There is a growing critique of the hegemonic discourse on the ‘War on Terror’ against the backdrop of an overwhelming silence about the impacts of the global WOT on the non-Western and particularly the Muslim world. The new critique is based on: the dominance of ‘state-centric’ perspectives; the pre-eminence of ‘problem-solving’ approaches; and largely ahistorical accounts of terrorism.
Just over a year ago, Obama’s climate negotiator Todd Stern gave an important speech at a U.S. Climate Action Symposium. He’d been on the job for fewer than three weeks, but he nonetheless offered 10 fairly detailed principles that he said would underpin U.S. participation in the Copenhagen process.
The China-Google cyberconflict adds to the debate on the position of China in the world system, & creates insecurities about the ambitions, capabilities and hidden desires of the ‘next hegemon’. It brings together in one discussion a complex matrix of debates: global politics and world-system theorizing, global political economy and many more.
Not so long ago, it was fashionable among apologists and many other commentators on contemporary capitalism to refer to the nation state as passé. Globalization of large corporations was enshrined as a mechanism enhancing efficiency far beyond what could be achieved within national boundaries. Not surprisingly these rosy assessments of capitalism’s prospects glossed over the problem of its inherent instability.
Warnings against the political construction of the Self through opposition to a negative-valued, dangerous or threatening Other are common at a time when the discourses of the clash of civilisations have acquired a worryingly prominent place in the public spheres of many different countries. But do we actually need ‘more’ religious and cultural traditions rather than less in order to oppose religiously-inspired political violence?
National religious lobbies and advocacy organizations represent a growing phenomenon of political life in America. One of the striking recent developments is the globalization of the focus, constituencies, and vision of this religious political advocacy. From the beginning of the republic, national religious interest groups have focused periodically on international relations.
It is wrong to say that Barack Obama rejects the democracy tradition in American foreign policy. His record, appointments and first-year budget requests show that democratization is not being jettisoned as a US goal. To varying extents, the president and his foreign policy principals are liberal internationalists. However there has been a stark rhetorical break from the Bush era.
Whether the issue at hand is security, global governance, nuclear proliferation, peacebuilding or international law, feminist scholars have written extensively about (how) gender matters in global politics and, further, argued that paying analytical attention to gender allows us a range of insights that ‘gender-blind’ approaches do not access.
Thanks to decades of feminist activism within and outside international institutions, the issue of gender inequality is now firmly embedded within contemporary development policy and practice. In this essay I offer a brief overview of some of the debates and policies that inform feminist approaches to development policy and practice.
Contemporary social discourses are relegating the need to keep fighting for gender equality, mistakenly thinking that perhaps ‘addressing’ gender is the same as ‘normalising’ gender politics. It is against this landscape that Lady Catherine Ashton becomes the first High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
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