bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Psychology and Security
Authors: Mercer Jonathan
Published: January 2018

Psychology plays a key role in the success of strategy and is therefore important to the study of international security. There are four general approaches to the psychology of strategy. The first focuses on personality, and more specifically on individual differences, cognition, and the use of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to investigate human nature. The second approach draws on deterrence theory, which considers how an actor can keep a target from doing something it would otherwise do. A political psychological perspective on deterrence consists of three elements. First, psychological approaches to deterrence reject stimulus–response models and instead lay emphasis on understanding cognition and emotion. Second, deterrence is a policy rather than a philosophy. Third, whereas normative theories explain how one ought to behave (and thus cannot be disconfirmed by evidence), psychological theories change in response to new evidence, such as with the development of prospect theory. The third aspect of strategic interaction involves learning and intelligence assessments. Based on this approach, how people learn, what they are likely to learn, and the problems of assessing the intentions and capabilities of others are central to strategy. The fourth and final approach is concerned with the strategy of group conflict, which has generated two waves of research: the first analyzed how material inequality or competition for resources gives rise to psychological forces that result in group cooperation and between-group competition, and the second added nonmaterial causes to explain group relations.
Security Council Resolution 1325
Authors: Patton Charlotte Graves
Published: January 2018

Resolution 1325, adopted by the United Nations Security Council (SC) on October 31, 2000, reaffirms the important role of women in conflict resolution as well as in the maintenance and promotion of international peace and security. Res 1325 urges states to expand the number of women working in UN peacekeeping, diplomacy, the military, and police, while rejecting impunity in matters of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, especially with reference to violence against women. It also calls for greater consideration of the needs of women and girls in conflict circumstances, including in refugee camps, and the different needs of female and male ex-combatants in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR). Transnational networks, such as the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace, and Security (NGOWGWPS), played an influential role in the drafting of Res 1325y. The implementation of this resolution throughout UN agencies may be assessed using two theoretical perspectives, constructivism and neorealism. The NGOWGWPS’s published report, Five Years On Report: From Local to Global: Making Peace Work for Women, describes National Action Plans (NAPs) as a tool that member states could use to detail steps that they will take to fulfill Res 1325’s objectives. It is worth noting that 37 out of 193 member countries of the UN have or are establishing NAPs. However, the UN has been slow to “adopt, consume, and promote” the norms embodied in SC Res 1325. One way to address this is to include changes in national foreign policies actively supporting such norms.
Teaching International Political Sociology
Authors: Pouliot Vincent
Published: January 2018

Teaching international political sociology (IPS) is intellectually rewarding yet pedagogically challenging. In the conventional International Relations (IR) curriculum, IPS students have to set aside many of the premises, notions, and models they learned in introductory classes, such as assumptions of instrumental rationality and canonical standards of positivist methodology. Once problematized, these traditional starting points in IR are replaced with a number of new dispositions, some of which are counterintuitive, that allow students to take a fresh look at world politics. In the process, IPS opens many more questions than it provides clear-cut answers, making the approach look very destabilizing for students. The objective of teaching IPS is to sow the seeds of three key dispositions inside students’ minds. First, students must appreciate the fact that social life consists primarily of relations that make the whole bigger than the parts. Second, they must be aware that social action is infused with meanings upon which both cooperative and conflictual relations hinge. Third, they have to develop a degree of reflexivity in order to realize that social science is a social practice just like others, where agents enter in various relations and struggle over the meanings of the world. There are four primary methods of teaching IPS, each with its own merits and limits: induction, ontology, historiography, and classics.
Teaching the Scientific Study of International Processes
Authors: Bennett D. Scott
Published: January 2018

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.
The Causes of War
Authors: Adams Karen Ruth
Published: January 2018

The scientific study of war is a pressing concern for international politics. Given the destructive nature of war, ordinary citizens and policy makers alike are eager to anticipate if not outright avoid outbreaks of violence. Understanding the causes of war can be a complex process. Scholars of international relations must first define war, and then establish a universe of actors or conflicts in which both war and peace are possible. Next, they must collect data on the incidence of war in the entire universe of cases over a particular period of time, a random sample of relevant cases, a number of representative cases, or a set of cases relevant to independent variables in the theories they are testing. Finally, scholars must use this data to construct quantitative and qualitative tests of hypotheses about why actors fight instead of resolving their differences in other ways and, in particular, why actors initiate wars by launching the first attack. Instead of taking the inductive approach of inventorying the causes of particular wars and then attempting to find general rules, it is necessary for scholars to approach the problem deductively, developing theories about the environment in which states operate, deriving hypotheses about the incidence of war and attack, and using quantitative and qualitative methods to test these hypotheses.
The Millennium Development Goals and the Politics of Global Poverty
Authors: Nelson Paul
Published: January 2018

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), endorsed by 189 governments at the Millennium Summit, propose a concerted global effort to reduce the incidence of severe poverty and many of its most serious manifestations over a twenty-five-year period. The MDGs offer crucial insights into the politics of poverty and poverty reduction in international affairs. Their political dimensions can be analyzed in terms of agency, the nature and limits of accountability, the use and manipulation of quantitative goals for political ends, the dangerous illusion that MDG objectives can be accomplished in large part by mobilizing more development assistance, and the MDGs’ distinctly apolitical approach to the structural causes of poverty. The MDG initiative should be situated in three ongoing streams of debate and discussion: the debate over the relative priority of growth and of human development for poverty reduction; the tension between the assertion of rights and the enunciation of donor-driven goals as the political engine of poverty reduction; and the debate over the roles of markets and of state direction and regulation. While the MDGs concentrate on increasing aid flows to reduce the incidence of poverty and its manifestations, international trade and finance arrangements too often impede rapid progress. This is evident in water privatization, trade rules, and anti-retroviral medicines for HIV/AIDS patients. A way forward is to integrate the MDGs more deeply with human rights guarantees. Donors, for example, must take seriously the 2002 Draft Guidelines for the application of human rights to poverty reduction strategies.
The Pluralist–Solidarist Debate in the English School
Authors: Bain William
Published: January 2018

In his 1966 essay, “The Grotian Conception of International Society,” Hedley Bull distinguishes between two conceptions of international society: pluralism and solidarism. The central assumption of solidarism is “the solidarity, or potential solidarity, of the states comprising international society, with respect to the enforcement of the law.” In contrast, pluralism claims that “states do not exhibit solidarity of this kind, but are capable of agreeing only for certain minimum purposes which fall short of that of the enforcement of the law.” Bull’s formulation of pluralism and solidarism, and the way he set the two concepts against one another, exerted a profound influence on subsequent English School scholarship and sparked the pluralist–solidarist debate. This debate revolves around theorizing different kinds of order, in particular international and world order. The English School used the language of “pluralism” and “solidarism” to address the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. After the issue of humanitarian intervention was pushed down the list of scholarly priorities, pluralism and solidarism sparked renewed interest from scholars such as Barry Buzan, Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami, William Bain, and Andrew Hurrell. Despite the debates triggered by the pluralist–solidarist debate, the vocabulary of pluralism and solidarism is a promising means of tackling questions and issues that are undertheorized or largely neglected in English School theory, including those relating to the place of sub- and supranational entities in international society, the meaning and scope of world order, and the significance of international political economy in theorizing different kinds of order.
UN, Gender, and Women
Authors: Basu Soumita
Published: January 2018

After the end of World War II, women’s rights advocates at the United Nations vigorously campaigned for equality between the sexes. At the UN Charter Conference held in San Francisco in 1945, women delegates fought for the recognition of sex-based discrimination as a violation of human rights in Article 1 of the Charter. At the UN, issues relating to women were primarily placed under the purview of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), established in June 1946 with the mandate to “prepare recommendations and report to the Economic and Social Council on promoting women’s rights in political, economic, civil, social and educational fields.” Three main perspectives underpin feminist International Relations (IR) literature on the UN, gender and women: promoting women’s participation and inclusion of women’s issues at the UN; gender critique of the UN, geared towards institutional transformation; and challenging the universality of the UN. Despite some fundamental differences between these three strands of thinking, their political significance is widely acknowledged in the literature. The co-existence of these contentious viewpoints resonates with the vibrant feminist politics at the UN, and offers a fruitful avenue for envisioning a better intergovernmental organization. This is particularly relevant in light of feminist scholars’ engagement with activism and policymaking at the UN from the very beginning. Nevertheless, there are issues that deserve further consideration, such as the workings of the UN, as reflected in its unique diplomatic characteristics and bureaucratic practices.
What is Theory?
Authors: Jackson Patrick Thaddeus
Published: January 2018

The concept of theory takes part in a conceptual network occupied by some of the most common subjects of European Enlightenment, such as “science” and “reason.” Generally speaking, a theory is a rational type of abstract or generalizing thinking, or the results of such thinking. Theories drive the exercise of finding facts rather than of reaching goals. To formulate a theory, or to “theorize,” is to assert something of a privileged epistemic status, manifested in the traditional scholarly hierarchy between theorists and those who merely labor among the empirical weeds. In so doing, a theory provides a fixed point upon which analysis can be founded and action can be performed. Scholar and author Kenneth W. Thompson describes a nexus of relations between and among three different senses of the word “theory:” normative theory, a “general theory of politics,” and the set of assumptions on the basis of which a given actor is acting. These three types of theory are somehow paralleled by Marysia Zalewski’s triad of theory as “tool,” theory as “critique,” and theory as “everyday practice.” While Thompson’s and Zalewski’s interpretations of theory are each inherently consistent, both signal a different philosophical ontology. Thompson’s viewpoint is dualist, presuming the existence of a mind-independent world to which knowledge refers; while Zalewski’s is more of a monist, rejecting the mind/world dichotomy in favor of a more complex interrelationship between observers and their objects of study.
Comparative Immigration Policy
Authors: Money Jeannette
Published: January 2018

The research on comparative immigration policy is relatively recent, with the earliest dealing with significant immigrant inflows into Western Europe after World War II. Because of the difficulties in finding empirically grounded measures of immigration policy, the literature has grown primarily by adding to the theoretical literature. In terms of the immigration control literature, nativism (anti-immigrant preferences) has been complemented by approaches that include attention to the economic consequences of immigration, focus on how societal preferences are channeled, and focus on state national interest and state security. In terms of the immigrant integration literature, there has been a tendency to classify the immigrant reception environment of states according to historical nation building features of the state and to types of “immigration regimes.” More recently, in recognition of the static nature of these models of policy making, scholars have disaggregated integration policy into its component parts and incorporated aspects of politics that change over time. The research arena is, in short, theoretically rich, though both dimensions of research on immigration policy suffer from two flaws. The first is the inability to compare effectively policies across countries. The second is the research focus on Western Europe and advanced industrial countries, to the neglect of the remaining countries in the world.
Defining–Redefining Security
Authors: Buzan Barry , Hansen Lene
Published: January 2018

International security studies (ISS) has significantly evolved from its founding core of “golden age” strategic studies. From the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s through to the 1970s, strategic studies virtually was ISS, and remains a very large part of it. The fact that it continues to stand as the “mainstream” attacked by widening/deepening approaches further speaks to its status as a “core.” This core consists of those literatures whose principal concern is external military threats to the state, and the whole agenda of the use of force which arises from that. This core was originally focused on nuclear weapons and the military-political rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union, but has since adapted its focus to changes in the salience and nature of military threats caused by the end of the Cold War and 9/11. It includes literatures on deterrence, arms racing, arms control and disarmament, grand strategy, wars (and “new wars”), the use of force, nuclear proliferation, military technology, and terrorism. Debates within ISS are structured, either implicitly or explicitly, by five questions: (1) which referent object to adopt, (2) whether to understand security as internally or externally driven, (3) whether to limit it to the military sector or to expand it, (4) what fundamental thinking about (international) politics to adopt, and (5) which epistemology and methodology to choose.
Economic Diplomacy
Authors: Lee Donna , Hocking Brian
Published: January 2018

Mainstream studies of diplomacy have traditionally approached international relations (IR) using realist and neorealist frameworks, resulting in state-centric analyses of mainly political agendas at the expense of economic matters. Recently, however, scholars have begun to focus on understanding international relations beyond security. Consequently, there has been a significant shift in the study of diplomacy toward a better understanding of the processes and practices underpinning economic diplomacy. New concepts of diplomacy such as catalytic diplomacy, network diplomacy, and multistakeholder diplomacy have emerged, providing new tools not only to recognize a greater variety of state and nonstate actors in diplomatic practice, but also to highlight the varied and changing character of diplomatic processes. In this context, two themes in the study of diplomacy can be identified. The first is that of diplomat as agent, in IR and international political economy. The second is how to fit into diplomatic agency officials who do not belong to the state, or to a foreign ministry. In the case of the changing environment caused by globalization, economic diplomacy commonly drives the development of qualitatively different diplomatic practices in new and existing economic forums. Four key modes of economic diplomacy are critical to managing contemporary globalization: commercial diplomacy, trade diplomacy, finance diplomacy, and consular visa services in relation to increased immigration flows. The development of these modes of economic diplomacy has shaped the way we think about who the diplomats are, what diplomats do, and how they do it.
Foreign Policy Analysis and Rational Choice Models
Authors: de Mesquita Bruce Bueno
Published: January 2018

Since the end of World War II, foreign policy thinking has been dominated by a realist (or neorealist) perspective in which states are taken as the relevant unit of analysis. The focus on states as the central actors in international politics leads to the view that what happens within states is of little consequence for understanding what happens between states. However, state-centric, unitary rational actor theories fail to explain perhaps the most significant empirical discovery in international relations over the past several decades. That is the widely accepted observation that democracies tend not to fight wars with one another even though they are not especially reluctant to fight with autocratic regimes. By looking within states at their domestic politics and institutionally induced behavior, the political economy perspective provides explanations of the democratic peace and associated empirical regularities while offering a cautionary tale for those who leap too easily to the inference that since pairs of democracies tend to interact peacefully; therefore it follows that they have strong normative incentives to promote democratic reform around the world. Rational choices approaches have also helped elucidate new insights that contribute to our understanding of foreign policy. Some of these new insights and the tools of analysis from which they are derived have significantly contributed to the actual decision making process.
International Organizations and Preventing War
Authors: Edwards Martin S. , DiCicco Jonathan M.
Published: January 2018

International organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations play an important role in war prevention. In theory, IOs reduce the risk of war between belligerents by improving communication, facilitating cooperation, and building confidence and trust. In practice, however, IOs’ war-preventing capacities have sparked skepticism and criticism. Recent advances in the scholarly study of the causes of war have given rise to new and promising directions in research on IOs and war prevention. These studies highlight the problems of interstate and intrastate wars, global and regional organizations, preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping, and the relationship between IOs and domestic institutions. They also offer novel insights that both complement and challenge studies of traditional concepts such as collective security. An interesting work is that of J. D. Fearon, who frames war as a bargaining process between rational states. Fearon articulates a central puzzle of international relations: since war is costly, the question that arises is why rational leaders of competing states choose to fight instead of pursuing less costly, nonviolent dispute settlements. Three general mechanisms account for rational, unitary states’ inability to identify an alternative outcome that both would prefer to war: bluffing about private information, commitment problems, and indivisibility of stakes. Despite the obvious progress in research on IOs and war prevention, there remain methodological and theoretical issues that deserve consideration for further investigation, two of which are: the interaction of domestic and international organizations, and the implications of variations in IO design.
Regime Type, Foreign Policy, and International Relations
Authors: Hagan Joe D.
Published: January 2018

One of the most prevalent ideas in the literature of international relations (IR) is that domestic political patterns are linked to foreign policy via the concept of political regime (democracy, anocracy, and autocracy). Since the beginning of the 21st century, the regime-type foreign policy nexus has gained ample theoretical and empirical credibility in IR theory. There are four areas of research on regime type and foreign policy: the first considers democratic peace literature focused on authoritarian and democratic foreign policies; the second deals with democratization and war literature that highlights the foreign policies of anocracies; the third uses the common large-N data sets and research design and unpacks democratic and authoritarian regimes (separately) to identify subtypes of each regime type; and the fourth is the so-called politics and war literature. The politics and war literature is fragmented, with authors pursuing separate and evidently incomplete lines of argument. There are three steps for integrating the key insights of the politics and war literature: First is the intensification of domestic opposition to established elites; second, the adoption of new ruling strategies as a means for leaders to cope with rising domestic political crises and to control their hold over the regime; and third, the occurrence of international crises, in which larger aspects of domestic politics persist or emerge and affect decisions involving the threat of war.
Religion, Nationalism, and Transnational Actors
Authors: Haynes Jeffrey
Published: January 2018

The relationship between “religion,” “nationalism,” and transnational actors in contemporary international relations is often unclear and sometimes controversial. Many scholars have questioned the view that religion and nationalism are necessarily separate. This became necessary as it was clear that rather than fading away, religion showed surprising persistence, with deepening religious identities in many countries around the world, both “developed” and “underdeveloped.” Religion and nationalism were not necessarily apart. Instead, as two kinds of self-identification, although they were sometimes in tension, often they were not; either coexisting unproblematically, or acting in mutually supportive ways. Various approaches are suggested to explain the relationship. Rather than “either or,” the relationship between nationalism and religion can be seen as a continuum. At one end is an ideal-type “secular nationalism” and at the other there is fully realized “religious nationalism.” Somewhere in the middle is “civil-religious nationalism,” for decades believed to be the situation in America, with characteristics of both. Over time, the issue of transnationalism has also appeared of interest to scholars. This includes “transnational religious actors” which operate across international boundaries, including the Roman Catholic Church and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Our discussion commences with a discussion of secularization, in order to locate the issues of religion, nationalism, and religious transnationalist actors within an appropriate intellectual and ideological context. The aim of the essay is to illustrate how religion has a strong role in relation to nationalism and transnationalism during what many identify as a period of post-secular international relations. The two case studies highlight different aspects of religion’s involvement in international relations and underline that neither conflict nor cooperation can solely characterize such involvement.
South Asia and Foreign Policy
Authors: Ganguly Sumit
Published: January 2018

There has been a pronounced dearth of scholarly literature on foreign and security policy in South Asia. Fortunately, there is a significant transformation under way. The amount of South Asian case materials that have been effectively integrated into the mainstream of the foreign and security policy literature is slowly expanding. Furthermore, the bulk of the scholarship on these subjects emanating from the region had been quintessentially devoid of theoretical substance. This, too, is undergoing a change. The neglect of South Asia is baffling considering that the region offers a rich array of cases pertaining to questions of comparative foreign policy, interstate conflicts, regional crises, and the effects of nuclear proliferation, among other issues. There are a variety of plausible reasons to explain the marginalization of South Asian foreign policy studies. One, at the level of the global system, the South Asian states (with the exception of Pakistan) sought to self-consciously exclude themselves from the tensions of the Cold War international order. Also, India was one of the principal exponents of the doctrine of nonalignment. After several decades of systematic neglect, however, there are signs that scholars are beginning to integrate the study of India and South Asia into the study of international relations, foreign policy, and strategic studies. This newfound scholarly interest in the South Asian region can be attributed to a host of actors, such as India’s remarkable economic growth of the past decade or so, Pakistan’s political fragility, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by India and Pakistan.
Women’s Rights as Human Rights
Authors: Joachim Jutta
Published: January 2018

For centuries, women have been struggling for the recognition of their rights. Women’s rights are still being dismissed by United Nations (UN) human rights bodies and even governments, despite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. It was not until the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria that states began to recognize women’s rights as human rights. However, this institutional change cannot solely be credited to the UN, but more importantly to the work of international women’s organizations. According to the social movement theory, these organizations have been permeating intergovernmental structures and, with the help of their constituents and experienced leaders, framing women’s rights as human rights in different ways throughout time. It is through mobilizing resources and seizing political opportunities that women’s rights activists rationalize how discrimination and exclusion resulted from gendered traditions, and that societal change is crucial in accepting women’s rights as fully human. But seeing as there are still oppositions to the issue of women’s rights as human rights, further research still needs to be conducted. Some possible venues for research include how well women’s rights as human rights travel across different institutions, violence against women, how and in what way women’s rights enhance human rights, and the changes that have taken place in mainstream human rights and specialized women’s rights institutions since the late 1980s as well as their impact.
Development Theory and the Global Aid Regime
Authors: Lebo Franklin Barr
Published: January 2018

International development has remained a key driver of global economic relations since the field emerged in the mid-20th century. From its initial focus on colonization and state building, the field has grown to encompass a wide range of issues, theoretical problems, and disciplinary traditions. The year 1945 is widely considered as a turning point in the study of international development. Three factors account for this: the emergence of the United States as an economic hegemon after World War II; the ideological rivalry that defined the Cold War; and the period of decolonization that peaked around 1960, forcing development issues, including foreign aid, state building, and multilateral engagement, onto the global agenda. Since then, development paradigms have continuously evolved, adapted, and been reinvented to address the persistent gap between the prosperous economies of the “developed North” and the frequently troubled economies of the “Global South.” In the early 2000s, a loosely knit holistic paradigm emerged that recognized the deficiencies of its predecessors, yet built on their strengths. Now called “development cooperation,” this holistic approach embraces methodological pluralism in the scholarly study of development, while recognizing that multiple stakeholders contribute to the development agenda in practice from policy practitioners, entrepreneurs, and corporations to nonstate actors such as community groups and Indigenous peoples. In 2015, development cooperation was on full display with the adoption by 193 countries of the expansive United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to serve as the global guideposts for future development initiatives. While exceedingly optimistic in good times, the economic effects of the global pandemic wrought by the spread of COVID-19 in 2020 threatened to undo many of the perceived global gains realized in the development context over the preceding 25 years. Regardless of the speed of recovery of the global system, the profound reverberations on foreign aid and thus the backsliding of global progress indicators is a likely outcome for many years to come.
Environment and Development
Authors: Kurian Priya , Bartlett Robert V.
Published: January 2018

The fundamental conflicts and contradictions between environment and development, and various theoretical and practical efforts to reconcile them, have been a prominent part of the history of development thinking since environmentalism emerged as a significant political phenomenon in the 1960s. The idea of development as change for the better resonates perhaps with all civilizations and across time. All civilizations have development myths which reflect a self-awareness that a particular culture had at some time in the past advanced from a more primitive, less developed state. But these cultural myths of development are only incidentally material or economic. More pronounced concerns over the environment and development emerged during the 1960s and the 1970s. These decades were marked by the emergence of widespread public concern about environmental problems of air and water pollution, and the growth of the environmental movement led to national environmental policy developments and international efforts on the environmental front. In addition, development, environment, and sustainability are all normative concepts with implications for ethics and justice. The vast literature on sustainable development has spawned a range of critiques from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. The environmental justice literature developed after early sustainable development literature, and raises questions about intragenerational equity.
Feminism, Activism, and Scholarship in Global Context
Authors: Naples Nancy A. , McGary Nikki
Published: January 2018

The histories of women’s studies and feminist scholarship reveal the lack of distinction between feminist activism and feminist scholarship. The term “feminism” consists of multiple theories and agendas depending on regional, historical, and individual contexts. Broadly speaking, feminism includes theoretical and practical challenges to gender inequality and multiple forms of systemic oppression. However, the political projects that make women their objects are not always feminist; and political projects that address women’s issues are not always framed around the concept of feminism. Women activists and organizations do not always explicitly identify as feminist, although they might be participants in struggles aligned with broad feminist goals, including women’s empowerment, autonomy, human rights, and economic justice. A major theme that runs through feminist scholarship on women’s activism relates to the question of what difference women’s participation and feminist analyses make for progressive struggles. Feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that there are “gender dimensions” to all struggles for social justice, and “feminists better be in these struggles and bring out those dimensions because certainly nobody else will.” Feminist scholars have also long debated what counts as a women’s movement. Revisioning women’s movements to include the diversity of women’s political analyses and strategies requires rethinking the labels used to categorize feminisms more generally.
Food Insecurity
Authors: Barrett Christopher B. , Lentz Erin C.
Published: January 2018

Food plays an essential role in performance and well-being. Apart from its physiological necessity, food is also a source of pleasure. Since both biological needs for food and psychic satisfaction from food vary considerably among and within populations, coming up with precise, operationalizable measures of food security have proved problematic. Furthermore, the concept of food security encompasses not only current nutritional status but also vulnerability to future disruptions in one’s access to adequate and appropriate food. The complexity of the concept of food security has given rise to scores, if not hundreds, of different definitions of the term “food security.” As a result, there have also been variations in thinking about the proximate manifestations and direct and indirect causes and consequences of “food insecurity,” the complement to “food security.” Food security is commonly conceptualized as resting on three pillars that are inherently hierarchical: availability, access, and utilization. Some agencies, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), have added a fourth dimension: stability. Food insecurity is often used interchangeably with the terms “hunger,” “undernutrition,” and “malnutrition.” Threats to food insecurity may be classified as either “covariate” or “idiosyncratic.” Based on these threats, various interventions have been implemented to promote food security by means of increasing availability (improving agricultural productivity), promoting access (economic growth and assistance programs such as food stamps or vouchers, food aid delivery, food banks, school lunch programs), or improving utilization (supplementary feeding programs, therapeutic feeding programs).
Gendering Human Security: How Gender Theory Is Reflected and Challenged in Civil-Military Cooperation
Authors: Gjørv Gunhild Hoogensen , Stuvøy Kirsti
Published: January 2018

Gendering human security is useful for making explicit the role of practice and actors, and the power relations between them, attributed through socialized and naturalized characteristics of the feminine and masculine. It offers analytical and empirical insights that release human security discourses from the stranglehold that a state-based, militarized security perspective has thus far had on the definition of security as a whole. A gender-based human security analysis reveals what human security means when understood through the power and practices of domination and marginalization, and more specifically the extent to which the militaries are capable of contributing to human security today. In feminist approaches as well as many human security perspectives, security has been delinked from the state and discussed in terms of other referent objects. Feminist and human security share a “bottom-up” approach to security analyses, but feminists have identified a gender blindness in human security theory. Gender is a primary identity that contributes to the social context in which the meaning and practice of security unfolds. Gendering human security exposes how the security needs of individuals are also identified in relation to specific groups, which reflects the feminist understanding of humans’ relational autonomy and implies that human security is not individual but social security when gendered.
Iraq-US Relations, 1920–2003
Authors: Wolfe-Hunnicutt Brandon
Published: January 2018

Oil played a central role in shaping US policy toward Iraq over the course of the 20th century. The United States first became involved in Iraq in the 1920s as part of an effort secure a role for American companies in Iraq’s emerging oil industry. As a result of State Department efforts, American companies gained a 23.75 percent ownership share of the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1928. In the 1940s, US interest in the country increased as a result of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. To defend against a perceived Soviet threat to Middle East oil, the US supported British efforts to “secure” the region. After nationalist officers overthrew Iraq’s British-supported Hashemite monarchy in 1958 and established friendly relations with the Soviet Union, the United States cultivated an alliance with the Iraqi Baath Party as an alternative to the Soviet-backed regime. The effort to cultivate an alliance with the Baath foundered as a result the Baath’s perceived support for Arab claims against Israel. The breakdown of US-Baath relations led the Baath to forge an alliance with the Soviet Union. With Soviet support, the Baath nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1972. Rather than resulting in a “supply cutoff,” Soviet economic and technical assistance allowed for a rapid expansion of the Iraqi oil industry and an increase in Iraqi oil flowing to world markets. As Iraq experienced a dramatic oil boom in the 1970s, the United States looked to the country as a lucrative market for US exports goods and adopted a policy of accommodation with regard to Baath. This policy of accommodation gave rise to close strategic and military cooperation throughout the 1980s as Iraq waged war against Iran. When Iraq invaded Kuwait and seized control of its oil fields in 1990, the United States shifted to a policy of Iraqi containment. The United States organized an international coalition that quickly ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but chose not to pursue regime change for fear of destabilizing the country and wider region. Throughout the 1990s, the United States adhered to a policy of Iraqi containment but came under increasing pressure to overthrow the Baath and dismantle its control over the Iraqi oil industry. In 2003, the United States seized upon the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an opportunity to implement this policy of regime change and oil reprivatization.
Print Media and Religion in America
Authors: Coffman Elesha J. , Grundmeier Timothy D.
Published: January 2018

An extraordinary number of printed words about religion have been produced and consumed in the United States. Religious print media in America encompasses the Christian Bible (a perennial best-seller) and scriptures of other religions; religious books, both fiction and nonfiction; pamphlets and tracts; periodicals; and, more recently, electronic media. The bulk of this output has been Protestant, because the United States has always been a predominantly, though never exclusively, Protestant country, and because Protestants have always been especially fond of print. The main historical trend, however, has been in the direction of increased diversity. The proportion of religious media within the universe of American media, and the proportion of Christian media within the universe of American religious media, both fell from the colonial period to the present. The trajectory of religion as a topic in secular periodicals has been less linear, rising and falling in conjunction with news events and perceived cultural trends. America has come a long way since the early 1740s, when revivalist George Whitefield absolutely dominated the media landscape, but religion remains a potent force in print, especially if one broadens the category to include the non-creedal spirituality of a figure like Eckhart Tolle or Oprah Winfrey.

Three goals have spurred the proliferation of religious print media in the United States. (Religion coverage in secular print media has followed a separate logic, commonly known as “news values.”) The first and perhaps most obvious goal is proclamation, or the transmission of religious ideas. Dissemination of scriptures, evangelistic or apologetic works, sermons, speeches, and educational materials all fit within this category. The second goal is religious community formation and boundary marking. Periodicals have contributed most significantly in this realm, linking co-religionists across often vast spaces, preserving languages and other communal traits, and providing in-group perspective on current events. The third goal is making money. While much religious publishing has been conducted on a nonprofit basis, many Americans have made careers in the trade, and a few have become rich and famous. Because printed materials fill the archives that are foundational for religion scholarship, knowledge of print media history is extremely useful for researchers interested in a variety of topics, not only those working on print culture specifically.
Online Media and Religion in America
Authors: Bajan Adam , Campbell Heidi A.
Published: January 2018

New and emerging media has played a pivotal role in Christianity throughout history. In early times, the Christian message was disseminated directly from Jesus and his followers to growing numbers of worshippers in the ancient world. This unmediated form of Christianity, while effective as a method of proselytization due to its immediacy and intimacy, was limited by how far its early disciples could travel to spread the Gospel of Christ. As communication technology developed through a series of paradigm shifts spread over several centuries of human sociocultural development, Christianity capitalized on these shifts in a variety of ways. This fostered significant structural changes to the religion due to steadily increasing levels of technologically rooted mediation over time.

In its most current form, Christianity is mediated through a variety of secular digital media with online capabilities. Media are utilized by increasing numbers of Christian churches throughout America due to their potential as platforms for efficient dissemination and ability to reach large numbers of worshippers with relative ease. As churches integrate secular digital media into their structures, a third space of interconnectivity emerges in which the boundaries between on and offline lived religious practice are bridged; blended; and at times, blurred, depending on the context and level of mediation. This third space that emerges is quantified as a digital religion in which Christianity becomes redefined as a cultural practice and site of collective and individual meaning making.
Buddhist Geography and Regionalism
Authors: Bryson Megan
Published: January 2018

Since its birth in India about 2,500 years ago, Buddhism has spread throughout the globe. As Buddhism reached new areas, its followers developed their own regional identities and understandings of Buddhist geography. South Asia, and specifically the sites associated with the historical Buddha’s life, remained a conceptual center for many Buddhists, but the near disappearance of Buddhism from the subcontinent in the 13th century allowed Buddhists in other regions to overcome their “borderland complexes” and identify sacred Buddhist sites in their own lands. This involved both the metaphorical transfer of sacred sites from South Asia to new places and the creation of new sacred sites, such as reliquaries for the remains of local saints and mountains seen as the abodes of buddhas or bodhisattvas. By the 19th and 20th centuries, colonial encounters introduced Buddhism to the West and created categories of national Buddhisms, which led to new visions of Buddhist geography and regionalism.

In addition to national Buddhisms, regional distinctions commonly applied to the Buddhist world include the mapping of Theravāda in Southeast Asia, Mahāyāna in East Asia, and Vajrayāna in the Himalayas, or the mapping of Northern Buddhism as Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna in East Asia and the Himalayas, and Southern Buddhism as Theravāda in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. These models have some salience, but the history of Buddhist geography and regionalism reveals that the locations and interactions of different Buddhist traditions are more complex. New models for Buddhist regionalism have moved away from static, bounded spaces to foreground processes of interaction, such as network analyses of trade and transmission routes or areas such as “Maritime Asia” or the “East Asian Mediterranean.”
The Good Neighbor Policy
Authors: Friedman Max Paul
Published: January 2018

In the first three decades of the 20th century, the United States regularly intervened militarily in the circum-Caribbean, sending the Marines to govern directly or rule by proxy in Nicaragua (1912–1933), Haiti (1915–1934), and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924). The end of this era of U.S. occupations, and the relatively harmonious period that followed, is typically credited to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, although his predecessor Herbert Hoover began the process and both drew upon Latin American traditions and yielded to Latin American pressures to change traditional U.S. policy. The new approach to relations with Latin America included not only abjuring the use of military force but respecting the full sovereignty of Latin American states by not interfering or even commenting upon their processes of political succession. The Roosevelt administration signed agreements formalizing this new respect and sought to negotiate mutually beneficial trade agreements with Latin American countries. The benefits of the Good Neighbor Policy became evident when nearly every country in the region aligned itself with the United States in World War II. Measures taken against Axis nationals strained the policy during the war. By 1945, and during the Cold War, the policy unraveled, as the United States resumed both interference (in Argentine politics) and intervention (with a CIA-organized coup in Guatemala in 1954).