examines the theological dimensions of sovereignty, calling for a closer reading of the theopolitical discourses of legality and legitimacy at work within the largely secular discipline of International Relations. Tracing the pluralistic dimensions of sovereignty – juristic, popular, and theopolitical – allows us to see how sovereignty is operationalised through a range of distinct political registers. When the study of sovereignty is confused with questions of preference for modes of governing (whether secular, religious, democratic, and/or juristic) the complex historical sociology of sovereignty is overlooked. Contemporary scholarship in International Relations can benefit from closer engagement with the multiple, overlapping registers of sovereignty in global politics. We may disagree with Schmitt's reading of sovereignty as ‘theopolitics’ but there is real methodological value in engaging secular scholarship in thinking about religion as a constitutive domain for global order – alongside a rich range of critical approaches.

scholarly journals RASING FORCES: PATTERNS OF REDISTRIBUTION OF POWER IN WORLD POLITICS

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (06) ◽  
pp. 165-176
Author(s):  
Djamel Ben MERAR ◽  
Nassera MELLAH
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Dual Roles ◽  
Reciprocal Interactions ◽  
Power Equation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Emerging Powers

This article examines Rising Powers: Patterns of Power Redistribution in Global Politics, by creating a reliable framework for understanding the increasing complexities of the actors in the international arena. This is by studying the concept of power, which is one of the basic concepts in political science, whereby force imposes its logic on the curves of international relations and has multiple forms due to its complex nature. In what can be considered dual roles and reciprocal interactions, and to understand the dimensions, manifestations and nature of the actors in the power equation, especially the emergence of tensions and conflicts between the interests of the United States of America and the emerging powers in the world in light of the new strategic directions after the Cold War and each party's attempt to dominate areas of influence and wealth Proceeding from a pragmatic geopolitical policy.

17. Gender

2019 ◽  
pp. 271-286
Author(s):  
Paul Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines the power of gender in global politics. It considers the different ways in which gender shapes world politics today, whether men dominate global politics at the expense of women, whether international—and globalized—gender norms should be radically changed, and if so, how. The chapter also discusses sex and gender in international perspective, along with global gender relations and the gendering of global politics, global security, and the global economy. Two case studies are presented, one dealing with the participation of female guerrillas in El Salvador's civil war, and the other with neo-slavery and care labour in Asia. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether war is inherently masculine.

10. Feminism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Ann Tickner ◽  
Laura Sjoberg
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Security ◽  
World Politics ◽  
United Nations Security Council ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Feminist Poststructuralism ◽  
Liberal Feminism ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Feminist Constructivism

This chapter examines feminist perspectives on international relations. It first provides a historical background on the development of feminist IR, paying attention to feminist analyses of gender, before outlining a typology of feminist international relations, namely: liberal feminism, critical feminism, feminist constructivism, feminist poststructuralism, and postcolonial feminism. It then considers feminist perspectives on international security and global politics, along with developments in feminist reanalyses and reformulations of security theory. It illustrates feminist security theory by analysing the case of the United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iraq following the First Gulf War. The chapter concludes by assessing the contributions that feminist IR can make to the practice of world politics in general and to the discipline of IR in particular.

The United Nations in the 21st Century by Karen A. Mingst and Margaret P. Karns, and Alynna J. Lyon

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayesha Masood
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
International Relations ◽  
United Nations ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Human Security ◽  
World Politics ◽  
International Organization ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
The United Nations

The United Nations in the 21st century: Dilemmas in World Politics is a noteworthy book on the world’s leading international organization and international relations which provides a comprehensive introduction of the United Nations (UN), its functions and its role in the promotion of peace and stability. and the book has a lot to offer in terms of the United Nations in the broader context of global politics; reflecting mainly on its history, challenges, and reforms, etc. The book offers an in-depth account concerning the functions of the United Nations i.e. how the UN works and also sheds light on the numerous challenges faced by the organization in the present century. From terrorism to piracy and from evolved threats to human security such as cybercrimes to climate change and global warming, the authors in the book accord due importance to the new players on the international scene.

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