2013 Submitted Papers

Containment has been salient in intellectual and policy debates for 60 years. It informed US foreign policy towards the USSR and, later, the so-called rogue states. While there is a rich literature on state containment, research on containing territorial transnational actors (TNA) is limited. This article examines Israel’s foreign policy of containment towards two territorial TNA: Hezbollah and Hamas. It argues that Israel pursued two distinct forms of containment—limited and comprehensive—towards Hezbollah and Hamas respectively. The analysis is grounded in the ideas of the chief architect of containment—George F. Kennan—within the debate on, and practice of, containment. Thus, the article explores what might be the implications of the Israeli experience for the broader debate on containment, particularly with regard to territorial TNA. Three issues are highlighted: the circumstances of containment; its applicability to non-state actors; and the role of legitimacy as a component of containment.

What emerges from our empirical research projects is that critical enquiries into security politics should take care not to privilege the moment/event of security threats over the ‘everyday’. Rather, a la Huysmans (1998) and feminist interventions (e.g. Enloe 2000), we argue that critical approaches must encompass how the moment of security is always already implicated in ‘everyday’ political discourses. Waever et al.’s (e.g. 1995) focus on the speech act as a transformative act gives us a too rigid separation between the state of emergency and the discourses that are central to constructing it. Even a discourse theoretical (e.g. Torfing 2005) treatment of the subject, where the definition of ‘security’ is wide, brings us closer to understanding how the political constructs ‘security’, yet it still premises this understanding on an underexplored separation between ‘security’ and the ‘politics’ that precedes it. We draw on our research projects’ in-depth analysis of security articulations by political elites in the UK and US to deconstruct ‘security’ and thus (re)locate the political in the articulations, performances and practices that constitute it.

When Dr. Mariam Saleh was appointed Minister for Women’s Affair’s as part of the Hamas led Palestinian National Authority government in 2006, there was a huge uproar in the Palestinian women’s movement. Many women active in women’s rights NGOs saw the appointment of an Islamist as the Minister of Women’s Affairs as a contradiction in terms. In this paper I examine the debate that happened in the aftermath of this appointment. This paper is based on the fieldwork I conducted in the Palestinian occupied territories with Hamas affiliated female Islamists as well as women’s rights activists. In it I study the underlying assumptions of the women’s movement as well as those of female Islamists. In light of Chandra Mohanty’s work, I examine the relationship not only of the Palestinian women’s rights movement and their Islamic counterparts, but also the international dimension of this debate, and what significance this has for international feminist and women’s solidarity world in general. In this paper I ask what the ‘clash’ between women’s rights activists and female Islamists can tell us about the current affair of international politics. This paper uses postcolonial critique to question not only the claims to universality of feminist and women’s rights groups, but also the assumption that ‘religion’ necessarily disempowers subjects.

One could argue that IR more than any other discipline is prone to what Rogers Brubaker calls ‘groupism’ and a ‘clichéd constructivism’ when dealing with identity politics in the social sciences (2004: 38),1 a constructivism in name only – limited to the introduction section or expressed in customary yet seemingly perfunctory disclaimers – but the main analysis, at large, continues to be done under essentialist and substantialist presumptions of ethnic identities, often bordering a primordialism slipping in through the backdoor. Although a latecomer to the study of identity politics, due to IR’s primacy in explaining issues of war and peace in the domaine international, the expertise of IR scholars carries considerable weight among practitioners as a first point of reference for policy makers, governmental officials, political think tanks, and the military in addressing strategies for a specific ethnic conflict or the phenomenon at large. How IR categorizes and understands ethnic conflict thus matters a great deal beyond the ivory tower.

For a mediation process to be fully successful it needs to take into account if the agreement negotiated between the communities’ representatives will be supported by the communities they represent. This crucial dimension of conflict resolution and mediation success lacks a cohesive theoretical grounding drawn from empirical analysis. While the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland was highly supported by 90 per cent from the Nationalist community, the 51 per cent vote from the Unionist community is less expressive. In Cyprus, though the Annan Plan was rejected due to the low 24 per cent vote from the Greek Cypriot community, 65 per cent of the Turkish Cypriot community voted in favour of its implementation. When implementation of peace agreements negotiated at high-level mediation processes is dependent upon their democratic acceptance by the people in referendums, a deeper understanding of the conditions that generate community support for the agreements reached at mediated high-level negotiations is necessary.

This paper explores how we understand gender, agency and violence. My first claim is that there is a myth of motherhood ordering boundaries of appropriate gender behaviour. I argue that ‘unconscious’ ideologies, ideas in our societies, portray motherhood as natural, something we do not question, when it is in fact constructed. The notion of motherhood as natural has implications for how we understand female agency in political violence. In effect, it creates a tension in representations of female agency in political violence, a tension between identities of life-giving and life-taking. The second claim is that representations of female agency in political violence in mass media and popular culture are told as stories about monsters, heroines and victims, where stories about heroines and/or victims are stories about appropriate femininity and stories about monsters are stories of inappropriate femininity. Subsequently, I apply this framework to Britz and argue that boundaries of appropriate femininity are communicated through the discourses of the Myth of Protection, the Deviant Womb and the Cyborg Body. As a result, the myth of motherhood is exposed in three main ways: by Nasima faking motherhood, by Nasima hesitating about her mission and by representing Nasima as a desperate victim with personal rather than political motivations. My concluding argument is that representations of female agency in political violence are intimately linked with ideas about female bodies and performance of motherhood. Thus, it is only by exploring representations of motherhood that the limitations and boundaries of discourses of female agency in political violence can be exposed, understood and challenged.

This paper argues that international political economy (IPE) should reach beyond the ivory tower by developing a research agenda that includes a better understanding of the importance of rhetoric and narrative in economic policy, drawing on interpretative and constructivist approaches in the social sciences. It is proposed that governments economic language should be understood as not simply descriptive, but constitutive, of the politics of the economy. Economic narratives are designed to turn uncertainty into certainty and so provide a basis for policy action; rhetoric can thus be either a vehicle for political change or a constraint on politicians ability to think and speak new economic ideas. Yet too often political science has declined to engage with what governments say about the economy, in part because the impact of narrative is not amenable to analysis using the disciplines stock-­‐in-­‐trade methods. Political economy, in particular, has tended to dismiss rhetoric as either misleading spin or a projection of underlying material interests, preferring models that strip out rhetoric in favour of harder variables. Methodological and theoretical barriers to studying rhetoric and narrative have therefore led us to neglect an important source of insight into the politics of economics,and reduced our ability to engage in public debates about it. That oversight is particularly serious at a time when global economic crisis makes understanding the politics of the global economy more pressing than ever.

Both traditional and critical definitions of ‘terrorism’ and ‘political violence’ set out to describe the phenomenon as being violence with political intent. Traditional definitions will include the intent to cause fear in their definition of ‘terrorism’ while those who are critical tend to demonstrate how this ‘fear’ is often over-exaggerated with disproportionate responses. However, these definitions are fundamentally flawed due to their reliance on intent. The study of intent is open to accusations of educated guess work and definitions based on intent cannot provide the basis for sound academic research. This study works within reader-response theories to reconceptualise political violence in removing intent and sets out a new framework in which to study violence, its responses and those who support it.

Mainstream IR theory on regional cooperation and institutionalisation has been dominated by liberal-institutionalism and the experience of the EU. However, the applicability of the EU and its legal-functionalist model of institutionalism for evaluating regional organisations in other region of the world is questionable. This paper sets to examine whether a different model for regional cooperation is identifiable for regions composed of weak states, or whether all regional organisation are as distinct to one another as many regional organisations in other regions are to the EU. A comparatively analysis of ASEAN and SCO suggests the model of regional cooperation and institution building in the contemporary political landscape in Asia differs from mainstream models. Although, SCO and ASEAN differs on a few significant points, the two organisations have similar agendas and models of cooperation, emphasising a common spirit, flexibility and a focus on regime security. On this basis it is possible to assert that a different form of regional cooperation is evident between states in which significant challenges to the prevailing regimes exist.

The sustainable or “eco” tourism industry has been heavily criticised for “greenwashing”, or the pretence of sustainable practices in the search for profit. This paper will discuss the regulation of the sustainable tourism industry, focusing on how effective existing regulation is at ensuring that sustainable tourism fulfils its commitments. A comparison will be made between the significance of traditional state regulation and more voluntary forms of regulation that have emerged in recent years. Insights will be drawn from empirical research in Costa Rica during the summer of 2012. Costa Rica’s experience is particularly interesting because it has one of the most developed systems of governance for sustainable tourism in the world, partly due to its state-run certification system, the Certificate for Sustainable Tourism. Existing alongside this certification system is the Rainforest Alliance’s verification programme, which raises interesting issues in terms of the compatibility of these two programmes, particularly as one is run by a public actor and the other, privately. This paper will focus on the effectiveness of these programmes and the implications of the shifting focus of the state from legal mechanisms to voluntary mechanisms of regulation for the state-market debate. Key words: governance, regulation, sustainable tourism, sustainable development, environmental governance

The paper takes the theoretical framework outlined in Adler’s and Barnett’s seminal edited book Security Communities (1998) and, by examining recent events, considers how Russia is responding to the challenges inherent in closer integration into the European security community. The paper first outlines the central features of a security community; second, looks briefly at the present situation in Europe, and to what extent Russia may be considered as part of a wider European security community; third, focuses on a number of unresolved - theoretical and empirical - problems in terms of how Russia’s relates to this community; and finally assesses the prospects for the development of a ‘mature’ security community.

An assessment of the strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures of the first decade of the ICC.

Using primary sources this paper examines the role of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in the evolution of Israel''s foreign policy towards Hamas and Hezbollah since 2000. It argues that Israel''s foreign policy underwent a shift from unilateralism and containment to consolidation and the quest for deterrence. After examining this shift the paper proceeds to explore the security and political implications of this shift and the sustainability of Israel''s foreign policy reorientation.

This paper explores the way in which heroines are constructed in representations of female agency in political violence. First, two discourses that organize heroine stories are discussed: the Protective Mother and the Non-Mother. Within these discourses, the female subject is either ascribed agency by performing a maternal role, or the subject is allowed agency because it is lacking the ‘maternal essence’. In the remainder of the paper, the argument is applied to two recent cases of heroines: The British Navy sailor Faye Turney and ‘Jeanne’, a fictional character in Female Agents. It is shown how the subjects are performing the discourses mentioned but also how agency is limited within such discourses. In conclusion, the paper argues, firstly, that the writing of Faye Turney and Jeanne as heroines is gendered because their agency is either communicated through motherhood or through an absence of motherhood which means that essentialist ideas about gender are reinforced. Secondly, it argues that motherhood is not only a discourse denying women agency in political violence, it is also instrumental to the way in which female agency in political violence is enabled in heroine stories.

The Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-39, provides an intriguing and topical, though little studied, instance of the utility of air power in counter-insurgency. Most recent counter-insurgency scholarship focuses on post-1945 approaches typified by ‘hearts and minds’, with air power in a supporting role. Inter-war air control is seen as an outdated coercive colonial method. This paper contends the RAF in Palestine implemented a sophisticated concept of air-land integration that enabled on-call close air support, and resulted in air power playing a critical role in the suppression of the Revolt. Air power inflicted most insurgent casualties, enabled British freedom of manoeuvre, and used minimum force. This air-land integration concept was not adopted by British forces preparing for a continental war because the RAF did not believe close air support would be an effective use of air power.