Millennium - Journal of International Studies current issue

Situating Identities: Enacting and Studying Europe at a Russian Elite University

Muller, M. — 2008-08-07

The majority of studies on identity in the discipline of International Relations have analysed identities from an analytical perspective of distance; they elide the fact that identities are situated productions which unfold in specific contexts and through different forms of signification. In this article, I seek to work towards greater attentiveness to the situatedness of identities. I propose a reconsideration of the concept of discourse for situating identities and argue that ethnography can be a useful methodology for analysing the discursive construction of identities in micro-settings. This conceptual argument is illustrated by drawing on data from ethnographic research within Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), a Russian elite university. I analyse how identification with Europe shifts across multiple contexts as it is enacted in everyday life and represented in the multiple processes of studying international relations at this educational institution. Foregrounding the situatedness of identities in this way brings their ambiguities and instabilities into view, while cautioning against an all-too-easy universalization in identity research.

The Revival of Carl Schmitt in International Relations: The Last Refuge of Critical Theorists?

Chandler, D. — 2008-08-07

This article seeks to question the 'critical' readings of Carl Schmitt's understanding of international law and the use of force in international relations, particularly the approaches taken by many critical cosmopolitan theorists and many post-structuralists who have used Schmitt to distance themselves from, and to critique, American foreign policy, especially under the Bush administrations. I suggest that these critical theorists engage in a highly idealized understanding of Schmitt, focusing on his contingent political conclusions, using his work descriptively rather than analytically. It is argued that the idealist approach to Schmitt stems from these commentators' concerns to describe their work as critical rather than from any attempt to use Schmitt's underlying ontological framing of the relationship between law, ethics and the use of force to develop analytical insights into the practice and jurisprudence of the international sphere today. The revival of Schmitt in international relations therefore tells us more about the crisis of critical theorizing than the relevance of Schmitt's analysis to today's world.

War Crimes and the Ruin of Law

Dauphinee, E. — 2008-08-07

This article explores the manner in which the logic of the war crimes trial authorizes and legitimates the practice of war more generally. It proceeds from the recognition that all war involves injuring or the threat of injuring, and that articulating particular types of injuring as especially problematic takes as one of its effects the normalization of injuring in war more generally. The article queries the function of law through an analysis of the state of exception that is produced in the identification of 'war crimes'. It argues that the logic of excision, which produces the political conditions in which war crimes become possible is structurally replicated through the excision of the perpetrator in the context of the trial. It also explores the manner in which the narrative strategies of what Elaine Scarry calls 'active redescription' associated with war render most war-related deaths and injuries politically invisible. The article concludes with a number of strategies for rethinking what it means to account for violence.

Cosmopolitanism and Realism: Towards a Theoretical Convergence?

Beardsworth, R. — 2008-08-07

On both theoretical and analytic accounts, cosmopolitanism and realism seem destined to bypass each other, one entering, at best, the normative dimension of social science, the other, stressing its positive dimension. In this article, I want to suggest that this opposition needs to be unsettled for future theorization and (perhaps) practice of world politics. Taking these two schools of thought is exemplary since their respective theoretical modalities and tenets seem so far opposed. Arguing for convergence between them constitutes part of an emerging attempt, on the part of political philosophers, theorists and international relations scholars today, to recast the conceptual landscape of international relations in response to present complexities of political agency. This convergence is here situated in terms of: (1) the legitimacy of power; (2) the increasing immanence of justice to power in an interdependent world; and (3) the importance of moral leadership in the world political domain. The article is theoretical in modality and diction; outstanding empirical questions are posed once these points are made.

1988 and 1998: Contrast and Continuity in Feminist International Relations

Hutchings, K. — 2008-08-07

This article considers contrasts and continuities in feminist IR scholarship over the past twenty years. It traces various shifts in the substantive and methodological concerns of feminist IR in the decade between 1988 and 1998. It concludes with some reflections on the extent to which the agenda for feminist IR scholars in 2008 remains continuous with the last twenty years and the extent to which it has changed or is likely to change.

Men in the Feminist Gaze: What Does this Mean in IR?

Carver, T. — 2008-08-07

Some of the contributors to the 1988 and 1998 special issues of Millennium on women/gender and IR queried conventional accounts of sex and gender. Some of these put down markers for the study of sexuality in IR. The political thrust of this enterprise was broadly inclusive in character, deriving from various forms of identity politics, while also presuming a transformative outcome of some sort. A few contributors looked forward to a world beyond the confines of gender hierarchy. This article poses the question: 'What would it be like if "feminist IR" actually were "IR tout court "?' Answering this question requires a non-referential theory of language that goes 'all the way down' — as the 'constructivism' deployed in IR does not, because it relies instead on an unexamined acceptance of 'the material'. The answer also requires an analytical view of masculinity as both apparently ungendered and overtly gendered, thus asymmetrical with femininity. Following through on this analysis resolves the dilemma that many IR feminists feel they face: how to sustain a critique of the manly content and masculinized framing of IR without reinvoking the gender binary through which 'woman' and the feminine are always and already subordinated to men and masculinity, and marginalized as subject and object of knowledge.

Feminist Scholarship in International Relations and the Politics of Disciplinary Emotion

Soreanu, R., Hudson, D. — 2008-08-07

The article engages with the relationship between feminist scholarship and the discipline of International Relations. Taking a step back from the recurrent concerns with marginality and those with the absent feminist revolution in IR, we recast the problem of the complicated ménage between feminism and the field of IR as a case of a failure to love. Drawing on the sociology of thinking of Randall Collins and his theory of interaction ritual chains, we read the logic of practice in intellectual fields as one rooted in emotion. In this framework, we theorize citation practices as bearing the trace of intellectuals' emotion-loaded coalitions of the mind. The article maps out the intellectual coalitions in IR with respect to the feminist question by reconstructing the citation networks emerging from the special issue of Millennium, published in 1988 on 'Women in IR'. The maps we put together are read as snapshots of the emotional economy of IR, allowing further reflection about the status of feminist scholarship in IR, about intellectual creativity and about change and stasis in our discipline. We conclude that it is IR which is in trouble, not feminists, with regard to creative potential. Feminists are not marginal in or to IR; instead they are part of a ring of creativity connecting the emotional energies of different disciplinary fields.

Roundtable Discussion: Reflections on the Past, Prospects for the Future in Gender and International Relations

2008-08-07

Slow Looking: The Ethics and Politics of Aesthetics: Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) Gillo Pontecorvo, director, The Battle of Algiers (Criterion: Special Three-Disc Edition, 2004)

Shapiro, M. J. — 2008-08-07

This review essay treats three texts: Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art; Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain; and The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.

List of Books Reviewed

2008-08-07

Book Review: GENERAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjorn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 330 pp., {pound}20.99 pbk.). Sean Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 187 pp., {pound}42.00 hbk.)

Stocchetti, M. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Raffaella Del Sarto, Contested State Identities and Regional Security in the Euro-Mediterranean Area (London: Palgrave, 2006, 296 pp., {pound}45.00 hbk.)

Barbullushi, O. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Ethics of Researching War: Looking for Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 160 pp., {pound}14.99 pbk.)

Hutchison, E. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Mats Berdal and Spyros Economides (eds), United Nations Interventionism, 1991--2004 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 303 pp., {pound}17.99 pbk.)

Ker-Lindsay, J. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Francois Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008, 193 pp., $41.95 pbk.). Philip Hammond, Media, War and Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 175 pp., $34.95 pbk.)

Rowley, C. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: CONFLICT AND PEACE STUDIES Oded Lowenheim, Predators and Parasites. Persistent Agents of Transnational Harm and Great Power Authority (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007, 280 pp., $25.95 pbk.)

Leander, A. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Tan See Seng, The Role of Knowledge Communities in Constructing Asia-Pacific Security. How Thought and Talk Make War and Peace (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007, 284 pp., {pound}69.95 hbk.)

Freistein, K. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 240 pp., {pound}45.00 hbk.)

Varada Raj, K. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIRONMENT Radoslav S. Dimitrov, Science and International Environmental Policy: Regimes and Nonregimes in Global Governance (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006, 222 pp., {pound}21.99 pbk.). Robert Falkner (ed.), The International Politics of Genetically Modified Food: Diplomacy, Trade and Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 280 pp., {pound}58.00 hbk.)

Mallick, S. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS Stephen Holmes, The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 332 pp., $19.80 hbk.)

Brown, R. S. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Valerie M. Hudson, Foreign Policy Analysis: Classic and Contemporary Theory (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, 225 pp., $21.21 pbk.)

Bilgin, P. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Cornelius Friesendorf, US Foreign Policy and the War on Drugs: Displacing the Cocaine and Heroin Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 230 pp., {pound}65 hbk.)

Friedrichs, J. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (London: Viking, 2007, 144 pp., {pound}9.92 hbk.). Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower: How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 336 pp., {pound}15.99 hbk)

Lemish, L. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: George A. MacLean, Clinton's Foreign Policy in Russia: From Deterrence and Isolation to Democratisation and Engagement (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006, 172 pp., {pound}55.00 hbk.)

Oskanian, K. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: GOVERNMENTS AND THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE James N. Rosenau, David C. Earnest, Yale H. Ferguson, Ole R. Holsti, On the Cutting Edge of Globalization: An Inquiry into American Elites (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006, viii + 201 pp., {pound}21.99 pbk.)

Akturk, S. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Global Politics. Discourse and Democracy in a Divided World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006, 191 pp., $24.95 pbk., $59.95 hbk.)

Beckstein, M. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: INTERNATIONAL HISTORY Lorna Lloyd, Diplomacy with a Difference: the Commonwealth Office of High Commissioner, 1880--2006 (Leiden: Brill, 2007, 353 pp., $168 hbk.)

Davies, T. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY Brett Bowden and Leonard Seabrooke (eds), Global Standards of Market Civilization (London: Routledge, 2006, 248 pp., {pound}70 hbk.)

Strange, M. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: RELIGION AND POLITICS Maryam Panah, The Islamic Republic and the World: Global Dimensions of the Iranian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2007, 232 pp., {pound}45 pbk.)

Gocer, D. — 2008-08-07

Book Review: Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, 403 pp., $29.95 hbk.)

Rao, R. — 2008-08-07