Kimberly Hutchings

Making Sense of Masculinity and War

This article examines modes of theorizing about war in two contemporary literatures: on war and gender and on the changing nature of war. Both these literatures make a connection between masculinity and war. The article argues that, on examination, the link between masculinity and war does not depend on the substantive meanings of either masculinity or war, or on a causal or constitutive relation between the two; rather, masculinity is linked to war because the formal, relational properties of masculinity provide a framework through which war can be rendered both intelligible and acceptable as a social practice and institution.

Time and world politics : thinking the present

This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global ‘present’ are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, that fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. In so doing, it puts into question the ways in which social scientists and normative theorists diagnose ‘our’ post-Cold War times. The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political and international theory. The second part of the book examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new ‘untimely’ way of thinking about time in world politics. This book will be required reading for all those interested in the philosophical bases and critical possibilities of contemporary theories of international and global politics.

Dialogue between whom? The role of the west/non-west distinction in promoting global dialogue in IR

There is a politics to the West/non-West distinction that is bound up with predominant models for dialogue in IR; rethinking these models of dialogue implies a new politics, and therefore also, I will suggest, a move away from the West/non-West binary as a way of characterising the participants in dialogic exchange oriented towards the expansive transformation of disciplinary imaginaries.

Speaking and hearing' Habermasian discourse ethics, feminism and IR

It is impossible not to encounter Habermas as an important interlocutor in the fields of critical theory, feminist theory and international relations theory across which I work. He is the outstanding critical theorist of his generation, in the tradition of critique which was carried through the Frankfurt School and traces itself back to Kant, Hegel and Marx. And for feminists and international relations theorists, he represents one of the directions in which feminist theory or post-positivist IR could develop, deepening its epistemological and sociological understanding without sacrificing the possibility of the rationally grounded critique of contemporary world politics. This article is the beginning of an attempt to trace through layers of difficulty encountered in using Habermas as a normative resource for a particular version of feminist international theory, which understands feminism to be a transnational, cosmopolitan (but not univocal) project, neither authorised nor legitimised by any foundational ground or teleological end. I will argue that although Habermass notion of discourse ethics seems initially promising as a way forward for non-foundational feminist theory, in the end any ‘dialogue’ on Habermasian terms turns out to be one-sided and exclusive.

Political Theory and Cosmopolitan Citizenship

This book is an example of the kind of theoretical work identified by Heater in the above quotation. It seeks to explore the implications of conceptualising citizenship as something which is not necessarily tied to a bounded political community. The reasons why this has become a focus for political theoretical argument in the recent past are varied. Many of them are referred to in Heater’s own consideration of contemporary cosmopolitan ideas in his book World Citizenship and Government (1996). The reasons range from the consequences of perceived processes of globalisation and increased economic and cultural interdependence and commonality across the world, to the growing significance of global ecological issues, to the growth of such trans-state political structures as the EU. In relation to this book, however, the most important impetus for argument about the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship stems from normative ethical and political concerns about the possible costs and benefits to political order, community, rights and participation of opting either for a cosmopolitan or a bounded citizenship ideal. This is the argument which is set out in the following two chapters by Linklater and Miller respectively, and around which the rest of the contributions to this book are constructed.

Virtuous Violence and the Politics of Statecraft in Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber

This article seeks to problematise the dominant understandings of the relationship between politics and violence in political theory. Liberal political theory identifies politics with the pacified arena of the modern state; although violence may sometimes be an instrument for the pursuit of political goals, politics is conceptualised as the ongoing non-violent negotiation of competing rights and interests, and the overall aim of liberalism is to remove violence from the political process. Radical critics deny liberalisms promise to deliver a divorce between politics and violence, but they often share liberalisms premise that politics and violence are distinct in principle, and ought to be so in practice, developing a vision of politics beyond violence. In contrast, the theory of politics and violence that can be read in the work of Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber understands politics as immanently connected to violence. Neither politics nor violence is reducible to a singular logic. A distinctively political violence constitutes and polices political distinctions. In doing this political violence is bound up with its own limitations – it is one medium for the construction of a world which, according to these three thinkers, it does not and cannot fully control. Liberal and radical thinkers tend to treat Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber in their theory of political power as outdated or, worse, as celebrating the role of violence in politics. In our interpretation, however, their work has the virtue of demonstrating the paradoxes of political action, in particular the complex relationship between politics and violence which is neither one of naturalistic necessity nor pure strategy or instrumentality, but is embedded in politics as statecraft.

Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence

In contrast to liberal, Christian and other pacifist ethics and to just war theory, a range of 20th-century thinkers sought to normalize the role of violence in politics. This article examines the justificatory strategies of Weber, Sorel, Schmitt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. They each engage in justificatory argument, deploying arguments for violence from instrumentality, from necessity and from virtue. All of these arguments raise problems of validity. However, we find that they are reinforced by the representation of violence in terms of a specific aesthetic, either tragedy or sublimity, and by certain rhetorical textual strategies. We conclude that the persuasive force of these arguments for violence rests as much, if not more, on aesthetics and rhetoric, as it does on argument.

1988 and 1998: Contrast and Continuity in Feminist International Relations

This article considers contrasts and continuities in feminist IR scholarship over the past twenty years. It traces various shifts in the substantive and methodological concerns of feminist IR in the decade between 1988 and 1998. It concludes with some reflections on the extent to which the agenda for feminist IR scholars in 2008 remains continuous with the last twenty years and the extent to which it has changed or is likely to change.

Avowing violence: Foucault and Derrida on politics, discourse and meaning

This article enquires into the understanding of violence, and the place of violence in the understanding of politics, in the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. These two engaged in a dispute about the place of violence in their respective philosophical projects. The trajectories of their respective subsequent bodies of thought about power, politics and justice, and the degrees of affirmation or condemnation of the violent nature of reality, language, society and authority, can be analysed in relation to political traditions of realism, radicalism and liberalism. We trace the starting points, and points of convergence and divergence between them, and consider the implications of their work for our capacity to critically judge episodes and uses of violence in political contexts.

Foucault and International Relations Theory

By scrutinizing how proto-diplomacy was exercised at multiple sites, we can better understand how diplomacy emerged from unfamiliar relationships of force and truth at the infra- and supra-state levels. In short, a genealogical approach to diplomatic theory allows us to challenge its traditional state-centricity without denying the centrality of power politics in international relations. (Der Derian, 1987: 83)