Toward a Feminist Counter-geopolitics: Gender,Space and Islamist Politics in Istanbul

Geopolitical reasoning privileges the global scale as the locus of spatialised power relations. For the past 20 years, Islam and Islamist politics have figured prominently in geopolitical discourses of international conflict. This paper puts forth a feminist counter-geopolitics that focuses on how Islamist political practices and discourses are written into everyday life and urban spaces. Approaching political activity as comprising both formal voting behaviour and informal associational activities, this study uses survey and focus group data (collected in Istanbul in 1998/99) to explore gender and Islamist politics at national and local scales. Exploring women's activities within both formal and informal urban political spaces, the study reveals some of the ways in which women participate in the daily production and contestation of Islamist politics in Istanbul.     

Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies

In this essay I develop a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007 ) Globalization and Militarism , David Roberts' (2008 ) Human Insecurity , and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008 ). Drawing on the insights of these books, I ask first how violence is understood in global politics, with specific reference to the gendered disciplinary blindnesses that frequently characterise mainstream approaches. Second, I demonstrate how a focus on war and peace can neglect to take into account the politics of everyday violence: the violences of the in-between times that international politics recognises neither as 'war' nor 'peace' and the violences inherent to times of peace that are overlooked in the study of war. Finally, I argue that feminist security studies offers an important corrective to the foundational assumptions of IR, which themselves can perpetuate the very instances of violence that they seek to redress. If we accept the core insights of feminist security studies – the centrality of the human subject; the importance of particular configurations of masculinity and femininity; and the gendered conceptual framework that underpins the discipline of IR – we are encouraged to envisage a rather different politics of the global.     

From a Small to a Large Minority: Women in Scandinavian Politics

'It takes a critical mass of women, e.g. 30 percent, to make a difference in polities' This statement is common today, even among women politicians themselves. However, the theory of the importance of the relative size of the minority has not been sufficiently developed in political science. Based on the experience of women in Scandinavian politics (today being a minority of about 30 percent), the article discusses six areas for which an increase in the proportion of the minority might lead to changes in for instance the political culture, the political discourse or the reaction to women as politicians. The article suggests that the concept of a critical mass is replaced by one of critical acts , which would seem to be more relevant when studying human beings.     

Gender, Policy, Politics, and Work: Feminist Comparative and Transnational Research

abstract This article reviews feminist comparative and transnational research on workplace policy, politics and the state. The first section examines a range of theoretical approaches to the topic. We then present a variety of methodologies for conducting comparative and transnational research on policy developments. Informed by a number of case studies included in the symposium, we explore the dynamics and determinants, both national and supranational, of policy formation and its impacts. Finally, we tease out the implicit and explicit notions of gender equity for future policy analysis.     

From Catch-all Politics to Cartelisation: The Political Economy of the Cartel Party

Adaptations to coordination problems endogenous to political parties have established the cartel party as the emerging equilibrium type in modern Western democracies. However, these factors alone are insufficient to maintain such an equilibrium given the threat of defection. That threat is mitigated by three factors: historical changes in party form, systemic changes in the global economy and changed ideas about governments. Together, these changes produce both a cartel of parties and the cartel party organisational form, without requiring overt conspiracy. These speculations are mapped onto actual experiences of the UK, the US and Sweden. The theory of the cartel party is advanced by emphasis on the 'cost of production' of policies and the constriction of the policy-space over which parties compete. We also explain why a cartel of parties might be stable, notwithstanding the temptation to defection often attributed to cartels as multi-player prisoners' dilemmas.     

From Gerontocracy to Gerontonomia: The Politics of Economic Stagnation in Ageing Democracies

One in five people in the EU and nearly one in ten in the world are now aged 65 and over. This demographic transformation is one of the great successes of the twentieth century and has profoundly altered the composition of electorates in many democracies. This article explores whether and how this population ageing reshapes the relationship between democracy and capitalism. I argue that ageing changes the economic and policy priorities of a growing share of democracies’ electorates in ways that incentivise elected governments to prioritise certain social policies and economic outcomes, such as pensions and low inflation, at the expense of others, most notably greater social investments and pursuing economic growth. As a result, gerontocracies increasingly lead to what I call a ‘gerontonomia’ characterised by democratically sustained economic stagnation.     

Climate Change and UK Politics: From Brynle Williams to Sir Nicholas Stern

In 2000 the UK Labour government abandoned annual real fuel duty increases - a policy it had inherited from the preceding Conservative administration - in the face of direct action by farmers and hauliers. A short-term Conservative lead in the polls opened up. In 2006, the same Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced an increase in air passenger duty from February 2007 in the light of the newly published Stern Review. The opposition parties denounced this as too feeble.
As Stern points out, all citizens in the world are in a global N-person prisoners' dilemma. Everybody knows that a world without global warming is better than a world with it; but each actor is unconditionally better off from continuing to pollute than from restraining her polluting.
Everybody expects somebody else to drive less. Now, however, all parties have committed themselves to tax and/or emission trading policies to mitigate global warming. The paper examines this transition.     

From Family Values to Religious Freedom: Conservative Discourse and the Politics of Gay Rights

On the issue of gay rights, today’s social conservatives are more likely to describe their opposition as a matter of religious freedom or personal conscience as opposed to a belief that gays and lesbians represent an existential threat to the traditional family. But how new is this contemporary argument, and how different is it from the family values politics of the previous era? This article develops what Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes call “associative chains” from two important moments in anti-gay politics: Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign and Kim Davis’s decision to not issue gay marriage licenses in Rowan County, KY. On one level, these moments reveal competing roles of the state in the lives of its citizens. Family values politics authorized an interventionist state for the protection of children, while religious freedom defenders promote a zone of personal conscience impervious to the state. On another level, however, these moments reveal the mutability of social conservative opposition to gay rights. Calls for protecting religious freedom preserve a heterosexism derived from antecedent family values politics. The novelty of religious freedom as a defense for homophobia obscures a persistent social conservative commitment to using the state to enshrine the heteronuclear family.     

From Identity to Queer Politics: Shifts in Normative Heterosexuality and the Meaning of Citizenship

This essay argues that there is occurring in the United States something of a shift from identity to queer politics, which is paralleled by changes in the social patterns of normative heterosexuality. I consider some of the implications for thinking about sexual citizenship. In particular, I comment on the ambivalent relationship of a queer politics to a politics of citizenship.