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| 1 |
ID:
120326
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
For nearly forty years, debates on a definition of international terrorism as part of a comprehensive convention have been preoccupying the United Nations. This article challenges conventional approaches referring to divergences in national interests and preferences, or to institutional constraints and national legal traditions, to explain why no definition has been agreed upon. It analyzes the inconclusive debates from a critical perspective and argues that the continuous search for a definition can be understood through the prism of collective identity struggles: the desire to define terrorism is not only the desire to give a precise content to terrorism and, thereby, create the identity of an Other. It is also the desire to create a collective identity, a "Self," representing and uniting those who oppose terrorism. By applying a discursive understanding of collective identity construction to analyze the UN debates, the article elucidates how strongly the definition of terrorism hinders a common understanding among those who are opposing terrorism. Thereby, the analysis highlights that the demonization of terrorism foremost impedes a homogeneous understanding of a collective Self, ready to confront and define terrorism in the first place.
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| 2 |
ID:
110767
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2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the current literature in International Relations and Conflict Studies, water as a source of conflict is either extremely over- or exceedingly underrated. In order to account for the dynamics of water conflicts, it is argued in this article that the study of water conflicts should be linked to comprehensive theories of social conflict and world society. A theoretical framework is developed based on a combination of securitization theory, modern systems theory and sociological neo-institutionalism. The usefulness of this framework is illustrated through two empirical cases of water conflicts, namely Spain and Egypt/Sudan. This study contributes to an understanding of the evolution of water conflicts as a result of securitization practices, the dynamics of these conflicts as complex social systems and as the outcome of local adaptations to and of 'world cultural' frames.
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| 3 |
ID:
138072
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International relations and critical security studies are increasingly including the role of materiality in the study of security practices, inquiring into how objects act as both threat and /or endangered referent. However, objects of ‘dual-use’ – that is, objects that are not only threatening or in need of protection but also beneficial or pleasurable to the human collective – figure less prominently. Drugs are such an ambivalent matter: beneficial in the context of medicine and at the same time threatening in the context of crime. Mobilizing the concept of the dispositif, this article questions how drugs and addiction materialize in the practices of the global drug prohibition regime. I argue that the ambivalence of the material object ‘drug’ is the condition of possibility of the regime. The regime as an epitome of the ‘drug dispositif ’ illustrates how ambivalent objects give rise to expanding security practices and specific power relations, highlighting how (critical) security analyses could profit from greater awareness of ambivalent matters.
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| 4 |
ID:
117762
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2012.
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The concept of hegemony has regained attention from various theoretical perspectives in International Relations. This article argues that IR-poststructuralism can offer an independent perspective on the production of hegemonies in international politics. Based on IR-poststructuralism and poststructuralist discourse theory, it develops a conceptual framework and an associated methodological approach for the analysis of international hegemonies in concrete discourses. Thereby, the article conceptualises international hegemonies as the creation of a specific type of collective identity while arguing that for hegemonies to emerge, both the creation of an antagonistic Other and a vision of the opposed Self are necessary. The workings of the conceptual framework are illustrated with a comparative reconstruction of United Nations discourses on international terrorism and drug prohibition from 1961 to 2011.
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