Gender is imperative to our understanding of issues surrounding refugees of war. The use of a gender lens to scrutinise the ways in which people are treated demonstrates the embeddedness of deeply held beliefs about men & women and the roles and responsibilities that they should be fulfilling, according to societal norms.
The emergence of critical theory and the encroachment of feminist scholarship into IR discourse has highlighted the position of women within the international security framework. Yet, the dominant theoretical perspectives, realism and neorealism have been accused of neglecting the gender variable.
Hitler imagined the nation in purely ethnic terms, the German Volk with the Aryan core at the top of the genetic pool. However, nationalism is too thin an ideology to be Hitler’s only political thinking and he uses the ideas of Social Darwinism, fascism and militarisation to thicken out his personal ideology.
As a whole the situation in the Central Asian region is fraught with future social disturbances. They are inevitable in all countries, but the degree of violence will be different according to the achieved level of development. The bloodiest events are possible in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. In the latter country, a variant of the Libyan example is quite probable.
China and the west view Africa with a different set of eyes. In supporting trade with any and all nations in Africa and around the globe, China by default supports nations that have horrendous human rights track records that do not support democratic institutions. But China’s model of economic aid can be used by African nations to pull millions of people out of poverty. It is nothing more, nothing less.
Almost a century after its birth, IR is still in the process of defining itself. The Great Debates stimulated discussion about the essential characteristics of the discipline, and through these IR theory has undoubtedly advanced in complexity and nuance since its founding, and doubtless will continue to do so.
When thinking about anarchy in international relations, we have to consider world order and how it is organised. Can an anarchical system be ordered? The cause of war is not only systemic, but via the fact that states can generate conflicts by their own choice, mainly because of self-interest and a thirst for power.
In discussions of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region, China looms large. The United States—along with many of China’s neighbors—have cautiously embraced China’s rise. However tensions in the region have been on the rise and the potential for strategic rivalry in the long run remains high.
Both the enormous diversity within Sudan in combination with the lack of a substantial “Sudanese” identity accounts for the prevalence of conflict. This absence of a widely accepted and omnipresent state identity also explains how identity is formed in relation to hegemony.
Terrorist organizations have become more effective in delivering fear to global populations. It is not only globalization that has helped terrorist groups operate more efficiently, but also their inherited nature of a constant process of adaptation, ingenuity, and incrementalism when faced with new grand strategies.
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