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INGOs Under Lockdown: (Dis)advantages of Remote Advocacy for Feminists and Conservatives

 

In early March, everything was ready for the 64th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW64), an annual UN gathering dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. The session’s theme was the review of the implementation of the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. It was supposed to be a special moment for feminists. The Beijing Declaration is their brainchild. It was a result of their unprecedented advocacy, and it served as a blueprint for women’s empowerment ever since.

The main thing feminists feared ahead of the CSW64 was the conservative pushback. In the past decade, a strong conservative block has emerged in the UN. Often referred to as the “Unholy Alliance,” the block includes many post-Soviet, Catholic, and Islamic states, the US, and the Vatican, along with many conservative INGOs. Its members are making UN negotiations on women’s rights increasingly more difficult as they seek, among other things, to eliminate such concepts as “sexual and reproductive health and rights” from UN documents.

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Es ist Zeit für Behaviorale und Emotionale Theorien der Internationalen Beziehungen

Jelena Cupać macht sich in ihrem neuen Blogbeitrag Gedanken zu zwei aufkommenden Ansätzen in den Internationalen Beziehungen (IB) und plädiert für eine Zusammenführung der beiden Stränge in einem einheitlichen Forschungsprogramm.

Während behaviorale Theorien der IB ihren Ursprung hauptsächlich in der Verhaltensökonomik haben und Akteurspräferenzen, Entscheidungsstrukturen und Vorannahmen auf menschliche Prädispositionen zurückführen, so beschäftigen sich emotionale Theorien vor allem mit Fragen der Verortung von Emotionen und nutzen dazu Diskursanalyse und interpretative Methoden. Wenngleich die beiden Forschungsstränge aus unterschiedlichen Traditionen kommen und sich in Fragestellung und Methodik unterscheiden, so plädiert Cupać doch dafür, diese großteils künstliche Trennung zugunsten einer Vereinheitlichung aufzugeben. Somit würde anerkannt, dass Meinungen, Emotionen, Vorurteile und Entscheidungen alle aus einem komplexen Wechselspiel zwischen psychologischen und sozialen Faktoren entstehen. Nicht zuletzt führe dies auch zu wichtigen Konsequenzen für internationale Normen wie der Responsibility to Protect (R2P), wie Cupać in ihrem Beitrag aufzeigt.

Den vollständigen englischsprachigen Artikel finden Sie hier:

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It’s Time for Behavioral and Emotional International Relations

Two trends are emerging in International Relations (IR). One is the increasing receptiveness of scholars to insights from behavioural economics; the other is their growing interest in the role of emotions. These two trends have one thing in common: they both seek to bust the myth of rationality. Admittedly, many IR theories have already attempted to do so (e.g. constructivism, post-structuralism, feminism, or practice theory). However, these new approaches differ from the old ones in one important respect: they are more empirical because they are grounded in experimental and neuroscientific findings. This creates an opportunity for an interesting new body of IR scholarship. Before I get to that, let me first say a few words about behavioral economics and the scholarly turn towards emotions.

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Guns n’ Roses

This is a co-authored blog post, written by Thurid Bahr, Jelena Cupać, İrem Ebetürk, Lynda Iroulo, Mitja Sienknecht, Anam Soomro

International Women’s Day is a celebration of women fighting for their rights. This fight started in the late 18th century with political and legal issues being the main items on the agenda and it gained traction in the 19th and 20th. Since then, women have accomplished a lot in all spheres of life, including academia. Just like men could do for centuries, women can now make significant contributions to scientific knowledge. The more women joined academia, the more they theorized about their everyday experiences, and the more everybody became aware of the inequalities they were facing. Women have been the agents of and the force for change. It was them who insisted to take such concepts as patriarchy, gender bias, and positive discrimination seriously and address them in public discourse and policies. Many challenges, however, still remain. This is why we have come together to write this blog post on women in academia reflecting different perspectives. We claim neither to present the full picture nor to represent the correct perspective. We want to raise some issues relevant to our experiences. Let us walk you through these with some music in the background:

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Kann ein Populist der Anführer der freien Welt sein?

Populismus und die liberale Weltordnung vertragen sich nicht gut. In Ihrem Blogeintrag widerspricht Jelena Cupać dieser Auffassung. Cupać argumentiert, dass selbst ein Populist wie Donald Trump, „Anführer der freien Welt“ hätte werden können. Er hat sich jedoch bewusst dagegen entschieden.

Präsident Trump, im Gegensatz zu seinen Vorgängern, sieht die Vereinigten Staaten nämlich nicht als Vorreiter einer liberalen Weltordnung, sondern als deren Opfer. Die Schuld für Amerikas „sozialen Abstieg“ gibt der Präsident daher Verteidigungsbündnissen und Handelsabkommen.

Die komplette englischsprachige Version des Beitrags finden Sie hier.

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Can a Populist be the Leader of the Free World?

Populism and the liberal international order don’t mix well: The more populism there is, the less liberal the international order appears to become. Moreover, judging by the year-long presidency of Donald Trump, the liberal international order seems to be in particular danger if the most powerful state in the system catches the populist bug. Why is this so? Are populism and the liberal world order fundamentally incompatible? Can a populist be a leader of the free world?

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