Voice from the Margins: Critical Theory, Post-Modern, Feminist and Post-colonial Approach

Question 1

What is the difference between positivist and constructivist views on knowledge creation?

Answer 1

- Positivists presume investigator is
  outside of world being investigated,
  division between subject and jobect
- Constructivists presume investigator
  is embedded in the world under
  investigation

Question 2

What is the constructivist thought?

Answer 2

- The social order is
  produced/constituted through
  foundational texts
- Most knowledge is textual/intertextual
- Knowledge in the social sciences is
  intertextual
- Ideas have political implications

Question 3

What is critical theory essential for?

Answer 3

Democracy, it isn’t possible without it

Question 4

What are the origins of critical theory?

Answer 4

• Origins outside the discipline
  
  • Frankfurt School (1923)
  • Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
  • Both schools seek to figure out
    why Marx’s communist revolution
    hadn’t happened

Question 5

What was the Frankfurt School?

Answer 5

• 1923
• Origin of critical theory
• Theorise mass popular culture
• Influenced by Marx, Freud and Kant
• Critical of Capitalism and Soviet
  Socialism
• Critique of Mass Consumer Culture
• German Scholars who Moved to the US

Question 6

Who was Antonio Gramsci ?

Answer 6

• 1891-1937
• Origin of critical theory
• Italian Marxist imprisoned by the
  Italian Fascists
• Wrote Prison Notebooks, translates
  1970s v influential
• Theorises cultural/ideational hegemony
• Concerned by the role of Hegemony in
  preventing the spread of critical
  through
• Hegemony = coercion + consent
• Theories civil society within the
  state (hegemonic)

Question 7

How has critical theory impacted the discipline of IR?

Answer 7

• Critical IPE

* Globalisation

Question 8

What is Critical IPE?

Answer 8

• Neo-Gramscians
• World Order is Hegemonic
• The role of dominant ideas in shaping
  politics to the advantage of the few
• Global Civil Society
• Normative and analytical commitments
  of critical IPE
  
  • Broaden the agenda beyond states
    and markets (civil society)
  • Global pillage not village
  • New big question: systemic
    transformation (globalisation)

Question 9

What are the origins of Post-modernism?

Answer 9

• Origins outside the discipline
  
  • Historical context: European
    decolonisation (60s)
  • Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
  • Knowledge and Powrr
  • Alternative histories (of the
    asylum, the prison, punishment,
    sexuality)
  • how is the rationally ordered
    modern society produced?
    
    • Through the creation
      discipling of “difference”
      (the ‘insane’, the
      ‘deranged’, the ‘sexually
      deviant’)

Question 10

What impact has post-modernism had on IR?

Answer 10

- Development is an apparatus of
  knowledge/power that has the aim of the
  incorporation of the peripheral
  states into the global economy on
  terms that favour advanced powers
- Critical of the very idea of
  Development: teleological historical
  progress that all states will follow
- Why in more than 70 years of
  development programs is the world
  still divided rich and poor?

Question 11

What are the origins of feminism?

Answer 11

- Waves of Eu Feminist thought and
  writing (from the Restoration
  playwrights);
- 19th Century Suffragettes (the vote)
- 20th Century Equal Right Movement
  (equality in economic, political and
  sexual power);
- Divided by ideological schism
  (Liberal and Marxist)
- Liberal: concerned with women’s equal
  access to economic power
- Marxist: points out that the division
  of the modern state between public
  and private spheres is gendered

Question 12

What effect has feminism had on IR?

Answer 12

• Where are all the women?
• 1970s internationalisation of the
  American Women’s Movement
• 1975-1985 UN’s decade for the
  advancement of Women (gives rise to
  schisms and debate)
• Third World Feminism
• The Gender Agenda: MDGs, modernise
  the woman, you will modernise tha
  nation

Question 13

What are the origins of post-colonialism?

Answer 13

- occurs as a result of postcolonial
  migration, a symptom of globalisaiton
- Begins in comparative literature
- Puts European empire ‘on the map’ in
  the Social Sciences
- Points out that the social sciences
  have paid scant attention to their
  own colonial history
- Points out the knowledge and culture
  are central to the ability to colonise
- Dis-embedding of the Universal
  ‘Human” and including the experiences
  of former colonised territories
- Offres a critique of the ‘Progress”
  narrative of history

Question 14

What impact did post-colonialism have on IR?

Answer 14

• Only marginal
• More keenly felt in other disciplines
  (georgeaph)
• Fewer links to poltical activism

Question 15

What have the contributions of Critical Approaches to IR?

Answer 15

• Broaden the agenda
  
  • Issues inside states that affect
    global life
  • Non-state actors - NGOs, social
    movements, asymmetric warfare
  • Non-state issues - threats to
    human life rather than state
    existence (ecological, inequality)
  • IR from marginal perspectives
  • The cultural turn (occurs in both
    realist and critical perspectives)
• Deepen Thinking
  
  • What constituted thruth?
  • Rejects universal claims
  • Rejects scientific approaches
  • Knowledge is socially constructed
  • Relationship between knowledge
    and power
  • Truths claims have political
    implications