Daniela Tepe

Introduction - Social reproduction in international political economy: Theoretical insights and international, transnational and local sitings

ABSTRACT This introduction provides an introduction to current innovative theoretical and empirical research on social reproduction. While the work showcased herein is by scholars from Europe and North America (reflecting a western bias), the diversity in the empirical cases goes some way to overcoming the focus on North American countries. The contributions vary from transnational accounts of social reproduction to the study of changes in social reproduction in the countries of the global south. The collection also offers contrasts in research on the macroeconomic level with research on the microeconomic level in order to allow for an understanding of peoples experiences of changes in patterns of social reproduction.

The State and Civil Society

By addressing the propositions that were set out in the introduction, this chapter brings together what has been developed up to this point. It becomes clear that materialist state theory as employed in this book and especially the Gramscian understanding of the integral state form meaningful tools to understand the agitation of the landmines campaign in Germany and the UK.

‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory’: Feminist Materialism, Intersectionality and the Social Totality of the Frankfurt School

This is certainly not the first contribution to address the nature of Critical Theory, nor the first to address the necessarily feminist character of Critical Theory. Given that most of the writing concerned with the latter has gone largely unheard in much of IR and IPE scholarship, it seems appropriate to address this subject again. In 1985, Nancy Fraser, in her seminal piece ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender’, engaged with Habermas’s conceptualization of distinct logics of symbolic and natural reproduction relating to the spheres of life-world and system-world as crucial to his Critical Theory. Fraser exposed these distinctions as conceptually inadequate and potentially ideological, highlighting the ‘dual aspect’ of both spheres and logics. She showed how Habermas’s logic potentially: directs attention away from the fact that the household, like the paid workplace, is a site of labor, albeit of unremunerated and often unrecognized labor. Likewise, it does not make visible the fact that in the paid workplace, as in the household, women are assigned to, indeed ghettoized in, distinctively feminine, service-oriented and often sexualized occupations. Finally, it fails to focalize the fact that in both spheres women are subordinated to men. (Fraser, 1985, p. 107)

IR and NGOs — A Simplistic Story?

This chapter deconstructs IR’s understanding of non-state actors as too optimistic and theoretically under-complex. A normative bias towards actors of ‘global civil society’, ‘transnational civil society’ or ‘international civil society’ is a common feature of IR theoretical engagements with NGOs. In its most extreme, IR argues that NGOs tend to pluralise power and to problematise violence (Kaldor 2003: 8), that the society of non-state actors ‘encourages compromise and mutual respect’ (Keane 2003: 14), and that NGOs act as a ‘world consciousness’ (Kohout and Mayer-Tasch 2002). I will argue that these emancipatory understandings of non-state actors are the product of the absence of a rigid theorizing of the capitalist state and capitalist society.

The Landmines Campaign and the Ottawa Convention — The Involvement of NGOs in Banning Landmines

In addition to providing the necessary background, this chapter moves on to sketch debates surrounding the development of the Ottawa Convention. The focus lies on the creation of German and UK governmental positions up to the point of both governments signing the Convention. The overall purpose of this chapter is to provide the groundwork for the following analytical chapters that seek to describe the relations between discourse and interests, and between states and NGOs against the background of the implementation of the landmines campaign in Germany and the UK.

Discourses and Interests

I will now turn to highlight the historically specific settings that the landmines campaign confronted in Germany and the UK respectively. The consecutive chapter – Chapter 5 – locates these findings within the theoretical argument of this book, offering an indication of the historically specific state–civil society relationships in Germany and the UK that build the background against which the landmines campaigns was launched.

NGOs and Materialist State Theory

Approaches in IR dealing with global civil society have a limited understanding of the capitalist state. Consequently, these approaches construct NGOs as part of a global civil society that is empirically and normatively vague. Relations of dominance largely disappear from view, in parts creating an understanding of NGOs as a coherent force for good. The argument supported in this book is that theoretical considerations about the relationship of NGOs and the state have to be grounded in an understanding of the capitalist state and the international system.

Gender in the Theory and Practice of International Political Economy

At first sight, a neo-Gramscian framework is a promising framework that might be utilized by feminist scholars who seek to understand, analyze, and challenge social relations of inequality, who work within a broadly historical materialist tradition, and who are dedicated to the task of reclaiming an explicitly anticapitalist feminism. Nancy Hartsock, for example, has noted that Marxist inspired critiques of class domination “underline the need for a theory that can put individual and intentional actions in the context of structural constraints,” and in so doing, “explain how what seem on the surface voluntary interactions between equal participants are in reality deeply and structurally unequal.”1 Within the context of International Relations (hereafter, IR) and International Political Economy (hereafter, IPE) specifically, scholars with similar ambitions have noted the intellectual and political affinities between feminists and neo-Gramscians2 and, in recent years, work has appeared that has undertaken a thoughtful and serious analysis of gender within a broadly neo-Gramscian framework.3 However, in much neo-Gramscian IR and IPE, gender remains either wholly neglected or undertheorized. Thus, while feminists and neo-Gramscians can be seen as fellow travelers in some respects, the potential rewards to be gained from a serious engagement between neo-Gramscian and feminist approaches have not, as yet, been fully realized, and so the promise of neo-Gramscian approaches remains largely unfulfilled.