Lecture Notes 5

Alternative Theories

Paul Viotti
 Globalists are guided by four key assumptions:
o It is necessary to understand the global context within which states and other
entities interact.
o Globalists stress the importance of historical analysis in comprehending the
international system.
o Globalists assume that particular mechanisms of domination exist that keep 3 rd
World states from developing and that contributes to worldwide uneven
development.
o Globalists assume that economic factors are absolutely critical in explaining the
evolution and functioning of the world capitalist system and the relegation of 3 rd
World states to a subordinate position.
 Marx influenced globalists in three ways:
o Marx was concerned with exploitation of the many by the few
o Capitalism exhibited certain law-like qualities in terms of its development and
expansion
o Society must be studied in its totality, not piecemeal.
 Hobson noted that capitalist societies were faced with three basic interrelated
problems:
o Overproduction
o Underconsumption by workers and other classes
o Oversavings on the part of the capitalists
 Lenin:
o Imperialism explained why Marx’s prediction of proletarian revolution in Europe
had failed to come about. Imperialism allowed capitalism a breathing space.
o We’ll move from domestic class conflict towards international class conflict in
order to subdue domestic problems.
o Imperialism is the last stage of capitalism
 Dependency theorists deal not only with external factors, but also deal increasingly with
internal constraints on development.
 Easiest way to understand Dependency Theory is through coresemi-
peripheryperiphery relationships.
 Dependency & Capitalist World-System Perspectives view post-colonial system and say
that neo-colonialism exists without the formal structures of the imperial colony.
 Capitalist World-System Perspective differs from dependency in two ways:
o Advocates of the capitalist world-system perspective not only are concerned
with the lack of Third World development, but also wish to understand the
economic, political and social development of regions throughout the entire
world.
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 o The goal is to understand the fate of various parts of the world at various times
in history within the larger context of a developing world political economy.
 For Globalists, changes within the world-system appear to fall into three categories:
o There are changes in the actors’ positions within the world capitalist economy.
o Some scholars identify phases or cycles of capitalist growth and contraction that
affects all societies.
o There is what has been termed a structural transformation of the system
 The Globalist view of the capitalist world-system is hardly static. The world-system is
dynamic, reflecting a myriad of activities and changes.

J. Ann Tickner

Introduction
 Feminists have never been satisfied with boundary constraints of conventional IR. While
women have been active, their voices have rarely been heard.
 For feminist IR scholars, understanding is preferred over explaining.
 Likelihood of conflict will not diminish until unequal gender hierarchies are reduced or
eliminated.
 not just about women but also about the way that international policies are framed,
studied and implemented
 only through gender analysis can we understand the differential impact of the state and
the global economy on the lives of women and men
Chapter 1
 Feminist scholars use a different lens.
 Focus is on the local level.
 Tickner focuses on hegemonic masculinity.
 When we are talking about groups outside of gender, we still use gendered language.
 First Debate—1930s-1940s: realists criticized so-called idealists for their optimistic
assessment of the possibility of cooperation in international politics through legal
agreements and the building of international institutions.
 Second Debate—1950s-1960s: Methodological debate between early realists and more
scientifically oriented scholars. Developed models from the natural sciences and
economics to build their theories.
 Third Debate—1980s-1990s: Development of Post-Positivism to challenge the social-
scientific methodologies, ontology and epistemology of conventional IR. Post-Positivism
includes critical theory, historical sociology, postmodernism and feminism.
 Sandra Whitworth has suggested that, to incorporate gender, theories must satisfy
three criteria:
o They must allow for the possibility of talking about the social construction of
meaning.
o They must discuss historical variability.

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 o They must permit theorizing about power in ways that uncover hidden power
relations.
Chapter 2
 How do we see conflict in IR terms? Feminist terms?
 Security-seeking behavior of states is described in gendered terms.
 The association of men with war and women with peace also reinforces gender
hierarchies and false dichotomies that contribute to the devaluation of both women and
peace.
 Security is often focused on external, interstate, but what about internal, intrastate
security issues? Non-military security issues such as, disease, environmentalism, identity
theft, etc.
 Structural violence—decreased life expectancy, economic deprivation
 How do unequal social structures affect conflict and vice versa?
 Security: Defined broadly in multidimensional and multilevel terms
o Security of individuals is related to national and international politics
 Security threats include:
o Domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender subordination, war, ecological
destruction
 Those at the margins of states may be rendered more insecure by their state’s security
policies
 Myth of Protection:
o Much of the legitimacy of war is based on the cultural construction that men
fight wars to protect ‘vulnerable people’
o Yet, women and children constitute a majority of casualties in recent wars
o Feminists highlight:
 Militaries are often threats to individual’s (particularly women) security and
competitors for scarce resources on which women may depend on more
then men
 Wartime rape as deliberate military strategy
Chapter 3
 Women have been affecting development for a long time
 Need to understand women’s economic insecurities.
 Women share a certain commonality since they are disproportionately located at the
bottom of the socioeconomic scale in all societies.
 Even in areas where economic growth is rapid, improvements in the position of women
have not been made.
 Women have not been left outside global restructuring; they are participating while
remaining invisible.
 Certain feminists also claim that values espoused by liberalism of privilege (individual
freedom, property rights) emphasize values associated with a Western form of
hegemonic masculinity. These values are then reproduced in economic models.

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  Top-down visions of universality hide the extent to which the globalization of capital and
finance is built on divisions, often gendered and racialized, both within and between
societies.
 Gendered constructs such as “breadwinner” and “housewife”—central to modern
Western definitions of masculinity, femininity, and capitalism—have been evoked at
various times to support the interests of the state and the economy.
 Women are disproportionately located at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale in all
societies
 Disproportionate poverty cannot be explained by market conditions alone
 Gendered role expectations contribute to their economic insecurity:
o Economic worth of women’s work
 Kinds of tasks that women are expected to do

General Info about Alternative Approaches from other sources:

Feminism
 Objectivity is culturally defined – AND it is associated with masculinity - so objectivity is
ALWAYS partial
 National interest is multi-dimensional – so not one set of interests can (or should) define
it …
 Power as domination and control privileges masculinity …
 All political action has moral significance – cannot/should not separate them
 Perhaps look for common moral elements …?
 Feminists deny the autonomy of the political realm – building boundaries around a
narrowly defined political realm defines political in a way that excluded the concerns
and contributions of women.
 How gender biased – or masculinist - is the discipline of IR?
 How can we convince the mainstream of the significance of scholarship on gender and
feminism?

 critique of invisibility of at least half of the population in most IR theories

 existing theories focus almost exclusively on male interpretations of human behavior

 Existing theories more or less ignore effects of international system on women (and
non-elite men) and consequently do not actually describe the system as it exists for
most people
 re-interpretation within another context leads to redefinition

 Focuses on social relations, particularly gender relations; rather than anarchy

 International system:
o constituted by socially constructed gender hierarchies
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 o these contribute to gender subordination
 Knowledge:
o mostly created by men and is about men
 Analysis:
o micro-level
o tend to share a post-positivist commitment
 IR represents a gendered view of reality, that is premised on ‘masculine’ interests
 Not necessarily ‘post-structural’ or ‘critical’ in their methods; nor is feminism confined
to IR
 Issues:
o Women’s equality and greater visibility in politics
o Critique of the Enlightenment as premised on a voice that is ‘European,
rationalist and male’ (and ‘white’).
 In Gramsci’s terms:
o the ‘hegemony’ of the existing world order and the bulk of IR theorising has
naturalised masculine interests
o women’s voices are consistently marginalised and silenced

Challenges of post-structural IR feminism:

 to challenge the often unseen androcentric/ masculine biases in the way that
knowledge is constructed
 to develop accounts of the social world that trace the influence of gender in all our
discursive categories, and especially ‘the international’
 to question/ ‘dislocate’ what we accept as normal:
 E.g. Cynthia Weber (1999) Faking It: US Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era
A feminist approach:
 reject commitment to ‘scientific’ methodology
 claim no single standard of methodological correctness
 feminist knowledge has emerged from a deep scepticism about the claims of ‘universal’
knowledge, which, in reality, are based primarily on masculine experiences and
perspectives
 regard knowledge-building is an ongoing process
 describe knowledge-building as emerging through ‘conversation’ with texts, research
subjects, or data
 research focus is not only on the subordination of women, but also other disempowered
people
 agree with positivists that research should pose questions that are ‘important’ in the
‘real world’ (King et al. 1994; Van Evera, 1997)
 disagree with the positivist definitions of ‘important’ and the ‘real world’
 Conventionally, scientific progress is judged not on the merit of the questions that are
asked but on how questions are answered

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  Feminists find that the questions that are asked – and also questions that are not asked
– are more important for judging knowledge.
 The questions that feminists ask
o are typically not answerable within a conventional social ‘science’
o challenge the core assumptions of the discipline and deconstruct its central
concepts
o E.g. ‘Why have wars predominantly been fought by men and how do gendered
structures of masculinity and femininity legitimate war and militarism for both
women and men?
o To answer such a question:
• challenge the separation of ‘public’ and ‘private’
• seek to uncover continuities between disempowerment of women in the
domestic sphere and in the public – political and international – life
• E.g. investigate military prostitution and rape as tools of war and
instruments of state policy
 Knowledge based on the standpoint of women’s lives leads to more robust objectivity:
o broadens the base from which we derive knowledge
o the perspectives of marginalised people may reveal aspects of reality obscured
by more orthodox approaches to knowledge-building
 Emphasis on sociological analyses that begin with individuals and the hierarchical social
relations in which their lives are situated
 Reject the conventional separation between subject and object of research:
o acknowledging the subjective element in one’s analysis increases the objectivity
of research
Types of Feminist Theory
 Difference Feminism
o If women were in charge of more states, there would be less war. Women are
less warlike.
o Gender differences are deep-rooted and partly biological. Women are inherently
more peaceful than men
 Liberal Feminism
o Women are no different than men, but ought to be included in diplomacy,
military, etc. Would increase the talent pool.
o Women are as capable as men in any field, including war-fighting; gender
equality will extend the liberal peace.
 Post-modernist Feminism
o Gender differences are social constructions. Feminist perspectives should break
with positivist science (Tickner)
o But generally gender is under-studied in IR (and peace research)
o A challenge primarily to realism, which is seen as a pseudo-science masking male
domination (patriarchy). Realists use the language of power/virility to glorify war
– often in sexual ways: “This is my rifle. This is my gun. One’s for killing, the
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 other’s for fun.” Cynthia Enloe, author of “Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making
Feminist Sense of International Politics,” writes about how war almost always
comes with rape of women, and how military forces almost always come with
prostitution. And yet these are often overlooked in scholarly work on war. Also,
realists use a narrow definition of “security” that overplays the importance of
the state and downplays the role of community. Tickner is a post-modernist
feminist.

Critical Theory
 Critical theory’s boarder intellectual origins in Marxism
 Marx formulated the global-level ‘emancipation project’:
o political emancipation
o elimination of economic inequality
o Posits capitalism as the driving force in IR (e.g. Wallerstein).
 Marxism: Wallerstein
o World system has been created to benefit capitalism; capitalism requires a
division of labor to function.
o State system evolved as a requirement for capitalism.
o This division of labor allows core states (strong/wealthy) to dominate the
peripheral states (weak/poor) as the resources of the periphery are used to
increase profits in the core states.
o International politics maintains this division of labor.
 Historical emphasis:
o ‘historical materialism’
o mostly, historic change has been un-emancipatory
 Recognition that a given order serves particular interests
o e.g. class; or the ‘developed countries of the West’
 Representation of the existing order as ‘natural’:
o Gramsci: ‘hegemony’
 Feminism: Tickner
o IR as a discipline tends to disregard the contributions of women as feminist
theorists are more likely to use a different type of discourse than their
counterparts.
o Realism’s focus on states does not allow for the explanation or realization of
female equality.
o Liberalism’s focus on collective security is based on Western ideals which
denigrates women.
o A shift towards using the scientific method further dismisses methodology which
is more associated with feminist theories.
o Discussions of security should also examine discrimination and suffering
throughout the system.
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Positivists vs. post-positivists
 Positivist social theory insists that
o unless there is certain knowledge there can be no real knowledge at all
o ‘either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our
knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with
madness, with intellectual and moral chaos’ (Bernstein)
o any approach that refuses to privilege a single perspective (as corresponding to
reality) is guilty of relativism and is unable to make judgements about everyday
life and political conflict
 Post-positivists argue that although there may be no ‘absolute’ knowledge, this does not
undermine one’s ability to make decisions in the world:
o this ‘allows for a decision-making regime based on personal and social
responsibility’ which is not relegated ‘to objectified sources “out there” (e.g., the
system, the government, science, the party, the state, history, human nature)’
(George, 1994)
 Post-positivist methods:
o Discourse analysis - a ‘language turn’ (e.g. Foucault; Milliken)
o Analysis of practices (Neumann 2002)
o Shift from ‘mimetic’ approaches (that attempt to model reality) to aesthetic ones
(aimed to relive reality in unique creative ways (Bleiker 2001)
Dependency Theory
 Critical Theory: Events cannot be explained apart from their historical setting;
theoretical perspectives are of limited utility.
 What is Dependency?
o Generally dependency is the reliance on a person, or something for support, survival
or enhancement
o In development studies dependency speaks to a situation in which a particular
country or region relies on another for support, “survival” and growth.
 What is the Dependency Critique?
o A Neo-Marxist perspective that maintains that Third World countries are
Underdeveloped because of the activities of the First World.
o Dependency theory holds that “the condition of underdevelopment is precisely the
result of the incorporation of the Third World economies into the capitalist world
system which is dominated by the West and North America” (Randall and Theobald
1998, 120)
o Dependency Theory emerged in the 1950s as a critique of Modernization
o Argues that these Classical theorists failed to recognize that Imperialism, Colonialism
and Neo-Colonialism are solely responsible for the development of the First World
and the subsequent underdevelopment of the Third World.
 Features of the Dependency Theorization
o The existence of a Capitalist World System

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 o In this capitalist system countries are divided into Metropoles and Satellites (Frank)
or Core and Semi-periphery and Periphery (Wallerstein)
o Core Countries/ are the Rich Industrialized Countries of the West, whose GDP and
per capita income exceed 7% per annum
o Peripheries are those countries whose annual rate of growth is less than 5-7% and
are primary producers of goods and services
o Semi-peripheries: Newly industrialized countries, China, Singapore, Taiwan, South
Korea (Asian Tigers), Cuba, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt, Portugal,
Spain and Italy.
 Features Continued
o The capitalist system operates where peripheries/Satellites provide raw material for
the Core countries who manufacture and sells it. Thus the basis of dependency and
Underdevelopment
 How Dependency Occurs
o Emergence of Europe’s drive to capital accumulation, 1500
o Led to the colonization of Latin American, Caribbean, African and East Asian States.
o The Extraction of Wealth (Natural Resources and Capital) from the colonies resulting
in stagnation
o Subsequent transfer wealth to the Europe facilitating industrialization and
development (Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa)
o The persistent of culture of dependency even after colonialism. Third World-
Producers/ First World Manufacturers
 Immanuel Wallerstein
o Ideas: The existence of a total system or network driven by the endless
accumulation of profits
o “the perpetual and widening inequity among states is explained by capitalism and
the international division of labour and the production” (Kegley 2006, 141)
o The International division of labour leads to the development of countries as core,
periphery and semi-periphery