Journal of International Relations and Development最新文献

By drawing from the engagement with the empirical case of sumud (Arabic: steadfastness) in Palestine, this article focuses on the social and political implications of everyday life in conflict settings. Proposing an alternative perspective on conflicts, this article argues that it is important also to focus on normalcy of everyday life in conflict settings and how this transforms conflict dynamics. Hence, contrary to the assumption that there is an opposition between the normalcy of everyday life and violent conflicts, this article argues that everyday life is not disrupted but that it goes on also in the face of conflicts, it only has to adapt to it. Building on Stephen Lubkemann's concept of 'culturally scripted life projects', this article will show how the attempt to pursue a regular life unfolds in an everyday setting in order to escape the predominant conflict/resistance frame. In addition to sumud as an individual practice this article highlights the broader social and political role this concept assumes in the context of Palestinian nationalism. In order to illustrate this argument, this article presents sumud as a spatial quotidian practice which is primarily aimed at realising culturally scripted life project in the face of the Israeli occupation.

In this paper, we examine Brazil's international activism and ascent to the status of rising state during the presidencies of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) and his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011-2014). We focus on the dissemination of social policies under an innovative model of development that reflected the political and economic context of a developing country. We argue that this activism was framed in terms of Brazil's socio-economic and cultural peculiarities, whereby these were treated not as obstacles but as positive contributions to developing states' attempts to reform global governance structures. We argue that this reflects an alternative form of foreign policy politicisation in which the social dilemmas, particularities and contradictions of the Brazilian experience are incorporated in the foreign policy agenda to leverage its international stature as a rising state. We explain how Brazil's international cooperation through transferring its public policies and development models (policies for fighting hunger and poverty, agrarian development and income generation) to its Southern partners has been discursively articulated as representing Brazil's normative potential to contribute to political and institutional solutions, and rebuild norms and standards that affect the distribution of international power and wealth.

The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has prompted discussions, both politically and analytically, that frame its security problematic as an infrastructural dilemma that unfolds between the public health-related need for interrupting the movement of people and calls to keep economic processes of production, distribution and consumption going. Moving beyond this diagnosis, we argue that infrastructural responses to the crisis in the European Union have resulted in the creation and invocation of economic and socio-material assemblages that are expected to steer societies through the crisis, which we term 'safe assemblages'. In empirical terms, we discuss the cases of the creation of economic emergency funds which we view as economic assemblages that guarantee payment connectivity for struggling businesses, and of the invocation of the 'home' as an assemblage that minimises contagion risks while maintaining social connectivity through digital means. In theoretical terms, we suggest expanding current theorisations of the role of circulation in security infrastructures, referring to Foucault, by a consideration of assemblages as a third component that mediates the relationship between circulation and its interruption.

Resilience and gender have become new buzzwords for expressing renewal in peacebuilding. This article unpacks the gender-resilience nexus in theory and analyses global trends and variation in peacebuilding policy and practice. It advances an analytical framework based on three central pillars of peacebuilding: process, outcome, and expertise. A comprehensive analysis of 49 international peacebuilding handbooks, produced by leading international organisations for policymakers and practitioners in the field, is conducted. The results show how the integration of the gender-resilience nexus signals new ways of understanding conflict dynamics and peacebuilding. Yet, gender peace expertise is 'thin' with regard to policies and practices of resilient conflict transformation. By way of conclusion, we suggest three directions to be taken in research to advance and refine the gender-resilience nexus. First, the politics and contestation of peacebuilding need to be problematised and explored further. Second, the understanding of resilience in peacebuilding needs to shift emphasis from conflict management to conflict transformation. Third, the positionality of peacebuilding actors and local contexts need to be probed further.

This article examines the institutional rationale of China's Belt and Road Initiative for Sino-Latin American interregionalism and global multilateralism. Applying Pedersen's ideational-institutional realism approach and research on interregionalism, we provide a more nuanced analysis than mainstream realist theorising dominating research on China's foreign policies. We argue that China's interregional relations with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) entail a cooperative strategy to counter US hegemony in its own 'backyard'. At a cognitive level, we show that the worldviews of Chinese foreign policy elites are informed by the tenets of realism. At an institutional level, interregionalism serves as a soft balancing device. In the power dimension, China uses cooperative relations with LAC to create soft power, enhancing access to raw materials, and promoting Chinese values, worldviews, and policies to the region. Hence, China-LAC interregionalism qualifies as 'diminished multilateralism', a pragmatic variant of multilateralism that favours particularistic interests while hampering collective problem solving.

While the United Nations (UN) and other international organisations have celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, critical scholars claim that the agenda has rarely been able to foster resilience. They show how programmes have only slowly and partially achieved gender balancing and parity in war-affected countries. The limitation we identify in the debate between policy and critique is that resilience has often been reduced to an egalitarian project-where mechanical policies and schemes are deployed to ameliorate the conditions of women, enhance their participation in decision-making and pursue the equality between women and men-to advance in sustaining peace. In this article we complement the existing critiques by engaging with the feminist writings of Elizabeth Grosz, as well as with indigenous feminist practices in Liberia. We nurture a feminism that affirms the agency and inventiveness of women to begin to reimagine resilience as difference: a resilience that thrives outside governance structures and the confines of neoliberal policymaking.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41268-022-00264-0.

For two decades scholars have used insights from constructivist approaches and principal-agent (P-A) theory to understand the relationship between states and international organisations (IOs). Together, these works identify the conditions under which IOs can operate independently of states, although they have yet to explain when and why IO bureaucrats are likely to do so. Nor do they articulate a clear and consistent definition of autonomy. In this article, we seek to fill these gaps. We advance a narrow understanding of autonomy that distinguishes unintended behaviour from the intended independence of IO bureaucrats, before developing a three-stage, integrative explanation for the conditions under which IO bureaucrats act autonomously. First, we borrow from constructivist approaches a focus on staffing rules and the identity of IO bureaucrats to explain the sources of these agents' preferences. Second, we add insights from work on exogenous pressures for change-crises and critical junctures-to explain when and why IO bureaucrats will advance their preferences. Third, we incorporate P-A theory's attention to an IO's institutional design, along with insights from literature on domestic institutions, to explain when bureaucrats can implement their preferences. Case studies of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) illustrate our argument.

Voicing criticism seems to be a difficult task for employees in international organisations (IOs), as numerous anecdotes in the literature suggest. This observation is alarming, since internal criticism is an indispensable resource for organisational learning processes. So why are IOs apparently not using this resource to its full potential? The present article is the first to provide a comprehensive answer to this question by combining insights from organisation theory with an empirical case study of the UN Secretariat. My general argument is that 'criticism from within' is ambivalent. It can be a resource for, but also a threat to IOs: internal criticism can endanger an IO's external reputation as well as destabilise the organisation from within. Based on this theoretical understanding, I identify and empirically examine three specific reasons for the UN Secretariat's weak criticism culture: (1) Criticism is suppressed due to a widespread fear of leaks resulting from external pressures. (2) Criticism is avoided as a strategy of self-protection in the face of (inevitable) failures. (3) Constructive criticism is difficult to express in settings where organisational hypocrisy is necessary.

The existing scholarship in international relations (IR) has tended to underrate the conceptual implications of different types of shaming. This article advances a new terminology of shaming. Drawing from social and criminal psychology, the article distinguishes the social distancing effects of shaming that is disintegrative from the community-building effects of shaming that is reintegrative. This is important because it offers additional ways of seeing how it may be equally important to shed light on the multifaceted role and multiple effects of shaming in maintaining social order in world politics. The main argument raised here is that reintegrative shaming – shaming, which is followed by efforts to reintegrate the offender back into the community – is central to peaceful conflict resolution in a security community. This argument is empirically illustrated by the case of NATO’s military intervention in Libya.