scholarly journals Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a Knowing Otherwise

Author(s):  
Rosalba Icaza

Decolonial thinking has introduced border thinking as an epistemological position that contributes to a shift in the forms of knowing in which the world is thought from the concrete incarnated experiences of colonial difference and the wounds left. In this chapter, Argentinean feminist philosopher Maria Lugones’ (1992) interpretation of Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands foregrounds its main argument: border thinking as an embodied consciousness in which dualities and vulnerability are central for a decolonisation of how we think about the geo and body politics of knowledge, coloniality, political economy and of course, gender in International Relations and Global Politics.

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (04) ◽  
pp. 739-746 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna M. Agathangelou

International relations (IR) feminists have significantly impacted the way we analyze the world and power. However, as Cynthia Enloe points out, “there are now signs—worrisome signs—that feminist analysts of international politics might be forgetting what they have shared” and are “making bricks to construct new intellectual barriers. That is not progress” (2015, 436). I agree. The project/process that has led to the separation/specialization of feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist global political economy (FGPE) does not constitute progress but instead ends up embodying forms of violence that erase the materialist bases of our intellectual labor's divisions (Agathangelou 1997), the historical and social constitution of our formations as intellectuals and subjects. This amnesiac approach evades our personal lives and colludes with those forces that allow for the violence that comes with abstraction. These “worrisome signs” should be explained if we are to move FSS and FGPE beyond a “merger” (Allison 2015) that speaks only to some issues and some humans in the global theater.


Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 026339572110612
Author(s):  
Matteo Capasso

This article brings together two cases to contribute to the growing body of literature rethinking the study of international relations (IR) and the Global South: The Libyan Arab al-Jamāhīrīyah and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Drawing on media representations and secondary literature from IR and international political economy (IPE), it critically examines three main conceptual theses (authoritarian, rentier, and rogue) used to describe the historical socio-political formations of these states up to this date. Mixing oil abundance with authoritarian revolutionary fervour and foreign policy adventurism, Libya and Venezuela have been progressively reduced to the figure of one man, while presenting their current crises as localized processes delinked from the imperialist inter-state system. The article argues that these analyses, if left unquestioned, perpetuate a US-led imperial ordering of the world, while foreclosing and discrediting alternatives to capitalist development emerging from and grounded in a Global South context. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing and controversial debate on the meanings and needs for decolonizing the study of IR.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen

Introduction to International Relations provides a concise introduction to the principal international relations theories, and explores how theory can be used to analyse contemporary issues. Readers are introduced to the most important theories, encompassing both classical and contemporary approaches and debates. Throughout the text, the chapters encourage readers to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the theories presented, and the major points of contention between them. In so doing, the text helps the reader to build a clear understanding of how major theoretical debates link up with each other, and how the structure of the discipline of international relations is established. The book places a strong emphasis throughout on the relationship between theory and practice, carefully explaining how theories organise and shape our view of the world. Topics include realism, liberalism, International Society, International Political Economy, social constructivism, post-positivism in international relations, and foreign policy. A chapter is dedicated to key global issues and how theory can be used as a tool to analyse and interpret these issues. The text is accompanied by an Online Resource Centre, which includes: short case studies, review questions, annotated web links, and a flashcard glossary.


Author(s):  
Lior Herman

Oil and natural gas have frequently been used as instruments of foreign policy. While scholars have given substantial attention to the economics of exports and imports, much less has been paid to theorizing how energy can be its own type of carrot or stick, influencing international relations around the world. Future scholarship should focus on developing foreign policy theories specific to energy, including renewable energy sources and drawing on constructivist theories. In addition, the role of transit states, energy firms, sovereign wealth funds, and civil society should be more carefully theorized. Future theoretical and empirical research should also focus on the use of electricity and renewable energies as foreign policy instruments and their effects on global politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 14-38
Author(s):  
Chengxin Pan

This article stands at the intersection between the relational turn in International Relations (IR) and the quantum turn in the social sciences (and more recently in IR as well). The relational turn draws much-needed attention to the centrality of relations in global politics, yet its imprecise conceptualization of whole-part relations casts shadow over its relational ontological foundation. The quantum turn, meanwhile, challenges the observed–observer dichotomy as well as the classical views about causality, determinacy, and measurement. Yet, despite their common stance against the Newtonian ontology, the relational and quantum turns have largely neglected each other at least in the IR context. This article aims to bridge this gap by introducing a quantum holographic approach to relationality. Drawing on theoretical physicist David Bohm’s work on quantum theory and his key concepts about wholeness and the implicate order, the article argues that the world is being holographically (trans)formed: its parts are not only parts of the whole, but also enfold the whole, like in a hologram. This quantum holographic ontology contributes to both a clearer differentiation between internal/implicate relations and external/explicate relations and a renewed emphasis on wholeness and whole-part duality. In doing so, it not only provides new conceptual tools to rethink IR as holographic relations which involve the dynamic processes and mechanisms of enfoldment and unfoldment, but also has important policy and ethical implications for the conduct of “foreign” relations and for transforming the way we think about identity, survival, relationship, and responsibility.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shine Choi

AbstractMarysia Zalewski's Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse on feminism and global politics directly addresses matters of style, that is, questions of language and representation that foreground the invisible yet so palpable aspect of how meanings circulate. This article puts Zalewski's work in conversation with Trinh Minh-ha's D-Passage: The Digital Way and Lynda Barry's What It Is that similarly push the limits of how we craft feminist arguments. These feminists show how styles of writing and thinking, and how ideas gain shape to circulate matter in academic sites of knowledge as much as in art and culture. Building on these works, I put forward the thesis: to theorise is to feel out boundaries and question the questions we encounter that perennially relegate women as taint and malaise. I further explore this thesis by highlighting the visual dimensions of writing and thinking, in particular, what drawing, and drawing lines that shape ideas do. I focus on caricatures from the currently evolving North Korean nuclear crisis to loosen up the ways we go about thinking about war and politics wherein thinking is recognised not so much as a craft to be perfected but a democratic form of being in the world.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. p125
Author(s):  
Wang Sheng ◽  
Pan Ziyang

Robert Keohane is a leading contemporary international relations scholar. His ideas and doctrines are important parts of neoliberal institutionalism. In his books Power and Interdependence, and After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, he has a unique perspective on power, a core concept of international relations, that differs from realism and constructivism. This paper uses documentary analysis to distill and summarize the discussion of power in Robert Keohane’s work, which helps to systematically study the neoliberal institutionalist view of power and to make the classic theory show its charm beyond its time.


Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Georg Sørensen

Introduction to International Relations provides a concise introduction to the principal international relations theories, and explores how theory can be used to analyse contemporary issues. Readers are introduced to the most important theories, encompassing both classical and contemporary approaches and debates. Throughout the text, the chapters encourage readers to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the theories presented, and the major points of contention between them. In so doing, the text helps the reader to build a clear understanding of how major theoretical debates link up with each other, and how the structure of the discipline of international relations is established. The book places a strong emphasis throughout on the relationship between theory and practice, carefully explaining how theories organise and shape our view of the world. Topics include realism, liberalism, International Society, International Political Economy, social constructivism, post-positivism in international relations, and foreign policy. A chapter is dedicated to key global issues and how theory can be used as a tool to analyse and interpret these issues. The text is accompanied by an Online Resource Centre, which includes: short case studies, review questions, annotated web links, and a flashcard glossary.


2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edelgard Mahant

Interregionalism and International Relations, Heiner Hänggi, Ralf Roloff and Jürgen Rüland, eds., Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics; London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 364.How do we explain a widespread international phenomenon that only occasionally contributes to the geo-strategic or economic interests of the participating states? This book is about interregionalism, the international organizations and institutions that link regional organizations from more than one region of the world (as, for example, ASEM, also known as Asia-Europe Meeting) or that span across more than one region, such as APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation) or FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas). The fact is that few of these institutions have accomplished much in concrete terms, yet they continue to proliferate, as the four-and-a-half page list of acronyms at the beginning of this volume amply demonstrates.


Politics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Clapton ◽  
Laura J Shepherd

People learn about global politics not (solely or even mostly) from conventional teaching in the discipline of International Relations (IR) but from popular culture. We use the television series Game of Thrones to expand upon this premise. We show how representations of the gendered foundations of political authority can be found in popular culture in ways that challenge the division of such knowledge in IR. Game of Thrones and other cultural texts potentially enable different ways of thinking about the world that subvert both the disciplinary mechanisms that divide up knowledge and the related marginalisation of various knowledge claims.


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