Cynthia Weber

State sovereignty as social construct: The social construction of state sovereignty

During the last several years, there has been a virtual explosion of scholarly interest in sovereignty. This interest transcends all of the major divisions within the study of international relations, and it engages scholars across the globe. There has been a comparable increase in the level of attention given to sovereignty within the popular media. Much of this concern with sovereignty can be explained at least in part by the end of the Cold War and the possibilities of a “New World Order,” which have raised questions about many old assumptions, including those made about state sovereignty. Moreover, the dramatic fragmentation and dismemberment of major states such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, along with the potential fragmentation of many others, have led to renewed questions about the location of sovereignty – whether it lies in a population, or within a contiguous territorial space – and about the criteria for recognition as a sovereign state. As questions begin to be raised about the criteria for recognizing the modern state, can challenges to the traditional idea of sovereignty be far behind? Traditionally, sovereignty has been characterized as a basic rule of coexistence within the states system, a concept that transcends both ideological differences and the rise and fall of major powers, and it is frequently invoked as an institution that must be both protected and defended.

Flying Planes Can Be Dangerous

In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attack on America, a parallel was repeatedly drawn between this event and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The two events seem to have the same meaning in American discourse on 11 September because the two events seem to follow a similar sequencing: surprise attack leading to loss (again) of American innocence at a time when the rhetoric of isolationism was in play. Looking beyond superficial accounts of sequencing, this paper compares and contrasts the moral grammar that structures the meaning of these two events as they circulate in popular representations (the film Pearl Harbour and the official and mediatic representation of Attack on America) and the codes of gender and sexuality upon which these moral grammars rely. It concludes that the two events/representations of events abide by very different codes of gender and sexuality. Pearl Harbor and Pearl Harbor employ the codes of gender, sexuality and morality traditionally applied to sovereign nation—states, while Attack on America employs the codes of gender, sexuality, and morality traditionally applied to global firms in neoliberal takes on globalisation. The paper concludes by reading the investments America has in equating similar sequencing with similar meaning.

Popular visual language as global communication: the remediation of United Airlines flight 93

This article argues that while the linguistic turn in mainstream IR is important in broadening how IR approaches global communications, the linguistic turn has its limitations because mainstream IR tends to, in Mattelarts terms, `ex-communicate the visual from the linguistic. This is highly problematic, considering, firstly, that popular visual language is increasingly the language that amateurs and experts rely upon in order to claim contemporary literacy and, secondly, that much politics is conducted through popular visual language. If the challenge of this Special Issue is to think about how to bring the discipline of IR to meaningful, political life, then a very good place to start is by asking mainstream IR (again) to take popular visual language seriously as an important aspect of contemporary global communication. This article makes this demand of the discipline of IR. It does so by presenting a case-study the official US remediation of United Airlines Flight 93 as an illustration of how contemporary global communications move from the textual to the visual and of what is lost in not taking this move seriously. In particular, it claims that by failing to analyse popular visual language as integral to global communications, mainstream IR risks misunderstanding contemporary subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality.

Reconsidering statehood: examining the sovereignty/intervention boundary

R. B. J. Walker recently noted that far from its largely accepted status as an ‘essentially contested’ concept, state sovereignty is instead an essentially un contested concept. This is a seemingly paradoxical comment for an international relations theorist to make in light of the recent revival of academic scrutiny concerning sovereign statehood. Rather than marking an inattention to recent trends in the sovereignty literature, Walkers statement is a commentary on the way sovereign statehood has been studied. Walker writes of sovereign statehood:

Securitizing the Unconscious: The Bush Doctrine of Preemption and Minority Report

Using Minority Report as its interpretive guide, this essay considers how the securitisation of the unconscious is performed in primarily fiction (film) but also ‘fact’ (US foreign policy). The essay makes two general arguments. Implicitly, it argues that American moralities and what I call US moral grammars of war are not only formulated in traditional realms of politics but in geopolitical moral imaginaries in which US foreign policy intersects with popular (often filmic) imaginaries as well as with narratives about the family. Elaborating on this final point about the family, the essay explicitly argues that the feminine is the keystone of the US moral grammar of war in the war on terror because it is the foundational figure upon whom a specific articulation of a moral US ‘we’ is constructed. What this means is that as the US ‘we’ looks ahead to who a future moral American US ‘we’ might become (which is the theme of Minority Report and a theme in everyday post-11 September American life), it ought to begin by understanding how the feminine both secures and insecures the complex relationship between justice and security, particularly as it functions in relation to the present-day Bush administration’s policies of securitising the unconscious.

Why is there no queer international theory

Over the last decade, Queer Studies have become Global Queer Studies, generating significant insights into key international political processes. Yet, the transformation from Queer to Global Queer has left the discipline of International Relations largely unaffected, which begs the question: if Queer Studies has gone global, why has the discipline of International Relations not gone somewhat queer? Or, to put it in Martin Wight’s provocative terms, why is there no Queer International Theory? This article claims that the presumed non-existence of Queer International Theory is an effect of how the discipline of International Relations combines homologization, figuration, and gentrification to code various types of theory as failures in order to manage the conduct of international theorizing in all its forms. This means there are generalizable lessons to be drawn from how the discipline categorizes Queer International Theory out of existence to bring a specific understanding of International Relations into existence.

Introduction: Design and citizenship

This article introduces design, citizenship and their relationships by contrasting two very different design projects on citizenship. The first is the collaborative project ‘Touching the State’, which was carried out by the publicly funded UK Design Council in collaboration with the independent think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2004. The second is artist and designer Robert Ransicks project Casa Segura/Safe House. Bearing these two design projects in mind, the article suggests that if we want to better understand citizenship, we need to better understand how citizenship, citizens and those who are not (fully) counted as citizens are designed, re-designed, or designated as beyond the scope of design by states, professional designers, activists, citizens and citizen groups, and non-citizen and non-citizenship groups, in all the richly varied ways design and citizenship interact. The urgency in taking design seriously within the realm of citizenship studies is that design offers a new prism through which to address the political. The article then lays out how the contributions to this special issue examine citizenship in relation to the political through this new prism of design.

Design, Translation, Citizenship: Reflections on the Virtual (de)Territorialization of the US – Mexico Border

Taking Zygmunt Bauman and Étienne Balibars reflections on translation as its point of departure, this paper considers how the practice of translation operates through the discourse and practice of ‘design’. Specifically, it considers how design translates the US – Mexico border region into both a territorializing topography of cruelty where violence directed against undocumented migrants is so extreme that it appears to us to be worse than death and a virtual deterritorializing topography of civility where a collective participation in public practices to assist undocumented migrants is possible. It does this by analyzing US defensive designs (US border fence, surveillance) that inhibit the free flow of people across this border versus design projects by Judí Werthein (Brinco/Jump), Ricardo Domínguez et al (Transborder Immigrant Tool), and Robert Ransick (Casa Segura/Safe House) that enable the safer passage of undocumented migrants crossing through this border region. It concludes by reflecting on the limits of translation. Specifically, it considers how the always incompleteness yet overloadedness of translation—the ‘almost’ of translation—means that the virtual deterritorializing designs discussed in this paper place border subjects in positions of almost mobility, almost legality, almost hospitality, almost cruelty, and almost civility. In so doing, these designs go some way toward demonstrating how virtual deterritorializing practices of translation might make it possible, as Étienne Balibar puts it, “to ‘appropriate’ or ‘inhabit’ a transnational political space and transform it into a new public sphere” while at the same time materializing many of the “almost civilities” that are also “almost cruelties” that are activated in any call—including Balibars—for us to become active citizens again.

Fahrenheit 9/11 : The Temperature Where Morality Burns

Michael Moores 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11 is a visual and narrative tour de force that critiques everything from the controversial conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the US presidency to President Bushs handling of his so-called “war on terror.” With its tagline “The temperature where freedom burns,” Moore stresses the dubious ethical nature of the Bush administrations post-9/11 policies, especially as they redefine the US relationship between freedom and censorship. In so doing, he challenges the Bush administrations constructions of US morality as ultimately elitist and self-serving, substituting his own populist, class-based moral America(n) in its place.

Not without my sister(s): Imagining a moral America in Kandahar

Abstract Less than two months after 11 September 2001, and a few weeks after the beginning of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush made an urgent plea to see Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbafs Kandahar. Not only did the President want to see Kandahar; he encouraged US citizens to view it as well. This article offers two readings of Kandahar – the first suggestive of what its filmmaker Makhmalbaf saw in Afghanistan and the second suggestive of what Bush saw (or hoped to see) in Makhmalbafs Afghanistan. In particular, this article focuses on how the Bush administration – against the intentions of Kandahars director and star – propelled occidental subjects to ‘lift the veil’ on Afghanistan and on Afghan women by viewing Kandahar as if it positioned the feminine as a needy and willing object of US rescue. It was in part by laying this particular claim to the separated sisters of Kandahar that the Bush administration constructed a humanitarian US ‘we’ as among the foundations of its ‘moral grammar of war’ in the war on terror.