Christine Sylvester

War as Experience : Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis

Part I: International Relations and Feminists Consider War Introduction: War Questions for Feminism and International Relations 1. IR Takes On War 2. Feminist (IR) Takes on War Part II: Rethinking Elements and Approaches to War 3. War as Physical Experience 4. War as Emotional Experience 5. Concluding, Collaging and Looking Ahead

War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory

This article challenges International Relations to turn its view of war around and start not with states, militaries, strategies, conventional security issues or weapons, and not with the common main aim of establishing causes of war. The challenge is to conceptualise war as a subset of social relations of experience, on the grounds that war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people who experience it in myriad ways and not only down from abstract places of International Relations theory. To study war as experience requires that the body come into focus as a unit that has war agency and is also a prime target of war violence. It also requires exploration of the concept of experience. Using an exemplary texts approach, the article briefly reminds us where the field is in its war concerns, before noting work on contemporary wars conducted under the flag of feminist International Relations, where experience and bodies have always been front and centre, and where a social war studies emphasis is developing. The discussion then raises definitional complexities that must be addressed and suggests areas where various International Relations traditions could collaborate with feminist International Relations and fields like anthropology to study the social relations of war.

Zimbabwe : the terrain of contradictory development

One of the most distinctive countries in Southern Africa, Zimbabwe presents a fascinating study in contradictions. This book addresses these contraditions, focusing on disjointed trends as continuities and discontinuities with historical patterns of political economy. The author traces the historical antecedents - the precolonial patterns of political economy, the political economy of white settler colonialism, and the class-political conflicts - of contradictory development. In her exploration of the post-independence state and society can be found both the outlines of a country that continues to move in several directions at once and the prospects for a less contradictory future for Zimbabwe.

Experiencing the end and afterlives of International Relations/theory

Having raised the question of whither the international at the end of International Relations a few years ago, this article treats the state of International Relations theory as a continuing endist issue for discussion. Of interest is the restructuring of the field in the post-Cold War years, partly as a result of debates about epistemologies and partly in light of the failure of realisms to lead International Relations to the door of the Soviet and Eastern Bloc collapse, which many thought it could. As the world globalized, so did International Relations, turning itself into a field of differences — theoretical, geographical, philosophical, methodological, and so on. Is this the end of International Relations or its new afterlife? I argue that there are signs that old topics of International Relations, like war, are being taken up in new ways and in new collaborations, such as those that feminist International Relations has forged. At the same time, many camps display the old International Relations tendency to elevate abstract thinking above quotidian international relations, even in the face of clear evidence that the agency of people played a major role in shifting Cold War and Middle East configurations of power. International Relations’ camps should strive less for their own distinctive analysis and more for communication with colleagues, ordinary people making today’s international relations and policy proponents.

Anatomy of a Footnote

A footnote is several different and even contradictory things, really. A footnote can add information to a discussion without requiring the reader to consider that information if s/he is not of a mind to. In such cases, the information is clearly meant to be less important and less central to the discussion than the ‘real’ text above the note. A footnote can also acknowledge another’s ideas or a body of work that the writer finds inspirational – as in good, preferred, approved. Equally, in absenting some people and works and including others, a footnote signals to the reader who and what the writer finds uninspiring and unimportant, or perhaps threateningly important. That is, a footnote can give credit where credit is thought to be due and it can snub ideas, withhold credit and recognition, or only partially acknowledge these (as when names are provided but no reference to specific works is offered). A footnote also stakes out personal space in what can be an impersonal narrative: one’s foot is forward, and the footprint is a clue to where writer has been and goes and who is taken along for the ride or not. It is an eccentric space, the place to shoehorn in details that tickle a writer’s fancy and that reveal his or her life just a little bit and his or her values much more. Whether presenting something to the reader or making details that should be presented go missing, footnoting is the ghost that stalks all formal academic texts and writers: it is an inclusion that is simultaneously an exclusion. A footnote, thereby, is one of the lodestars of the political in academia. Who and what is in and who and what is out: it’s all in the footnotes. Here is a footnote. It appears early in ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) as footnote number 3, on page 444:

Whither the International at the End of IR1

IR today has a far more expansive sense of the international than it had prior to the third debate era. Exciting as this is, the broadening has also resulted in a certain narrowing. We are now an IR of camps that form around, and develop particularistic notions of, the international and its key relations. Camps follow particular personages and texts, often interact minimally with one another, and can be unfamiliar with texts and theories that do not concern them; increasingly, the camps even develop their own journals. Establishing zones of professional distinction that operate in camp-ish modes, the camps of IR render intellectual exception-taking the norm. In some ways, this means that IR is at an end: there is little agreement today on what the field is about. Yet IR lives on with a structure that simultaneously lets more in and misses elements of the international that lie in spaces between camps. Drawing on a range of writings on “camps” and “the end,” I characterise IRs structure today and propose a route to an afterlife that juxtaposes fragmented knowledges instead of seeking reconciliation or continuing on with separateness. The idea is to construct IR collages, wherein differences, even seeming incommensurabilities, are put together into compositions that suggest locations and links as yet unexplored.

Tensions in Feminist Security Studies

Barry Buzan & Lene Hansen (2009) note that the first glimmer of concern with women and security within international relations and peace studies was a site of tension: in the 1970s and into the 1980s, women were not on the agenda of international relations at all. Peace theorists embraced the concept of structural violence but also excluded women from their discussions. There are now new inclusion/exclusion tensions within feminist international relations and its security wing. In this article I address two tensions: (1) concern to maintain the stance that security is a peace issue as some venture systematically into feminist war studies, and (2) a tendency to issue harsh judgements of feminists whose views challenge the accommodation of cultural difference. I briefly consider examples of these two tensions and suggest ways to work with and beyond the structure of international relations to ‘evolve’ (feminist) security studies further.

The Art of War/The War Question in (Feminist) IR

The war for art within the war for Iraq has gone nearly unnoticed in IR, much the way gender has long been neglected by IR analysts of war. One might say that IR has not yet formulated the gender question in war and is now likely to overlook the possibilities of an art question in IR, too. Feminist IR has no art question in war either, in part because feminists understudy war relative to other tranhistorical and transnational institutions, such as the family and religion. This article highlights these respective myopias and explores theoretical and methodological modes of refusing them. I propose to bring art into war thinking via a method associated with art making, the technique of collage; the article includes three imagined collages. Theoretical connections between art, war, gender, and IR build on the work of two feminist theorists — Ann Orford and Judith Butler — whose emphasis on sensory aspects of war dovetails with the empathetic co-operative tradition of feminist IR. The Iraq war contextualises the analysis and foregrounds interventionist war and its humanitarian claims. Throughout, the eye is repeatedly drawn to the power of art, the power of war, and the power latent in a variegated politics of mourning and touch.

Simultaneous revolutions: the Zimbabwean case

The state of Zimbabwes political economy seems to indicate that a potential Marxist revolution lost its fire somewhere along the line and dissolved into contradiction‐riddled reformism under the ZANU (PF) government. This article argues that Zimbabwes post‐independence contradictions are grounded in at least four simultaneous revolutions which took place in the years following World War II. Two of the revolutions were of a type which, borrowing from Antonio Gramsci, can be termed ‘passive’, and the remaining two resembled ‘anti‐passive’ and ‘council’ revolutions. Each unfolded separately but simultaneously and each brought tangible but partial transformations of consciousness, state, economy, and class structure which linger into the present and which defy easy characterisation as the results of ‘a’ failed revolution. The article treats the theoretical characteristics of simultaneous revolutions first and then details their application to the Zimbabwean case.

TerrorWars: Boston, Iraq

This article queries the difference between experiencing an urban terror attack and experiencing war in an urban war zone. The case considered is the Boston marathon bombings of April 2013 and the lockdown that followed, a first in the USA. Official responses to the bombings exceeded militarised urban policing strategies in ways that arguably turned Boston into an urban war zone. To consider that proposition, I juxtapose events in Boston with US war operations around Al Tafar Iraq in 2004, as described by Kevin Powers in The Yellow Birds. I also consider responses to the lockdown by people in the area of the bombings, people waiting for delayed transportation during the lockdown and experts on anti-terrorism.