Linguistic Portrayals of Conflict and the Inaction of the International Community: The Case of Rwanda
Using theories of cognitive consistency and identity, this essay seeks to understand the impact of a conflict’s portrayal on the decision to intervene. To illustrate, the essay analyses the inaction of the United Nations in the face of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
What is Distinctive About English-school Attitudes to War?
This essay argues that, for the English School, war is an essential component of international relations that is regulated by “norms”. Prominent English School thinkers believe that war should be waged with reference to morality and justice (with rules formulated to that effect) and that the purpose and existence of war is as an instrument of international society used to enforce international justice.
To What Extent is the Neoliberal Paradigm Limiting in the Study of ‘offshore’?
This essay argues that neoliberalism seeks to frame highly political and morally-charged operations within a bland discourse that insists on the neutrality of the market. Thus it is necessarily flawed in its contribution to the study of offshore, because it attempts to disguise the invariably political and pragmatic functions of offshore in the contemporary global political economy.
Can Secularisation be Universal? [A Postmodernist Conspectus]
It is a trite but commonplace observation that we are witnessing a resurgence in religion and religious fundamentalism; that the secularist progression envisaged by linear models of social development has not come to fruition. This essay seeks both to contest the notion that secularisation can be seen as a universal or absolute process and, further, to problematise certain critical approaches which understand ‘religion’ as a site of autonomy and resistance against these totalising discourses.
Body and Nation-state: Population, Sex and Control in the People’s Republic
This essay first considers the ideological and discursive background to China’s one-child policy, before employing the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopower to outline how these techniques of control are effected – looking specifically at non-coercive examples, which tend to be overlooked in discussions and popular conceptions of the People’s Republic.
To What Extent is ‘crony capitalism’ a Reasonable Explanation for Recent Experiences of the East Asian ‘developmental state’?
This essay first outlines the orthodox or neoclassical understanding of ‘cronyism’ and its pejorative connotations, before considering the ‘developmental state’ paradigm that emerged with East Asia’s ‘miracle’ growth. I then attempt to recast the concept of cronyism within its historical and cultural context, dispensing with neoclassical ideas of ‘correct’ economic practice and notions that crony capitalism itself represents either an explanation or a necessary outcome.
Is Marx Relevant to International Relations Today?
This essay argues that one central problem remains regarding this Marxist theorisation of the international: namely that the normative concern of historical materialism can engender hostility towards contemporary ‘postmodern’ themes, which may ultimately prove an intractable obstacle to further intellectual enquiry.
In Defence of the Freakshow: Critical Approaches to International Relations and the Social Sciences
As thinkers such as Steve Smith have noted, whilst the positivist mainstream approaches continues to dominate the social sciences—and in particular Americanised disciplines such as International Relations—there have been gradual moves in Europe towards more reflectivist alternatives (2000). In light of this, it’s pertinent to ask whether approaches such as genealogy, dialectics and critical theory represent a useful diversion, or whether they are merely a distraction from what we should be doing.
What Challenges Face Attempts to Alleviate Social Suffering within Israel/Palestine?
This essay first briefly explains the significance of ‘structural violence’ in Israeli society, before going on to critically examine dominant conceptions of ‘suffering’ in the Israeli context, arguing that the pragmatic and rationalist bias of this notion itself constitutes one major hindrance to ‘healing’. Finally, I consider the role of silence and memory in perpetuating suffering in Israel, looking specifically at the two imbricated elements of Holocaust memorialisation and the construction of the Other, arguing for a more processual rather than essentialist conception of suffering, community, healing and memory.
“How can an alternative interpretation of Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’ be of relevance to IR theory today?”
The anarchical Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ is a commonly used paradigm in IR theory, yet this essay argues that alternative understandings of Hobbes’ work call into question the degree to which he himself could be accurately described as ‘Hobbesian’.
