Emotions and the everyday: Ambivalence, power and resistance

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Schick
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Relations Of Power

This special issue on emotions and the everyday represents a provocative intervention in the literature on emotions in International Relations. A strong theme that emerges is the ambivalence of emotions in global politics, which I explore in two parts. First, I explore emotions’ ‘ambivalent potentiality’ in international politics, highlighting two dimensions: the ways emotions are generated and captured by relations of power and the state to create ‘willing geopolitical subjects’, and the ways emotions resist power by creating and sustaining ‘sites of contestation’ that challenge hegemonic emotional regimes. Second, I trace the contributors’ claims regarding the promise and danger of empathy in global politics, maintaining that the special issue highlights the deep ambivalence that attends empathy as well as emotions more generally. I then trouble the notion of empathy as resistance and argue that a more radical and reflexive empathetic engagement could be captured by a greater emphasis on listening and vulnerable interrogation of the self as well as the other.

scholarly journals The identity/alterity nexus in international relations: two cases of encounter with difference

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 234-247
Author(s):  
Erica Resende
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Different Levels

The aim of this article is to survey the implications of the identity/alterity nexus in international relations (IR) as related to processes of othering for understanding conflict and violence in global politics. I will offer what I could call an ontology of difference in global politics, where I stress the reliance of understanding othering practices in global politics, as I explore two cases from which I ask the following questions: How do identity and identity formation processes occur and develop at different levels, times and dimensions? How do discourses of differentiation and identification help construct state identities and interests? Following Emmanuel Lévinas, I will argue that by seeking ways to reach out towards the Other, we free ourselves from the restraints of selfishness, from indifference and isolation. Finding and coming to terms with a composition of the Self that also includes the Other enables us to take responsibility for him/her inasmuch it prevents the conditions for violence and conflict.

Environmental Scanning for Organisational Effectiveness: A Study of Select MSMEs of Jammu and Kashmir, India

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinay Chauhan ◽  
Sushma Kaushal
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Effectiveness ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Environmental Scanning ◽  
Jammu And Kashmir ◽  
Economic Dimension ◽  
The Impact

Environmental scanning yields greater anticipatory management that provides important inputs for aquitision and use of information for planning and designing organization strategies. Apart from this, effective environmental scanning activities are likely to deal with threats and grasp the opportunities to finally link with enhancing organizational effectiveness. In fact this relationship matrix has led the researchers to conduct an environmental scanning through an examination of the existing status the components of the macro-environment vis-a-vis their relationship with the organizational effectiveness. There are a number of approaches, which describe the macro-environment, of which PEST analysis is regarded as the most common approach for considering the external business environment. Thus, the present study applies PEST analysis to scan the existing business environment. Jammu and Kashmir due to its peculiar political, geographical, economic, and socio-cultural features, had led its cost mountain economy become a distinctive identity. Despite the fact that the state has rich endowments, international relations with its neighbours vis-a-vis its impact on political environment also pose developmental challenges for the business units operating in the state. This has provided valid rationale for conducting the present. The environmental scanning is done through the perception of the select entrepreneurs operating MSMEs in the state of J & K. An impact analysis of environmental factors (PEST) on the organizational effectiveness is also done in the study. The findings of the study show that the political environment of the state that is not favourable for entrepreneural development whereas the rest of the other drivers of PEST i.e. economic environment, socio-cultural environment, and technological environment show a favourable response of the entrepreneurs. In terms of cause and effect relationship, it is found that the first two drivers of the PEST i.e. political and economic dimension impacts OE positively whereas the other two dimensions namely socio-cultural and technological impacts OE negatively but it is pertinent to mention that the impact is very less and is insigninificant. The study also suggests some of strategic options for developing and creating an enabling environment for successful entrepreneurial development to achieve integrated development of the state.

scholarly journals Chopping the world into bits: Africa, the World Bank, and the good governance norm

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
World Bank ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World

This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue and an ability to enable progress or improvement. Norms become ideal when they are able to conflate what is good with what is appropriate, standard, or proper. It is when the good becomes ‘natural’ that a norm appears immanent and non-contestable, and so acquires an idealized form.45Along with the other articles in this special issue, I will attempt to challenge some of the complacency surrounding the apparent naturalness and universality of norms employed in international relations.

scholarly journals Self and other in critical international theory: assimilation, incommensurability and the paradox of critique

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
VASSILIOS PAIPAIS
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
International Theory ◽  
Critical Edge ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article is principally concerned with the way some sophisticated critical approaches in International Relations (IR) tend to compromise their critical edge in their engagement with the self/other problematique. Critical approaches that understand critique as total non-violence towards, or unreflective affirmation of, alterity risk falling back into precritical paths. That is, either a particularistic, assimilative universalism with pretensions of true universality or a radical incommensurability and the impossibility of communication with the other. This is what this article understands as the paradox of the politics of critique. Instead, what is more important than seeking a final overcoming or dismissal of the self/other opposition is to gain the insight that it is the perpetual striving to preserve the tension and ambivalence between self and other that rescues both critique's authority and function.

Autoethnographic International Relations: exploring the self as a source of knowledge

2010 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 779-798 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORGAN BRIGG ◽  
ROLAND BLEIKER
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Knowledge Communities ◽  
Personal Involvement ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractResearch is all about a person's engagement with an issue. But most approaches to International Relations actively discourage personal involvement by the researcher. We question the adequacy of this norm and the related scholarly conventions. Instead, we explore how the personal experience of the researcher can be used as a legitimate and potentially important source of insight into politics. But we also note that simply telling the story of the researcher is inadequate. We engage the ensuing dilemmas by discussing how to both appreciate and evaluate autoethnographic insights. Rather than relying on pre-determined criteria, we argue that methodological uses of the self should be judged within knowledge communities and according to their ability to open up new perspectives on political dilemmas. We then advance two related suggestions: one advocates conceptualising research around puzzles; the other explores the methodological implications of recognising that producing knowledge is an inherently relational activity.

F.H. Bradley: An Unpublished Note on Christian Morality

1983 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Kendal
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Moral View ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
Moral Importance ◽  
Unpublished Note

At some time between 1907 and 1912, probably very much nearer the earlier date, Bradley produced the first draft of an article on Christian morality. He did this in response to criticism that his moral ideas were anti-Christian. This charge was based mainly on the content of two articles that he published during 1894 in the International Journal of Ethics, one called ‘Some Remarks on Punishment’ and the other ‘The Limits of Individual and National Self-Sacrifice’. In these Bradley had maintained that the conventional ‘Christian’ belief in the sacredness of life undermined any sensible approach to punishment and any clear understanding of the moral importance of self-assertion (in contrast to self-sacrifice). It encouraged a squeamishness about retribution and ‘social surgery’. It devalued proper human ends and interests, and the rights and duties founded on them. There was needed ‘a correction of our moral view, and a return to a non-Christian and perhaps a Hellenic ideal’, one that would recognize the unlimited right of the moral organism (i.e. virtually the state) to dispose of its members and to use force internationally in defence of right. Bradley pulled no punches and had this to say about the self-styled ‘Christian’ party:

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Territorial State ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

This book has sought to deepen the dialogue between history and international relations theory in examining a pivotal moment in the history of international relations. The Paris Peace Conference constituted a historically specific effort to reimagine “the world.” More specifically, it sought to replace anarchy under realism with “sovereignty.” The conference could not live comfortably with the radical liberalism of Wilsonianism, but the international contract made at the time of the armistice with Germany meant that the conference could not live without it. The territorial state and its discontents lay at the heart of sovereignty at the conference. Two logics of the state fought each other to a standstill in Paris—that of the self-help of realism, forever seeking unattainable “security,” and that of the state that exists only in relation to other states, toward some common end.

scholarly journals SALT AND SOVEREIGNTY IN COLONIAL BURMA

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
JAGJEET LALLY
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
British India ◽  
Administrative Capacity ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Government ◽  
Fiscal Administration ◽  
The One ◽  
Knowledge Deficits

Abstract Across monsoon Asia, salt is of such vital necessity that controlling its production or supply has historically been connected to the establishment and expression of political authority. On the one hand, rulers maintained the allegiance of their subjects by ensuring their access to salt of suitable price and sufficient quantity. On the other hand, denying rebels their salt was a strategy of conquest and pacification, while the necessity of salt meant it could reliably be taxed to raise state finances. This article first sets out this connection of salt and sovereignty, then examining it in the context of colonial Burma, a province of British India from its annexation until its ‘divorce’ in 1935 (effected in 1937), and thus subject to the Government of India's salt monopoly. Focusing on salt brings into view two aspects of the state (while also permitting analysis of ‘Upper Burma’, which remains rather marginal in the scholarly literature). First, the everyday state and quotidian practices constitutive of its sovereignty, which was negotiated and contested where indigenes were able to exploit the chinks in the state's administrative capacity and its knowledge deficits. Second, in turn, the lumpy topography of state power. The state not only failed to restrict salt production to the extent it desired (with the intention that indigenes would rely on imported salt, whose supply was easier to control and thus tax), but conceded to a highly complex fiscal administration, the variegations in which reflected the uneven distribution in state power – thicker in the delta and thinnest in the uplands.

Man is a Wolf to Man1

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Still
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Fruit And Vegetables ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Natural Man

This focuses on Derrida’s analysis of the figure of the wolf in the first volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, particularly in La Fontaine’s fables (where the wolf can represent the sovereign as well as the outlaw) and in political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notably Hobbes’s De Cive and Rousseau’s Discourses. This is developed with reference to other texts of the period such as the Encyclopédie in which wolves are represented as man’s enemies, rivals for scarce resources, notably food. The wolf is typically evoked as solitary and hungry; for Hobbes he, like man in the state of nature, is dangerous. For Rousseau, on the other hand, both wolf and pre-social man are shy rather than violent, preferring flight to fight – and food is naturally abundant for natural man who would in any case prefer fruit and vegetables to meat. The politics of food and taste are critical both in the self-fulfilling prophecy that man will become a wolf to man, and in the extermination of wolves.

Allowing ourselves to follow our bodies: Cultivating student curiosity via sensorily-oriented modes of teaching

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Bruff
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pedagogical Practice ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Metal Music ◽  
The World ◽  
Extreme Metal

This article addresses the themes animating the Special Issue from the other side of the coin, namely the notion of aestheticizing political pedagogies. This reflects the direction of travel in some sections of politics and international relations scholarship, where there has been an upsurge of interest in aesthetics and especially popular culture. While there have been valuable contributions on teaching within such work, there has been a lack of sustained reflection on how, for example, a more aesthetically informed pedagogical practice can help us encourage students to think critically in creative ways. There has also been a rather bloodless account of aesthetics, diverting attention away from its visceral essence. Taking inspiration from the writings of Matt Davies on aesthetics, Jennifer Mason on the sensory and Cynthia Enloe on curiosity and surprise, the article explores the potential for aestheticizing political pedagogies to be mobilized in purposeful, strategic ways for enhancing the capacity of students to think critically and creatively. More specifically, I discuss how sensorily-oriented modes of teaching can disrupt entanglements between students’ ways of knowing and experiencing the world and their ‘objective’ understandings of politics, society, culture and so on. Three examples from my own teaching practice are discussed, all rooted in my utilization of extreme metal music with the aim of cultivating curiosity among students about their topics.

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