Geography and international studies are both deeply rooted in masculinist, imperialist, and patriarchal ways of viewing the world. However, over the past 20 years, the increase in the number of women within these fields has planted the seeds for the introduction of feminist intervention. Feminist geography is primarily concerned with the real experiences of individuals and groups in their own localities. It can be viewed as the study of "situated knowledges derived from the lives and experiences of women in different social and geographic locations." Feminist geographers consistently seek out techniques which are in line with their feminist philosophies. Although much of the work will be categorized as qualitative, such as ethnographic fieldwork, feminist geographers recognize the need for feminist approaches in quantitative analysis, and techniques alone do not render the project feminist. Rather, feminists in geography argue that all types of data collection must recognize the power relationship between the researcher and the researched. Feminist geography also operates at the local scale and crosses to the global. This is illustrated by geographers who not only study the daily lives of women in a refugee camp but also construct theoretical arguments focused on global forces such as climate change or war in relation to the international migration of women.
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Advances in Feminist Geography
Nicole Laliberte, Kate Driscoll Derickson, and Lorraine Dowler
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Women and Publishing in International Studies
Marijke Breuning
A gender disparity in publishing hinders the ability of women to advance their careers in academia. A review of the literature shows that there is little published research on the status of women in international studies. Women’s access to, and progress in, the field of international studies has also been slower than many have thought. Feminist approaches to international relations emerged later compared to other subfields of political science, at around the end of the Cold War. Data suggests that there has not been substantial growth in the proportion of women in international studies since the mid-1990s: the data of Tétreault et al. (1997) reported 31.2 percent women for 1994 and Breuning et al. (2005) calculated that there were 31.8 percent women in the International Studies Association in 2004. With each successive rank on the academic career ladder, the percentage of women becomes smaller. In 2006, women accounted for 36 percent of the assistant professors in political science, but only 28 percent of the associate professors and just 17 percent of full professors. Some women—especially those engaged with the research communities on women and/or gender in international studies—have found high-quality outlets in journals such as the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, and the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy. However, women whose work does not focus on those research communities are unlikely to benefit from the existence of these journals.
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The History of International Studies
Brian C. Schmidt
A significant development in the history of international relations (IR) is the increased focus on historiographical issues. Prior to 1998, the literature had, for the most part, failed to address adequately the question of how to write a history of the field. The tendency was to describe the history of IR as if a complete consensus existed on the essential dimensions of the field’s evolution. However, during the past 10 years (1998–2008) a wealth of new literature has appeared that greatly challenges much of the conventional wisdom regarding the development of IR. Three main thematic issues have been prominent in the literature. The first theme concerns the status of IR as an academic field or discipline. For various reasons, there has been a repeated questioning of whether IR is in fact a distinctive discipline. A second theme is the issue of whether the boundaries of IR should be demarcated in terms of one particular country (the United States) or whether it should be viewed as a more cosmopolitan endeavor without regard to national differences. The third theme involves the historiographical debate about whether the evolution of the field is best explained in terms of exogenous events in the realm of international politics or by endogenous factors associated with the institutional setting of the field.
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Habitus and Field
Anna Leander
The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.
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Incorporating Women into International Studies: Working Their Way In
Meredith Reid Sarkees and Marijke Breuning
Women are underrepresented in the discipline of international studies, though the field has seen a sizeable influx of female professionals only within the last 30 years. As the percentage of women has grown, women have adopted a variety of strategies for “resisting at the margins,” or finding places for themselves within the profession, and for ensuring their professional success. Although the larger presence of women has led to activism and improvement, women still have a way to go before they will have achieved parity with their male colleagues in international studies. Due to their focus on the realm of “high politics,” international relations and international studies were often seen as disciplines that were not suited to the inclusion of women. Consequently, women in international studies have to confront significant barriers to their career progress, which has contributed to women’s disenchantment with the field and to the leaky pipeline in international studies. However, research has found that women in male-dominated fields (such as international studies) are strongly organizationally committed. Women in international studies are willing to structure their professional efforts to conform to the goals and practices of organizations such as the International Studies Association (ISA), especially as participating in annual meetings and conferences is critical for a career in international studies.
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International Studies as a Discipline and Women’s Status Therein
Meredith Reid Sarkees and Marie T. Henehan
As a distinct discipline, international studies is relatively young, emerging in the United States only after World War II. The study of the status of women in international studies is also a fairly new field, appearing more recently than that in other fields in academia, including political science. In the United States, political science evolved through at least six distinct phases. The first two phases occurred during the American Revolution and the post-Civil War era, while the next four took place in the twentieth century, described by David Easton as the formal (legal), the traditional (informal or pre-behavioral), the behavioral, and the post-behavioral stages. It was during this period that the study of women in politics began. As political science began to solidify itself as a separate academic discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was also an attempt to include international relations within its domain. Despite the increase in the number of women in international studies and the advances that women have made in publications and positions, the field remains dominated by men. In other words, it is still not an equitable place for women to work. In order to overcome many of these enduring barriers, there should be a greater willingness to investigate and publish more studies about the status of women and to take more proactive steps to resolve the issues that have stalled women’s progress.
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Linguistic Models in International Studies
Gavan Duffy and Sean Miskell
International Studies (IS) generally refers to the specific university degrees and courses which are concerned with the study of the major political, economic, social, and cultural issues that dominate the international agenda. The terms and concepts of IS and international relations (IR) are strongly related; however, IR focuses more directly on the relationship between countries, whereas IS can encompass all phenomena which are globally oriented. Since the artifacts of world politics—international laws and treaties, foreign policies, diplomatic exchanges, military plans, and journalistic accounts—are usually presented in textual and/or verbal form, it is only natural to examine international political mechanism via linguistic models. Automatic content analysis is more and more becoming an accepted research method in social science. In political science, researchers are using party manifestos and transcripts of political speeches to analyze the positions of different actors. But while analysts are accustomed to incorporating manifestos, speeches, media reports, and other documents as evidence in their studies, few approach the task with the same level of understanding and sophistication as when applying other, more quantitative methods. Indeed, while recent innovations in statistical analysis have lent significant precision to the study of political texts, these advances have vastly outstripped those in the interpretive field.
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Teaching the Scientific Study of International Processes
D. Scott Bennett
The Scientific Study of International Processes (SSIP) is an approach aimed at teaching of international politics scientifically. Teaching scientifically means teaching students how to use evidence to support or disprove some particular logical argument or hypothesis that reaches some level of generalization about relationships between concepts. Closely related to simply asking what evidence there is, is teaching students to address the breadth, depth, and quality of that evidence. The scientific approach may also draw attention to the logic of arguments and policies. Are policies, positions, and the arguments behind them logical? Or is some policy or position based on assumptions that are not logically related, or only true if certain auxiliary assumptions hold true? Teaching methods for SSIP include comparative case studies, experiments and surveys, data sets, and game theory and simulation. Instructors also face several challenges when seeking to teach scientifically, and in particular when they try to make time to teach methodology as part of an international politics course. Some problems are relatively easily overcome just by focusing on effective teaching. Other are unique to SSIP and cannot be dealt with quite so easily. Among these are the need to appeal to a broad audience, and dealing with students' negative reactions to the term “science” and the constraint of finite time in a course.
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Global Studies
Amentahru Wahlrab
A review of introductory international relations, international studies, and global studies textbooks reveals that each field defines itself differently: one in terms of its central focus on the diplomatic and strategic relations of states, the second more broadly by including transnational transactions of all kinds, and the third focusing on globalization as both an object of analysis and a lens through which to view nearly all phenomena. However, in reading past the definitional chapters there are clear overlaps—most notably with regard to each introductory textbook’s treatment of globalization. Close examination of recently published introductory textbooks and those well into multiple editions reveals that globalization is treated as a fundamental aspect of each of the three fields. While both International Relations (IR) and International Studies (IS) scholars have contributed significantly to further broadening of both IR and IS in order to become increasingly “global,” other scholars have moved to create a new field of study called Global Studies (GS).
This new field of GS developed in the 1990s as scholars from multiple disciplines began to study the many dimensions of globalization. While globalization remains an essentially contested concept, most scholars accept as uncontroversial that it refers to the many strings that connect the world such that pulling on one string in one place will make a change somewhere else. Globalization’s central dynamics include interconnectivity, reconfiguration of space and time, and enhanced mobility. GS is the only field that places the contested concept of globalization at the center of its intellectual initiative.
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Teaching with Technology: Active Learning in International Studies
Steven F. Jackson
The adoption of new technologies in instruction will change the nature of instruction itself. There are four broad categories of the potential benefits of technology in higher education: off-loading; enhanced resources; enriched conventional class lecture/discussion; and outreach through distance education. Other college and university administrators have seen technology as either a money-saving or money-making tool for their institutions. The technologies most commonly associated with pedagogy include desktop software, internet-mediated communications, World Wide Web pages, distance education courseware, internet access to statistical databases, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), cellphone and personal digital assistant applications, and classroom response systems (CRS). There has been a modest and somewhat sporadic literature on teaching with technology in international studies, much of which follows the development of new technologies, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, and courseware development. The three major themes in the scholarship on technology in teaching and learning in international studies include technology-based enthusiasm/experimentation, comparative studies, and skepticism. However, some of the challenges to scholarship in teaching and learning with technology: the use of technology has become so pervasive, accepted, and easy that few teacher-scholars bother to write in scholarly journals about the act; weak structure of incentives for studying the use of technology in teaching and learning; and technological instability and discontinuity. Nevertheless, there are some technologies and trends that may appear in the future international relations course. These include podcasting, Real Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds, Twittering, and Wikipeda and Google Books.
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The Global and the Local
Roxanne Lynn Doty
The connections between the local and the global raise a range of issues that have been addressed in social and political theory in the past but continue to provoke important discussion. Many of the constructs that have traditionally been foundational to the academic discipline of international relations, including territory and sovereignty, are inherently intertwined with how we think of the local and the global. The local–global connections revolve around three broad and overlapping themes: the critical scrutiny of older concepts and the emergence of new ones as well as alternative vocabularies; an appreciation of the necessity of an interdisciplinary perspective; and attention to the significance of the relationship between theory and practice. Many of the more recent scholarly work on the local–global continue to tackle the effects of global capitalism in locations constructed as local as well as the role of these locations in facilitating global capitalist relations. Critical geographers and cultural studies scholars have made important contributions to our understandings of the global–local nexus by focusing on the formation of social movements and localized practices of resistance as well as transversal struggles that call into question conventional spatial logics. Another important area of research that has made both conceptual and empirical contributions has produced the “global cities” literature. Students of international studies need to continue to focus on what have been referred to as “everyday” or “local” practices that have often been considered unimportant when it comes to the “big” issues of international studies.
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Women Teaching International Studies
Mary N. Hampton and Kathleen A. Mahoney-Norris
One aspect of women’s professional experience in the field of international studies is that of teaching. Women’s experience in the gendered classroom has been shaped by three general factors: their identity, their interests, and the institutions in which they work. Major dimensions of identity can be grouped into: identity as reputation; identity as race and sex; and identity as role models and mentors. Meanwhile, women’s teaching is clearly affected by their scholarly interests, which impact on both the subjects they choose to teach and their pedagogical approaches. While it would not be surprising to find that women teachers tend to teach more about women and feminism, a major survey of International Relations (IR) faculty in the United States found other significant differences between women and men in the classroom, often linked to women’s differing research interests. Women’s teaching is also impacted by the institutional environment in which they work. Surveys and studies across the academic spectrum confirm the importance not only of gender equity at institutions, but also the presence of an institutional climate, or culture, that is friendly to women faculty. Major elements that affect the institutional environment include the number of faculty women (including senior women); the type of institution (its focus on research or teaching); and the ability to offer feminist and gender courses, and related pedagogies.
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The Origins and Evolution of the Scientific Study of International Politics: How Methods Met Models, with a Short Interlude
Kelly M. Kadera and Dina Zinnes
The International Studies Association (ISA) was founded in 1959, but the Scientific Study of International Politics (SSIP) only became one of its sections in 1993. SSIP researchers initially believed that subject oriented committees were unparalleled. They argued that combining traditional and quantitative research on a single committee with a common subject focus would encourage cross-examination and provide a greater understanding of the problem—but this was not the case. Nowadays, the SSIP is dedicated to the pursuit of international studies using formal or empirical data. Following the methods of scientific inquiry, the section aims to support and promote replicable research in terms of the clarity of a theory and/or the testing of hypotheses. The SSIP is committed to bringing together researchers who, at all levels of analysis and with respect to the entire range of international political questions, pursue these issues using formally stated arguments and/or systematically collected and analyzed empirical data. Furthermore, the SSIP fully cooperates with any existing organization that has similar goals, both within and outside the ISA. The significance of international studies manifests through degrees and courses that engage students and researchers with the increasing number of issues and phenomena which have arisen in the current globalized world. As such, most education providers justify the need for the degrees by relating the increasing importance of the discipline with real-world situations and employment opportunities.
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Nonhuman, More-Than-Human, and Post-Human International Relations and International Studies
Audra Mitchell
In international studies, the field of non-, more-than-, and post-human approaches to international relations and associated subfields (e.g., international security and global studies) has burgeoned in recent years. Within the field are works that challenge mainstream ideas of “the human” or “humanity” and highlight their exclusions. It also examines terms and frameworks such as rights, agency, ethical status, sovereignty, security, and survival from the perspectives of three main streams: nonhuman, more-than-human, and post-human and inhuman thought. Examined also are the broader contexts on which such arguments draw, including currently marginalized knowledge systems (e.g., Indigenous, Black, Global Majority, queer, and disabled approaches), to ultimately guide further study in this rapidly growing subfield.
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Women and Academic Organizations in International Studies
Karen Erickson and Elisabeth Prügl
Academic organizations introduce gender, race, nationality, and other signifiers of power into the field of international studies. Research on the status of women in the international studies profession has typically focused on the distributions of women and men according to academic rank, salaries, and employment. A number of detailed case studies have explored practices in particular academic departments and universities in order to elucidate the mechanisms in place that help to reproduce gender inequality. We can gauge the progress that women have made with regard to their status and role in academic organizations over the years by looking at the International Studies Association (ISA). The ISA presents a mixed picture of international studies as a field of gendered power. While women have entered leadership positions in the association, they have done so mostly at lower levels, while men continue to dominate the positions at the top, the ISA president and executive director. Women have made some advances into editorial positions, but gatekeeping in the scholarly journals published under the auspices of the ISA remains largely a male preserve. Furthermore, women and men in the ISA reproduce gender difference and inequality by re-enacting gender divisions of labor while participating in an economy that circulates symbolic capital. An important consideration for future research is the assumption that international studies is a field of complex gendered power that cannot be easily explained by purely singular tools of analysis.
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Organizing Strategies for Advancing Women in International Studies
Mary K. Meyer McAleese and Susan S. Northcutt
The interdisciplinary field of international studies has traditionally been a male-dominated field. Indeed, the field of international relations, both theory and practice, has been argued to be gendered in highly masculinist ways. Whether as practitioners or as scholars, women have had a difficult time entering and advancing in such male-dominated fields, both in the United States and around the world. Their admittance and full acceptance in the profession has been hindered by laws and regulations, institutional practices and inertia, gendered stereotypes and customary expectations, overt discrimination and subtle biases, or benign neglect. As such, women have adopted a number of different strategies to make their ways into such male-dominated fields. These include working to expand the field to encompass questions of interest to women, developing new networks with other women for mentorship and resource development, and organizing themselves into distinct groups to promote women’s professional interests and advancement. One of these women’s organizations is Women’s Caucus for International Studies (WCIS), a formal section within the International Studies Association (ISA). Since its formal organization in 1996, the Women’s Caucus has worked hard to fulfill its mission of upgrading the status of women in the profession. Specifically, it seeks to promote equal opportunities for women in their professional lives, as well as women’s professional development. The Caucus fulfills its mission in numerous ways, including sponsoring scores of panels and roundtables focused on women’s professional development, and organizing mentoring networks, both inside the Caucus and beyond.
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Measuring “Success” for Women in International Studies in Academic Settings
Vicki L. Golich
Success is not easy to define or measure. In the academic field, traditional indicators of success include level of educational attainment, type and place of employment, tenure status, promotion or position status, publication productivity, and compensation. Alternatively, success can be defined as “the achievement of something desired or planned.” This is a more inward-looking definition of success, and adopting it might improve the chances for women to attain recognized success because it rewards what women in higher education and in international studies actually do. Some measures about how to determine success in international studies are more quantifiable than others, such as identifying obstacles women have had to overcome to enter and to thrive within the discipline. Others are controversial, such as self-professed goals that do not align with the traditional success measures. For example, many women—and even men—are simply more concerned with seeking work–life–family balance than the “prestige” of a tenured, full-professor appointment at an Ivy League Institution. Clearly, there is a need to change perceptions about what success means and what a successful life looks like. To this end, the academy in general, and international studies as an academic discipline in particular, should rethink how to evaluate quality teaching, recognize a broader range of research as valuable, and honor all kinds of service. They should also undertake some seriously introspective studies focused on why women’s work in academia remains so undervalued. Such studies must include recommendations for action aimed at rectifying current gender imbalances.
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International Organization and Crime, and Corruption
Frank G. Madsen
The intersection of international organization and crime and corruption has been garnering increasing interest from international studies scholars and practitioners. An international organization can be defined, following the International Law Commission, as an “organization established by a treaty or other instrument governed by international law and possessing its own international legal personality.” International organizations generally have States as members, but often other entities can also apply for membership. They both make international law and are governed by it. Yet, the decision-making process of international organizations is often less a question of law than one of political judgment. Meanwhile, corruption is a form of dishonest or unethical conduct by a person, or an institution, entrusted with a position of authority, often to acquire personal benefit. Corruption may include many activities including bribery and embezzlement, though it may also involve practices that are legal in many countries. Government, or 'political', corruption occurs when an office-holder or other governmental employee acts in an official capacity for personal gain. Strangely, the most important contribution to the field of organized crime did not come from criminology, legal studies, or international studies, but from philosophy. Recognizing both criminal law and international relations as the exercise of power, Michel Foucault introduced radically new thinking in the area of societal control in relation to the study of organized crime.
