Gillian Youngs

Blogging and globalization: the blurring of the public/private spheres

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show how the blurring of public and private spheres is among the changes associated with the phenomenon of blogging. In linking this to theories of globalization shows more clearly how new media transformations have macro as well as micro significance.Design/methodology/approach – An assessment of blogging is undertaken in the context of theories of globalization, with specific focus on issues related to public/private linkages, the aim being to make theory‐practice connections to enhance understanding of the wider implications of blogging.Findings – The analysis identifies how theories of globalization offer foundational understanding for investigating blogging as a social rather than purely new media development. This relates to the spatial reconfigurations of social, political, economic and cultural life, which have been characteristic of processes of globalization. The ways in which blogging demonstrates the blurring of public and private spheres is usefully u...

Feminist international relations in the age of the war on terror: Ideologies, religions and conflict

Abstract This article introduces this theme issue and examines how Feminist International Relations is responding to the war on terror. The articles address ideologies, religions and conflict and highlight the enduring problem of the absence of womens voices in the theory and practice of mainstream International Relations. I argue that the question of agency is central to the issue as a whole: womens agency or lack of it, to shape not only our own lives and destinies, but those of the wider societies to which we belong. I argue this is best interpreted through a ‘transitional nexus’ representing the twofold situation women and feminists confront when working for change. This involves not only the kinds of change women are working towards, but also the historically created patriarchal context affecting how such efforts are recognized, or more usually not recognized, because of the marginal status assigned to women and their diverse interests over a long history and across different societies of the world. We need to recognize that there is change ‘for women’ and change ‘by women’, the former too often denying womens agency, and the latter asserting it. The articles in this issue address how both characterize the war on terror.

Private Pain/Public Peace: Women’s Rights as Human Rights and Amnesty International’s Report on Violence against Women

I n this article, I examine the 2001 report of Amnesty International (AI), titled Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: Torture and Ill-Treatment of Women, in relation to women’s rights as human rights. I undertake a critical reading of the report in the context of long-standing feminist campaigning against violence against women. I connect the report’s findings to feminist efforts to politicize, and therefore make of public concern, all forms of oppression and cruelty toward women, whether this occurs in public or private (i.e., domestic or familial) settings. I argue that the report marks an important development in AI’s established strategy for campaigning against the practice of torture by integrating private as well as public forms of violence against women into the general or universal definition of torture. I explain that this ties issues of private pain to public peace by identifying torture as acts by public officials or private individuals across all settings, including the home and community. This definition of torture adds force to feminist arguments that violence against women is violence against women, regardless of the setting. Patriarchal systems have traditionally classified violence against women as private, denoting its distance, and to some degree protection, from the legal gaze and thereby from accountability and punishment. This is fundamentally an issue of spatial politics,

Ethics of access: Globalization, feminism and information society

This article explores the ethics of access in relation to globalization, feminism and information society. It argues that the virtual settings of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are beginning to place significant emphasis on sociospatial as well as geospatial understandings of the world and the interactions that take place within it. The article examines the extreme material and other associated inequalities of contemporary globalization, and the concentration of technological development and power in the rich economies. Historical developments related to these factors are discussed, including the gendered nature of technologies and social processes shaping their production, application and use. It is argued that feminist theory and practice is relevant to broad debates about inequality of access in the information age, as well as to those concentrating specifically on gender and women. The tension between liberal/neoliberal focus on ‘equality’ and the ‘grotesque’ levels of contemporary inequality is raised. It is argued that feminisms long-standing and extensive critique of the problematic masculinist and partial nature of liberal/neoliberal theory, and its framing of agency, offers a major contribution in addressing this. Cyberfeminism works in theory and practice on horizontal networks and consciousness-raising about their potential, arguing that the era of the cybercitizen raises new and important risks of marginalization, on the basis of gender and other factors, and new forms of empowerment.

Embodied Political Economy or an Escape from Disembodied Knowledge

This chapter explores overlapping concerns rooted in my experience of the study of IR in general and IPE more specifically. In my early student days, a naive question haunted me about IR. I would repeatedly, and of course silently, ask myself the following question: where are the people? This was long before I understood the high politics orientation of the field and the implications for its representation of ‘the people’. It took me many years to begin to obtain satisfactory answers to my query, at least to start to explain to myself why there appeared to be no people in this strangely structured world called IR. It remains a pertinent question for newcomers to the discipline whose direct experience of its prime high politics domain will often be limited and who are therefore left with the feeling that they are entering a rather alien world of analysis. Once I became fully familiar with the foci of the discipline, such as foreign policy analysis, international history and international theory, I started to understand that ‘the people’, which from my perspective at that time just meant people in general, were distant but they were there, encapsulated in representative terms such as the state, bureaucracy, interest groups and so on.

Media and mediation in the ‘war on terror’: issues and challenges

These research notes offer some reflections on media and the ‘war on terror’ drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) research seminar series titled ‘Ethics and the War on Terror: Politics, Multiculturalism and Media’. The points cover the relationship of media to questions of security in the ‘war on terror’, and distinctions between old and new media.

Globalization, Ethics, and the 'War on Terror'

This article serves as a lead-in to the special issue and reflects on the relationship between globalization, ethics, and the ‘war on terror’. It argues that while globalization studies have focused substantially on the marketization of life, including the realms of politics and culture, the current ‘war on terror’ phase has directed focus in theory and practice back to traditional state-centred security concerns and critical investigation of state–citizen relations, notably in the context of multicultural societies. The article discusses three key areas of ethics. First those connected to the terminology of ‘war’ in this context and the applicability of just war thinking; second, the challenge of such rhetoric to core values of liberal democracies, such as equality and impartiality; and third, the consequences for the division between the political and public spheres and the supposedly private spheres of religion and culture. Este artículo sirve como introducción al asunto en particular y se refleja en las relaciones entre la globalización, la ética y “la guerra contra el terror”. Sostiene que mientras los estudios sobre la globalización se han enfocado sustancialmente en la marquetización de la vida, que incluye los dominios de la política y la cultura, la fase actual de la ‘guerra contra el terror’ ha regresado el enfoque en teoría y práctica a los asuntos tradicionales de seguridad del estado centralizado y de investigación crítica sobre las relaciones entre el estado y los ciudadanos, particularmente en el contexto de las sociedades multiculturales. El artículo plantea tres áreas claves de ética. Primero, aquellos conectados a la terminología de ‘guerra’ en este contexto y la aplicabilidad del simple pensamiento de guerra; segundo, el reto de semejante retórica a los valores fundamentales de las democracias liberales, tales como la igualdad y la imparcialidad; y tercero, las consecuencias de la división entre las esferas políticas y públicas y las esferas supuestamente privadas de la religión y de la cultura.

Violence, Techno-Transcendence and Feminism: Thinking about Agency in the Digital Age

We live in a different world in the 21st century, and much of that difference is technologically mediated. It is not an overstatement to say that many of our theories and concepts are far from up to speed with what these changes mean. This is the case not only with how to understand and analyse the world and different structures and processes within it but also with inevitably how to critique them, identify negative impacts and overcome them. The Internet and digital transformations that have resulted from it, especially since the arrival of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, have heralded a new spatiality in human affairs yet to be fully comprehended in philosophical, and many other, senses. This new spatiality represents a complex approach to the social that incorporates the Internet and its virtual processes as much as more familiar traditional physical settings and activities. The overall aim in this chapter is to locate violence and women’s agency within this complex spatiality to enhance our thinking about forms of gendered oppression and resistance to them. Use of the Internet has expanded the social sphere and identity and relational processes within it, so it is an integral part of considerations of being and empowerment. This discussion draws on the concept of ‘techno-transcendence’ to capture this expansion and to recognize how the Internet has contributed to reducing temporal and spatial constraints.

Cinderella or Cyberella? Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society

collective. Last but not least, a betterfinanced and more independent local authority must move decisively to combat the causes of corruption. The authors admit, however, that even after installing efficient control systems and a culture of democracy, improved levels of transparency and accountability necessary to prevent corruption in areas where it is the norm are not likely to change entrenched practices and attitudes for a long time. ‘The Role of Development Cooperation’, the final chapter, is the raison d’être for the book. In it the authors offer seven strategic reasons for giving ‘specific and increased’ support to urban development. I abridge these below: