"This chapter is a re-written version of the paper originally presented on the Millenium panel but the basic argument and structure of the paper remain the same.... In re-writing the paper for publication, I have decided to retain my main arguments and claims, mainly because it was clear that some of the other participants would want to disagree with/dissent from my paper when they came to write up their own. Thus, what follows is an extended version of the paper as presented, and this will hopefully allow the other participants to continue their disagreements with me in print...."

"Like all participants on the panel I was asked to focus on six tasks, all designed to get me to 'confront [my] own limitations, stimulate debate about their most significant accomplishments and shortcomings, and discuss research paths for the years ahead'. I interpreted this as an invitation to assess where 'alternative and critical perspectives' stand at the start of the new Millennium. Aside from the obvious fact that these approaches involve a variety of different (and sometimes contradictory) positions since there are few assumptions that they share, I was also troubled by the expectation of offering a definitive statement of how things stood. Thus what follows is a very partial and personal account of the development of these approaches. My other initial health warning is simply that I was not really sure what 'alternative and critical perspectives' included. But, from the line-ups of the other panels I deduced that the panel should focus on Critical Theory and postmodernis accounts of IR...."

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Excerpt from:
"Universality in International Studies: An Historicist Approach"

Robert W. Cox
York University, Toronto

"One of the problems in participating on a panel entitled "Alternative and Critical Perspectives" is that the very nature of "Alternative" is diversity and non-conformity. There can be no single "alternative perspective" nor any "alternative school". Nor can I think of "Alternative" as a "sub-field". "Alternative" is a residual category for all who are not considered to be "mainstream". It has a clearer exclusionary meaning for those who consider themselves to be "mainstream" than it does for those who are so excluded. As a participant in an "alternative" panel, I can only write about the intellectual problems I am confronted by in my own work. I cannot discuss "alternative perspectives" in general.

"Critical" is a different matter. It describes an approach towards understanding and action. So far as I am concerned, there is no "critical school", no orthodoxy of criticism. It is, however, possible to distinguish a critical approach to a topic from other approaches that express different purposes—description, explanation, restoration, reconstruction, promotion, for example—and to ask what the critical approach consists of, how the critical theorist approaches the subject.

In this brief paper I focus on one theme that I found important in my own work: the issue of universality versus relativism (which includes the issue of positivism versus historicism).... I approach the theme mentioned from the standpoint of critical theory and I ask where it leads me towards a research program...."

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Excerpt from:
"How We Learned to Escape Physics Envy and to Love Pluralism and Complexity"

Ernst B. Haas and Peter M. Haas

"Is cumulative knowledge and progress possible in International Relations? While this essay focusses on international institutions, it may be taken as a mere illustration of much wider issues in the field of international relations and social science more generally.

Students of IR remain divided on the implications of international institutions for the understanding of contemporary international relations. This is largely due, we believe, to the incommensurate epistemological and ontological positions within the discipline of IR that characterizes most studies and interpretations of international institutions. In this piece we try to frame a pragmatic-constructivist approach for the study of international institutions, and of IR more generally...."

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Excerpt from:
"The Globalization of Globalization"

James N. Rosenau
The George Washington University

"As one whose professional life exceeds that of ISA, I have mixed feelings about the invitation to reflect critically on the accomplishments, failures, debates, standards, approaches, and future agendas of International Relations (IR) and its subfields. On the one hand, I have no doubt that our shared past is marked by enormous growth and progress. The conceptual and methodological equipment with which IR is probed today is far more elaborate, incisive, and diverse than was the case at the outset--back in the 1950s when a few isolated, non-Ivy League scholars first came together around common interests to form a professional association, replete with a journal (called Background before being changed to the International Studies Quarterly) and with a membership so small that it convened annually on campuses because it was unable to reach the minimum registration required for reduced rates at hotels. On the other hand, for all the progress that has marked IR's evolution, I am plagued with doubts about the field's capacity for adapting to the transformations at work in the world today. And my doubts extend to questioning the wisdom of engaging in introspective assessments of inter- and intra-paradigmatic debates. Perhaps out of fatigue generated by a history of vigorous involvement in such debates and perhaps because I have progressively moved away from the IR mainstream, but more likely out of a conviction that change has left us so far in arrears that we need to focus our energies on assessing substantive dynamics rather than evaluating our colleagues, their theories and their standards...."

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Excerpt from:
"The Fish and the Turtle: Multiple Worlds as Method"

L.H.M. Ling
Institute of Social Studies, The Hague

"... For too long, the whale of IR--realism--has subjected our discipline to an illusory universalism propagated through notions of power and the state. Though many states now populate our 'international system' and each exercises power within its limits, these facts alone do not verify the claim that, therefore, every state is the same and acts on power in the same way. Doing so would require two, related corollaries: (1) state-making and power construction are identical processes across time and space because (2) the Westphalian inter-state system has succeeded in eradicating all previous 'imagined communities' of clan, tribe, nation, language, religion, and/or civilisation. Precisely because this is not so (Chechnya as the latest example), realists vow to renew the fight against 'instability', 'pariahs', and 'clash of civilisations'.

Feminists and other critical theorists have led the charge against such realist 'one-worldism'. First, they have identified this perspective as precisely that. Neither an objective law of nature nor an intrinsic element of the human condition, realist one-worldism is but one representation of the world. Its longevity relies on a deceptively simple self-justification: that is, because realists believe that the world is nasty, brutish, lonely, poor, and short, they behave accordingly, thereby ensuring that the world is, indeed, so, which, in turn, affirms their belief that the world is nasty, brutish, lonely, poor, and short. Meanwhile, realists proclaim loudly their goal of averting a global holocaust by entrenching us further into this one-world logic--of which the latest manifestation is rational choice theory...."

More than other critical theorists, feminists have exposed the inherently gendered nature of such world-making. Not only is realist one-worldism a social construction but it reflects the experiences, practices, norms, and institutions of a particularly small segment of the world's population: propertied, white males. What traditional IR has passed off as 'universal' or 'human', feminists have pointed out, should be described, more accurately, as 'particular' and 'androcentric'. For this reason, IR as a field of study and practice implicitly discriminates against anyone who does not or cannot abide by realism's version of hegemonic masculinity--even those bodies that may be white, male, propertied, and even heterosexual but who may subscribe to an alternative logic of understanding or constructing the world...."

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Excerpt from:
"Critical Paradigms in International Studies: Bringing it all back home?"

Jan Jindy Pettman
Australian National University

"It is a daunting task to respond to the challenge to assess the state of the art of International Studies, or more particularly, feminist International Studies: to reflect on where we've come from and where we are now (and indeed who 'we' are); and to ask what's at stake here?

For me, writing as a feminist in International Studies (IS), there is always a double edge, asking both what happens to the international when we take feminism seriously in IS? and what happens to women, sex, gender and feminism when we take the international seriously? I argue that IS needs feminism, to give better and more inclusive accounts of the world; and that feminism needs an international perspective, especially in these days of intensifying globalisation. This double move is typical of feminist IS, working both in and beyond—or even against—the discipline.

I begin with several claims regarding feminism and IS, before elaborating on the difference I think feminism has made to our understanding of 'the international'. This elaboration provides an opportunity to assess 'progress' and to address the questions which guide this collection. I ... conclude with two illustrations of feminist approaches, regarding war, and the 'Asian Crisis'...."

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Excerpt from:
"'Progress' as Feminist International Relations"

Christine Sylvester
Institute of Social Studies
The Hague, Netherlands

"One of the questions put to us by organisers of the millennial panels at ISA 2000 concerns progress: What might we, from our particular positions within a field, say about the progress of IR in general? As it happens, I have been ruminating about progress lately, quite independently of this particular query from the ISA. I have done so mostly in the context of productions of women and progress in Zimbabwe, but also with respect to feminist IR and whether it has brought us—and who is that?—progress. "Progress" is an odd thing. It twists my head around. Feminists require "it" for the advancement of "women". Much of IR tries to reach "it" cumulatively, using the right methods harnessed to the right research programs—now neorealism, now neoliberal institutionalism, now constructivism, now rationalism, now. I delight in feminist IR as a sign of an avant-garde movement making waves a certain type of progress in the IR field possible. Simultaneously, knowing that some avant-gardes have been described as working to extricate themselves from the distractions of women (Docker, 1994), the double edges of avant-garde progress also come into view....

...Life is ever in progress. Whether it progresses in positive or negative or in-between ways, when, where, and how is an enormous issue. The term eludes definitional clarity. The jury, it seems, is still out. We face a new millennium without a name for "it", or with a name that is everywhere known and there/not there. Is it not rather risky, therefore, to talk about progress in IR? . . ."

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Excerpt from:
"Feminist Theory and Gender Studies: Reflections for the Millennium"

J. Ann Tickner
School of International Relations
University of Southern California

"... My first thought on being asked to write these reflections was how difficult a critical assessment of such a young field would be. While there are differences amongst IR feminists, engaging in self-criticism seems premature as feminist approaches still struggle to be heard in a discipline that has not been particularly open to gender approaches. I have also been struggling with a more fundamental problem as I attempt to formulate responses to the questions posed to the participants in this millennium project—namely the fact that these questions are not ones that many feminists would ask when engaging in self-evaluation. Words such as "state of the art" and "cumulation", as well as the selection of certain scholars to speak on behalf of the rest, are in tension with an approach that "celebrates diversity" in terms of its subject matters, normative focus, and methodologies. Asking contributors to compare feminist approaches with realism, for example, is like asking for a comparison of a whole array of theoretical and methodological approaches that cross the disciplines, from the humanities to the social sciences, with one IR approach that, for the most part, has been located within the discipline of political science. Nevertheless, I welcome this opportunity to elaborate on some "progressive" paths in IR feminism and to identify some of the important research questions that have guided feminist scholars in the past and will probably continue to do so in the future. I will also engage in some self-criticism; to this end I will conclude by raising some issues relating to methodological differences amongst IR feminists...."

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Excerpt from:
"Feminism and/in International Relations: An Exhausted Conversation? OR 'Feminists doing International Relations: The Cut(ting) Edge of Contemporary Critical Theory and Practice?'"

Marysia Zalewski

In common with the other presenters on the Millenium Reflections Feminist Theory panel, I found the task at hand something of a challenge. At one level this should not be surprising, writing any academic paper usually is—and should be—challenge. But there was something about the kinds of questions we were being asked to consider which clearly troubled our group....

Why were the questions we were asked to consider so problematic for us? Surely it makes eminently reasonable intellectual sense to engage in 'critical self-reflection' or to 'assess where we stand on key debates and address why we have failed to resolve them' or to suggest 'what intra-subfield standards we might use to evaluate the significance of feminist theoretical insights'? I think there are at least two main reasons that we found these kinds of questions so problematic. One is that what makes 'reasonable intellectual sense' is structurally defined by the traditional or neo-traditional centre of the discipline and therefore, by definition, a critical approach such as feminism, will have an alternative sense of what counts as 'reasonable' in the realm of the intellectual. A second reason is that we were being asked to make authoritative statements about the impact of the work on feminism and gender in International Relations. This is problematic as it relies on the assumption that feminist work in International Relations can be fitted into a coherent framework upon which such judgements can then be made. This is not the case as feminism is a vast and sometimes contradictory body of work which makes it therefore difficult (and perhaps inadvisable) to make sweeping and authoritative generalisations about...."

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Millennial Reflections on International Studies
Table of Contents



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