The dimensions of the divide: vertical differentiation,international inequality and North–South stratification in international relations theory

Recent attempts at developing social-structural accounts of the international order have suggested that the international system might be analysed in terms of patterns of vertical differentiation and stratification. Taking up this challenge, this article argues that inequality should be understood as part of the ‘deep structure’ of the international system rather than in terms of the attributes of individual states. It suggests that we can understand how stratification and vertical differentiation emerge by examining five dimensions along which processes producing asymmetry occur, focusing on transactions between actors. These dimensions are: inter-state political hierarchy; secular socioeconomic development within societies; global stratification within the world economy; the dynamic of competitive development; and the process of overall collective management and supranational governance of the international system/global order. The historical intersection of these forms of stratification has produced an emergent, historically contingent division within the international order familiar to students of international politics as the North–South divide.     

When Development Is Not Enough: Structural Change,Conflict and Gendered Insecurity

Despite two decades of rapid global economic growth and social modernisation, including increases in gender equity, levels of violence against women remain stubbornly high. Moving beyond conventional liberal views, a growing literature has identified how structural change and conflict associated with economic development can exacerbate women’s physical insecurity. We examine the relationship between development patterns and variation in the Physical Security of Women index—the best available cross-national indicator—to fill the gap in emerging ethnographic, case and survey-based accounts with systematic cross-country assessment. We find that, after controlling for standard explanatory variables, income inequality, urban crowding, corruption, political violence, autocracy and unequal representation of women in politics are associated with more physical insecurity, confirming the relevance of structural change and conflict approaches to development. Correcting the conventional wisdom, high national incomes are associated with greater security for women only if they are well distributed, and the relationship with female labour force participation weakens as women’s work rises. These relationships are robust to the year in which they are measured, and to the introduction of region and time fixed effects. We also demonstrate that gender-based violence has different correlates than generic insecurity.     

Scales of Political Action in the Anthropocene: Gaia,Networks, and Cities as Frontiers of Doing Earthly Politics

The purpose of this article is to propose a new theorisation of “scale” in doing earthly politics (i.e. who is acting, who should be responsible for addressing planetary environmental degradation). I connect the politics of scale in global urban politics with the scale question in environmental politics. While the existing paradigm on “politics of scale” have made an excellent contribution on performative aspects of scale, they have failed to respond to the affirmative movements in which scholars and policy makers attempt to theorise scales as ranges in which political action can be mobilised. On the other hand, the new “down-to-earth” affirmative ecopolitics movement often fails to move beyond the romanticisation of the local, which is easily subject to criticisms, such as “local trap” where the small is not always intrinsically “good”. As an alternative, I theorise “scales of political action” that can be simultaneously both materially situated (local) and ubiquitous (global), mainly using Gaian ecology and complex theory. Finally, as a concrete example of “scales of political action”, I propose cities as frontiers of doing earthly politics, focusing on the characteristics of urban conditions that match our new theorisation of scale.     

Feminist Studies of Globalisation: Beyond Gender,Beyond Economism?

This article offers a distinctive mapping of the feminist literature on globalisation. Part I sets the “new wave” of debate in the context of long-standing feminist theorising and organisation around global power and politics, drawing attention to a growing focus on economic processes. Part II explores the marginalisation of feminist arguments within globalisation studies, pointing to the dominance of an economistic model of globalisation as a key factor. It also identifies a parallel feminist tendency to neglect non-feminist efforts to develop non-economistic analyses of globalisation. Part III seeks to pinpoint the originality of the contribution of feminism. Although the most obvious starting point for such an evaluation is an emphasis upon gender, the feminist contribution is not reducible to this. Feminists have integrated gender analyses into accounts of multiple, intersecting relations of global power. They also offer distinctive analyses of the relation between the local and the global and the character of agency and resistance. The article indicates that the feminist response to economism still remains incomplete. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that feminist insights pose a significant challenge to non-feminist accounts of globalisation and to those organising within and against global power relations.     

Transnational Networks and Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming

How can we account for the global diffusion of remarkably similar policy innovations across widely differing nation-states? In an era characterized by heightened globalization and increasingly radical state restructuring, this question has become especially acute. Scholars of international relations offer a number of theoretical explanations for the cross-national convergence of ideas, institutions, and interests. We examine the proliferation of state bureaucracies for gender mainstreaming. These organizations seek to integrate a gender-equality perspective across all areas of government policy. Although they so far have received scant attention outside of feminist policy circles, these mainstreaming bureaucracies—now in place in over 100 countries—represent a powerful challenge to business-as-usual politics and policymaking. As a policy innovation, the speed with which these institutional mechanisms have been adopted by the majority of national governments is unprecedented. We argue that transnational networks composed largely of nonstate actors (notably women's international nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations) have been the primary forces driving the diffusion of gender mainstreaming. In an event history analysis of 157 nation-states from 1975 to 1998, we assess how various national and transnational factors have affected the timing and the type of the institutional changes these states have made. Our findings support the claim that the diffusion of gender-mainstreaming mechanisms has been facilitated by the role played by transnational networks, in particular by the transnational feminist movement. Further, they suggest a major shift in the nature and the locus of global politics and national policymaking.     

My Country,My Country,directed by Laura Poitras,produced by Jocelyn Glatzer and Laura Poitras Iraq in Fragments,directed by James Longley,produced by John Sinno and James Longley

A new form of “entertaining news,” accessed by most through television, has become a privileged domain of politics for the first time in countries “beyond the West” in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. What are the political consequences of this development: What is the relationship between media and politics in these regions? We answer these questions through a case study of India, the world's largest democracy, where two decades of media expansion and liberalization have yielded the largest number of commercial television news outlets in the world. We show why prevailing theories of media privatization and commercialization cannot account for the distinctive architecture of media systems in places like India. In this article, we first provide an overview of the historical and contemporary dynamics of media liberalization in India and the challenges that this poses to existing models and typologies of the media-politics relationship. We then present a new typology of media systems and a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between television news and democratic politics in India, and by extension in the global South. In the concluding section, we reflect on the broader comparative insights of the essay and discuss directions for future research. We believe that our alternative comparative framework captures more meaningfully the diversity and complexity of emerging media systems and their relationships to democratic practice in these regions.     

International Plug 'n Play? Citizen Activism, the Internet, and Global Public Policy

One of the most dramatic changes in world politics has been the rise to prominence of citizen networks. Among the many factors responsible for their emergence are new communication technologies, and in particular the World-Wide Web. Opinions on the nature and significance of these citizen networks, however, are mixed. Some applaud citizen networks as potential counter-hegemonic forces and expressions of democratic participation. Others see them, on the contrary, as undemocratic and largely destructive. Straddling both of these views is a third argument that suggests "real" communities cannot be sustained on the Internet, hence calling into question the long-term viability of citizen networks as actors on the world political stage. To help push these debates further, this article examines the case of the citizen networks that emerged to lobby against the Multilateral Agreement on Investments, focusing in particular on how the Internet played a part in the opposition movement. The case suggests that, contrary to those who see new media as an obstacle to global citizen etworks, the Internet and World-Wide Web greatly facilitated their activities. As a consequence, citizen networks will likely continue to grow and expand, intruding into international policymaking processes. The article concludes by examining several global public policy issues that are raised by this shift in the landscape of world politics that will have to be addressed by practitioners of international relations in years to come.     

Institutional Reforms and the Politics of Inequality Reproduction: The Case of the League of Nations’ Council Crisis in 1926

ABSTRACT

This contribution to the special issue explores how institutional reforms are shaped by and feed back into the politics of inequality reproduction. IR has recently begun to more closely study how hierarchies intersect. This article uses the analytical concept of “interlinkages” to grasp how international organisations couple intra-organisational patterns of unequal representation to extra-organisational social hierarchies. It empirically investigates the forms and effects of such interlinkages through a case study of the League of Nations’ Council crisis and reform in 1926. The reform reaffirmed the most prominent interlinkage: the restriction of permanent membership to states recognised as “great powers”. In addition, the reform created two new types of non-permanent seats which changed the pattern of representation of small states. Overall, the case study shows that the interlinkages and their effects were generated by an interplay of formal design and informal understandings both at the level of permanent and non-permanent seats.     

Global Cities,International Relations and the Fabrication of the World

The global city presents one available model for understanding urbanisation and associated hierarchies of power. In International Relations (IR), the global city is treated as a unit in a new type of international system, an increasingly important actor in world politics, or a site through which global processes operate. This article forwards an alternative perspective. It treats the global city as a dispositif of power. While the global city captures the fact that power and wealth are spatially concentrated in today’s urbanising world politics, the concept also has a world-making capacity. The article analyses this capacity in two contexts. Firstly, it presents a genealogy of the voyage of the global cities concept from critical academic scholarship to a buzzword of city elites and business consultants. Secondly, it performs a governmental analysis of global city reports and indexes. Finally, the article suggests that conceptualising the global city as a dispositif enables the important task of imagining alternative ways of framing the meaning of urbanisation in world politics.     

Organising Global Stratification: How International Organisations (Re)Produce Inequalities in International Society

ABSTRACT

The article makes the case for scrutinising international organisations (IOs) as key sites and agents of inequality reproduction and transformation in international society. Drawing on sociological inequality research and institutionalist approaches to International Relations, we argue that IOs reproduce and transform broader stratification patterns in their global social environment through intertwined processes of categorisation and distribution. We propose to capture these twin processes from three observation points, which highlight different material and symbolic practices operating within IOs and at the interface between IOs and their environment.     

Gender Equality and State Aggression: The Impact of Domestic Gender Equality on State First Use of Force

I examine the role of domestic gender equality in predicting whether or not a state is more aggressive in international disputes. This research adds to a growing body of feminist research in international relations, which demonstrates that states with higher levels of gender equality exhibit lower levels of violence during international disputes and during international crises. Many scholars have argued that a domestic environment of inequality and violence results in a greater likelihood of state use of violence internationally. This argument is most fully developed within feminist literature; however, research in the field of ethno-nationalism has also highlighted the negative impact of domestic discrimination and violence on state behavior at the international level. Using the MID data set and new data on first use of force, I test, using logistic regression, whether states with higher levels of gender equality are less likely to be aggressive when involved in international disputes, controlling for other possible causes of state use of force. Beyond this project's contribution to the conflict literature, this research expands feminist theory by further incorporating it into traditional international relations theory to deepen our understanding of the impact of domestic gender equality on state behavior internationally.     

Considerations on inequality and politics in Thailand

In Thailand, economic inequality has long been a fact of life. It is a “general inequality of condition” that can be seen to influence all aspects of social, economic, and political life. Yet inequality has not always been associated with political activism. Following the 2006 military coup, however, there has been a deliberate and politicized linking of inequality and politics. The article explores a complex of political events – elections, coup, constitution, and the political ascent of Thaksin Shinawatra – that has given rise to a relatively recent politicization of economic and political inequalities, now invoked in street politics – a rhetoric developed amongst pro-Thaksin red shirts that challenged the status quo and generates conflict over the nature of electoral democracy.     

Primed for Violence: The Role of Gender Inequality in Predicting Internal Conflict

We know, most notably through Ted Gurr's research, that ethnic discrimination can lead to ethnopolitical rebellion–intrastate conflict. I seek to discover what impact, if any, gender inequality has on intrastate conflict. Although democratic peace scholars and others highlight the role of peaceful domestic behavior in predicting state behavior, many scholars have argued that a domestic environment of inequality and violence—structural and cultural violence—results in a greater likelihood of violence at the state and the international level. This project contributes to this line of inquiry and further tests the grievance theory of intrastate conflict by examining the norms of violence that facilitate a call to arms. And in many ways, I provide an alternative explanation for the significance of some of the typical economic measures—the greed theory—based on the link between discrimination, inequality, and violence. I test whether states characterized by higher levels of gender inequality are more likely to experience intrastate conflict. Ultimately, the basic link between gender inequality and intrastate conflict is confirmed—states characterized by gender inequality are more likely to experience intrastate conflict, 1960–2001.     

A New Game Needs a New System

Globalization has ushered in new political conditions and new political issues which goes beyond modernity. Internal politics and international politics, two political layers of the framework of modern political thinking, cannot effectively expound and solve political problems on the global scale, hence the need to introduce a global political analytical framework befitting the new global conditions. In contrast with modern political thinking which is based on the concept of hostile and competitive game, globalization has promoted universalization of knowledge, information and technology, and consequently symmetrical imitation of strategies will bring no gains but self-destruction. Moreover, with the high interdependency in economy and existence resulting from globalization, a new power, made up of global capital, shared technology and common media, is exerting its networked global dominance. This new power derives its authority not from its strength but from service, and its new power formula is: service is power. Thus the challenge for the global politics is not hostile competition but the optimization of co-existence. The new all-under heaven system, based on non-exclusive co-existence, holds the best chance to the resolution of political and economic problems on the global scale and world peace.     

United Nations Peacekeeping Decisions: Three Hierarchies,Upward Mobility and Institutionalised Inequality among Member States

ABSTRACT

This article explores the multiple and evolving hierarchies shaping UN decisions on peacekeeping operations. Three hierarchies—based on Security Council membership, financial assessments, and troop contributions—currently distribute influence over these decisions among UN member states. These hierarchies differ in their relationship to global stratification patterns, and in the states they empower. Their gradual “layering” has thus expanded the potential for upward mobility within the UN: states unable to increase their influence in one hierarchy can seek empowerment in another. Yet the UN peacekeeping case also highlights the limitations of hierarchy layering as an equalising mechanism in international organisations. New hierarchies supplement rather than replace older ones, and the degree to which they challenge existing rankings varies. Moreover, each new hierarchy inherently highlights, and creates institutional consequences for, a particular type of inequality among states. Consequently, hierarchy layering is best understood as recalibrating rather than eliminating institutionalised inequality in international organisations.     

Patterns of Internet and Traditional News Media Use in a Networked Community

Abstract

International communication has come increasingly under the impact of at least three major technological, socio‐economic, and political forces: expanded channels of communication provided by technological developments, democratizing pressures that have brought new voices to be heard in international media and forums, and new but as yet weak mechanisms for the conduct of meaningful dialogue and negotiations. Power politics has been thus increasingly supplemented or supplanted by image politics, questioning traditional boundaries between domestic and international politics, and creating image fixations that have proved occasionally inimical to accommodation of real interests. The symbolic uses of images, on the other hand, have served at least three kinds of cognitive interests: national solidarity, and domestic instrumental and global community. The Iranian hostage crisis, among a number of other contemporary examples, illustrates how these interests were served, symbolically and actually, in domestic as well as international politics. Through a case study of the hostage crisis, me paper concludes with some warnings on the potentials as well as menaces of image politics.     

Is democracy about redistribution?

Some scholars champion broad conceptualizations of democracy where distribution of economic resources is an integral part, whereas several prominent arguments drawing on narrower conceptualizations of democracy still assume that progressive redistribution is central to democratic politics. We empirically analyse individual opinions on whether progressive taxation and redistribution are among democracy's central characteristics. While many citizens around the world associate democracy with redistribution, we find that surprisingly few consider redistribution among the most central characteristics of democracy. We further analyse what factors affect individuals’ propensity to consider redistribution among democracy's most important features. Running multi-level models, we find that having lived under a communist regime and ? although less robust – currently living under democracy make individuals less likely to hold this notion. However, individuals with more to gain from progressive redistribution (that is, little education and belonging to lower classes) are more likely to hold it. We discuss how our findings help shed light on two puzzles in comparative politics; (I) why do democracies not promote more redistributive policies than autocracies, and (II) why is there no net relationship between income inequality and democratization?     

Grand Strategy of ‘Restrainment’

With the end of the Cold War, the subsequent global war on terror, the global economic recession, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one would think that the United States would have formulated a grand strategy for dealing with these problems. This, however, is not the case. This article advances a grand strategy of “restrainment,” as a guiding concept for our approach to international politics. It builds from the principle that U.S. policy must seek to restrain—individually and collectively—those forces, ideas, and movements in international politics that create instability, crises, and war.     

Global Debate and the Limits of the Bush Doctrine

The "Bush Doctrine" asserting the right to preemptively attack states that support or harbor terrorists and pursue weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has bitterly divided world opinion. Many seemingly long-settled questions of international politics, especially involving the unilateral use of force, have been reopened. Although we are concerned about the implications of the Bush Doctrine, we do not agree that it fundamentally changes world politics as some have asserted. Instead, we argue that the global debate leading up to the war in Iraq signals widespread support for existing international norms. Most states continue to see force as a last resort, properly subject to multilateral control in all but the most urgent cases of imminent self-defense. The nature of American diplomatic maneuverings in the United Nations and the public statements of high-level officials suggest that even the United States continues to recognize the importance of these norms.