Author: Guest Authors

Gender and Diversity in the IR Curriculum: Why Should We Care?

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A guest post from Dr. Joanne Yao and Andrew Delatolla. Joanne recently received her PhD from the LSE’s International Relations Department. Previously, she received her MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins SAIS and her BA in History and Political Science from the University of Chicago. Her research critically assesses international cooperation and environmental politics through an analysis of the first international institutions established in the 19th century to manage transboundary rivers. She is particularly interested in international cooperation, environmental history and historical institutionalism. Andrew is a final year PhD student at the department of International Relations at the LSE. Andrew has received his MA in Intelligence and International Security from King’s College London, a BA in Political Science from Concordia University, and a BFa in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University. His research is concerned with state formation and state building in the 19th and early 20th century with a focus on Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria. He is particularly interested in the sociological development of the state in the post-colonial regions and the Middle East regional state system.

Discussions of gender and diversity have become a hot topic by the proverbial IR water cooler, having increasingly gained attention at ISA through programs sponsored by the Women’s Caucus (WCIS) and the LGBTQA Caucus – amongst other groups and academics who have brought this topic to the table. However, such discussions are also prominent in scholarly inquiry, including Jeff Colgan’s work on course syllabi and Dawn Teele and Kathleen Thelen’s work. While most studies focus on the gender gap in PhD training or the ‘leaky pipeline’ problem – the problem that despite the gender balance at the graduate level, there are far fewer women in senior positions – we feel that the analysis should be expanded. Putting thought into action, we have embarked on a project of our own to examine not only gender but also diversity in IR pedagogy at the undergraduate, masters, and PhD. Unlike other studies of this type, we have sought to examine gender of authors (under the binary male/female assumption) but also diversity in terms of content. Although final results are forthcoming, our analysis has confirmed the 80-20 split between male and female authors across the IR curriculum as it exists at the London School of Economics and Political Science. With regards to diversity content, our preliminary results have shown that there is indeed a lack of diversity content overall, and especially with regards to content that discusses gender and race.

But why should anyone care? After all,  an 80-20 split with regards to gender reflects the gender gap of articles in top IR journals, while the lack of diversity content just means that there is ongoing research that needs to be done, and shouldn’t we have the ‘best’ quality material on our syllabi? Aside from the obvious circular logic surrounding what constitutes as ‘best’; the fact that the 80-20 split does not reflect the near 50-50 split in terms IR/Political Science PhD graduates; and there is no shortage of quality research that speaks to diversity content – we offer three arguments in favour of a more diverse IR curriculum:

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‘You are fired!’ Towards the Hegemony of Neoliberal Hypermasculinity

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This is the final post in a series of posts by several guest authors  for The Disorder Of Things symposium on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. In this post, Ali Bilgic responds to the previously published posts and makes some concluding remarks. The full series is collected here.

He is signing a document. Men standing behind him are all serious, looking over the shoulder of the one who he is performing the ceremony, a TV show par excellence. One of them passes the black folders; one after another, one signature after another. When he signs, his eyebrows rise a little, probably to see better. In this moment, it is possible to notice the blankness in his eyes that complements the expressionless face of the new Commander-in-Chief: there is no sign of affect in them, a staunch wall, like the one to be built on the border with Mexico, or the one in Palestine/Israel.

US President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, January 23, 2017.
Trump on Monday signed three orders on withdrawing the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, freezing the hiring of federal workers and hitting foreign NGOs that help with abortion. / AFP / SAUL LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

One expects he would abruptly say ‘You are fired’; one wonders whether he has learned and practised this masculine emotionless performance during his years in the world of entertainment: in a reality show where young men and women wildly competed against each other to prove themselves to the neoliberal finance capitalism. Otherwise, they are fired, they vanish, do not exist anymore, neither for the audience nor for the market. This kind of decision requires rational thinking; in other words, a solid emptiness, a wall.

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Decoding Gender in Turkish Foreign Policy: How Ali Bilgic Gets it Right

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This is the fifth and penultimate post in a series of posts by several guest authors  for The Disorder Of Things symposium on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here.  Swati Parashar is a Senior Lecturer in the Peace and Development program, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Monash University, Australia.

There is something fundamentally reassuring about reading a book on gendered hierarchies and foreign policy, at a time when we have just witnessed the inauguration of the Donald Trump Presidency in the United States of America. It is reassuring, because it tells us that the global gendered order of states is not going to be replaced anytime soon and gendered hierarchies will remain at the heart of all political contests, resistance and acts of solidarity. After all the biggest challenge to the Trump presidency is going to come from women’s groups who successfully organized the Global March on 21 January 2017.

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Of Malls and Mosques

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This is the fourth post in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here. Aida A. Hozic is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Florida.

The publication of Ali Bilgiç’s book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy in 2016 could not have been more timely. There are few historical moments in our recent history when politics of gender and race have been so forcefully pushed to the front and center of global conversations. Conflicts, refugee flows, uprisings, coups and counter-coups, populist blowbacks and rising authoritarianism – all seem to be written through, with, and over racialized, gendered bodies of men, women and children, justifying the persecution of some and advocating protection of others. Turkey, as the events (and the trail of bodies) of the last few years tragically confirm, sits at the crossroads of all these trends; civilizational cliché that it is the country where “East meets West” can no longer suffice to explain (and perhaps never could) multiple fissures and violent contradictions of its polity.

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Turkey, Power and its Eastern Others

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This is the third post in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here. Clemens Hoffmann is a Lecturer in International Politics at Stirling University, UK.

Ali Bilgic’s book is a timely and sophisticated contribution to the analysis of Turkish foreign policy as well as gender theory in IR. It combines a convincing analysis of the puzzle that is Turkish Foreign Policy (TFP) through an analytically as well politically original lens: that of gender. It identifies and problematizes practices of gendering underlying the relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘Non-West’, of which Turkey is held to be a part. Apart from its rich and sophisticated historiography, its major contribution lies in analysing a ‘non-Western’ society from within, offering a rich and original narrative, which, no doubt, will benefit future generations of Turkish foreign policy and feminist IR scholars alike.

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The View from Elsewhere Turns the World Inside Out

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This is the second post in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. The full series is collected here. Terrell Carver is a Professor of Political Theory at University of Bristol, UK.

Ali Bilgic’s Turkey, Power and the West contributes in highly significant ways to three literatures not normally brought together. Firstly, foreign policy studies, approached from what – for Anglophone writers and readers – is a novel, de-centred vantage point. Secondly, gender studies and feminist research, using masculinity as a highly relevant and essential analytical ‘lens’. Thirdly, postcolonial perspectives, from which the East/West binary is reimagined and pluralized (which, quite naturally, plays into the de-centred approach to foreign policy studies).

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Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy

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This is the first in a series of posts by several guest authors The Disorder Of Things on Ali Bilgic‘s new book Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, released in late 2016. This is an introductory post by Ali Bilgic. Ali is a lecturer at Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University.  Following this introduction, there will be posts by Aida Hozic, Terrell Carver, Swati Parashar, and Clemens Hoffmann, as well as a response by Ali Bilgic posted during the course of this week. The full series is collected here.

Introduction

‘What is this research really about?’ is a question we ask ourselves. Naturally it often invites more questions: what is the importance of this research? Why am I doing it? And finally, what is so puzzling about it? When I was writing Turkey, Power and the West: Gendered International Relations and Foreign Policy, I asked myself these questions and tried to produce academically sound answers. The book is about gendered power hierarchies between the West and non-West and the insecurities that these power hierarchies generate. More specifically, it examines how the changing standards of hegemonic masculinities in global politics are predominantly defined by the West(s) and how the inability of ‘subordinated’ non-Western masculinities to catch up with these changing standards becomes a source of insecurity. I define this ‘gendered ontological insecurity’: the anxiety about not being accepted as ‘man’, or better to say, ‘state’ enough by the West(s). A corollary objective is to situate domestic politics in a non-Western country in the context of foreign policy and evaluate it through the prism of gendered ontological insecurities.
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Trump’s new empire: Thoughts on American imperialism in the age of Trump. A sneak peek from Israel/Palestine

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A guest post by Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir. Hagar Kotef is a Senior Lecturer of Political Theory and Comparative Political Thought at the Department of Politics and International Relations, SOAS, The University of London. She is the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2015). Dr Merav Amir is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Human Geography at the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast. Her recent publication is titled “Revisiting Politicide: State Annihilation in Israel/Palestine”, and is due to be published in Territory, Politics, Governance.

In trying to understand the horror that unfolds post Trump election, two main threads seem to dominate left discourse and blogosphere. The first rightly focuses on the horror itself, on the unprecedented coup-d′état unfolding before our eyes, on the attacks on the constitution, on fascism or other forms of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, and on brute institutionalized racism of a regime that does not even seek to pretend it adheres to the rule of law and good governance.

Credit: GPO

Credit: GPO

All this is true, and yet this narration often fails to account for three main facts. (i) Such brutal constitutional changes and violent re-demarcations of the contours of the polity are hardly unheard-of, both historically, and at this very political moment in many places across the globe. Portraying this horror as unprecedented and unique, indeed as an unbelievable horror, is a form of American exceptionalism that plays into the normalization of violence in regions that are not considered part of the ‘West’. (ii) Many of these violent regime-changes across the globe have been occurring with at least the passive, if not the very active, involvement of consecutive US administrations. Finally, (iii) such modes of foreign “interventions” (we might want to call them wars or imperialism—“neo” or just that, “imperialism”) are often what allowed the Western metropoles of the American empire to remain largely peaceful and relatively prosperous. That is, it is by externalizing its violence that the US could be “exceptional” in the meaning suggested in (i). We should therefore be careful in reproducing a pattern in which “the real crime”, as Arendt put it in regard to a previous age of totalitarianism, was when totalitarian violence moved out of Africa (at first to Asia and then to Europe) “since here [unlike in the case of “African savages who had frightened Europeans literally out of their wit”] everyone ought to have known what they were doing.”[1]

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“Global Britain”: Theresa May’s Ersatz Vision

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A guest post by Seán Molloy, Reader in International Relations, University of Kent

Now that the contours of post-Brexit UK foreign policy are clearer following the Prime Minister’s ‘Global Britain’ speech, the time has come to ask the most critical question: is the project feasible? The central thrust of Theresa May’s pitch is that freed from ‘inflexible’ Brussels mordant grip the UK will soar to new heights. ‘Global Britain,’ May confidently asserts, will be a trading dynamo.

Nobody who lived through the referendum campaign could agree with the Prime Minister that the vote on June 23 was a declaration of Britain’s determination to build a “truly global” Britain. Insofar as the depiction of Britain as an economic titan destined for global greatness once free of the EU featured in the referendum it was a distant also-ran compared to immigration, the fabled £350m per week to be lavished on the NHS, and the restoration of British sovereignty. These objectives were all domestic in nature and not consistent with the Prime Minister’s characterisation of Brexit as the expression of a confident, thrusting nation about the take the commercial world by storm. The electorate voted with its eyes open, but its gaze was primarily fixed upon the perceived domestic consequences of EU membership and other grievances related to the operation of globalisation rather than an insistence upon seizing external opportunities.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May delivers a speech on leaving the European Union at Lancaster House in London

If what was genuinely at stake in the referendum eluded the Prime Minister, the full scale of its effects also seem to be absent from her articulation of the policies her government is poised to enact.

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Fake Becomes Legit: Disinformation, Social Media and Democracy

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mejias2015-05-225x300In our final post centring on the US presidential inauguration, Ulises Ali Mejias reflects on the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and the role of social media. Ulises is associate professor at the State University of New York at Oswego. He is the author of Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (2013, University of Minnesota Press). With Nick Couldry, he is currently writing a book on data as a capitalist social relation.

The previous two inauguration pieces can be found here and here.

While we didn’t exactly predict the rise of ‘fake news’, in 2013 a Russian colleague and I completed an academic article on the disinformation tactics used during the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Like many others, we started to recognize the ways in which citizens generate, consume and distribute false information by interacting with old and new media, contributing to a social order where lies acquire increasing authority. While we focused on the Russia-Ukraine case, we felt it was important to point out that these tactics might serve as a template for future scenarios, including in Western democracies.

The article will not see the light of day until this year, four years after it was finished. Interestingly, part of the reason it has taken so long to get it published is that some reviewers felt our argument should omit references to Western democracies. The sentiment seemed to be that this kind of stuff could not happen here.

That was, of course, before the 2016 US presidential elections.

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