Whose international is it anyway? Women’s peace activists as International Relations theorists

Each year, the United Nations Security Council holds an Open Debate on the theme of ‘Women and Peace and Security’. The debate is conventionally held in October, to coincide with the adoption of the foundational resolution of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, which accounts for the ways in which gender matters in and to peace and security governance. As with any Security Council practice, these open debates have a number of formal protocols that must be respected, and a number of informal rules or practices that have come to characterise the performance of both member states and non-state actors during the event. There is ritualised articulation of appreciation, where the ambassadors or representatives of member states thank the current President of the Council for hosting the debate. There is the appreciation expressed by the President in return for each member state’s contribution, and the ceding of the floor to the next representative so that she or he might deliver their 4-minute account of their implementation of WPS provisions and principles. And there is the tradition of inviting ‘civil society’ to speak to the Council, usually during the opening phase – after the Secretary-General, if he is present, but before the member states begin. The year 2016 was no different; ‘civil society’ was represented by Rita Lopidia, Executive Director of South Sudan’s EVE Organization for Women Development, who spoke on behalf of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) working group on WPS.

I am always attentive to the statements that these woman make; Sam Cook has explored the construction of the ‘woman-in-conflict’ as a political subject through precisely these practices and the political functions of these performances are indeed multiple and complex. ¹ Ms Lopidia, a women’s rights and peace activist who was part of the civil society delegation to the Addis Ababa peace talks in 2016, spoke with clarity and precision about the challenges posed to women in South Sudan. Her indictment of Security Council inaction was profound: ‘South Sudan is increasingly becoming a living hell for a lot of women’, she stated. ‘In my opinion, this should not be happening on your watch’.

How, though, does this account of a Sudanese peace activist’s provocation to the UN Security Council speak to the themes raised in, and the questions posed by, Justin Rosenberg in his indictment of International Relations theory for its failure to develop ‘theories that are based on the unique properties of the international’? ² In his account of ‘International Relations in the Prison of Political Science’ (as I read it, in any case), Rosenberg argues that ‘[t]he discipline of International Relations “arises around” the fact of societal multiplicity in human life. This is uniquely our ontological premise’. ³

The international, in Rosenberg’s analysis, is constituted by multiplicity, which in turn demands thoughtful and careful treatment of the consequences which flow from multiplicity: the necessity of co-existence, difference, interaction, combination, and the inevitability of dialectical change, all of which, he suggests, are undertheorised in the discipline. ⁴ Theorising multiplicity as ‘the deepest code of the international’ ⁵ liberates IR from the ‘prison of Political Science’ because the international is not, on this view, essentially a political domain devoid of central authority (an ontology ‘borrowed’ from Political Science) but rather has the essential quality of multiplicity: the international is ‘the co-presence of multiple interacting societies’. ⁶

To bring Rosenberg into conversation with Rita Lopidia, then, is to gently question: who are the IR theorists Rosenberg criticises for failing to develop an ontology of the international-as-multiple? Who are the IR scholars who do not ‘actually reason from the fact of the international to its implications for the social world in general’? ⁷ I ask these questions because Rosenberg’s careful and persuasive analysis proceeds from a number of assumptions about where ‘IR theory’ resides intellectually, and in whose bodies ‘IR theory expertise’ accrues; these are assumptions that I find it difficult to sustain, however skilfully written and engaging the argumentation presented.

Rosenberg proceeds from the ‘isms’, a common disciplinary tic/disciplining technique: ⁸

Of course, political realism has not had the field to itself in IR. Numerous other approaches have rejected both its narrow statist definition of the international and the idea of an autonomy of geopolitics. The sheer range of these alternatives – from liberalism, Marxism and feminism through to constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, queer theory and so on – accounts for much of the vibrancy of IR today. But how many of these challenges have themselves provided alternative, non-realist theories that are based on the unique properties of the international? The answer, it seems, is – none. ⁹

To support the argument presented, Rosenberg draws on International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity; ¹⁰ this is a popular and well-respected textbook aimed at undergraduate students, perhaps even postgraduate students new to the discipline of IR – but it is still a textbook. The purpose of such textbooks is to generalise, consolidate and make accessible substantial disciplinary debates and, as such, this textbook proceeds – as all textbooks do – to represent the substance of disciplinary debates in a particular way: a rather bloodless, inhuman account of global politics. As a form of representational practice, textbooks have a politics: they are partial, exclusionary, somewhat prone to over-simplifying the matters at hand. From textbooks, ‘IR scholars learn the disciplinary issues and -isms and learn to overlook the spaces between the neatly bounded packages of disciplinary knowledge, where the people and the connections between the issues (and even the -isms) reside’. ¹¹

In his article, Rosenberg performs a very similar set of disciplinary manoeuvres as are (re)presented in the textbooks to which he points as evidence of the paucity of IR theory: he assumes, first, that IR theory ‘lives’ in IR theory textbooks, filed neatly ‘ism’ by ‘ism’, and, second, he assumes that IR theory is done by IR theorists exemplified by the esteemed authors of all of those chapters on ‘isms’ he cites. What is missed when (re)presenting IR is this way are the spaces between – and all of the people who are theorising (in) those spaces.

Marysia Zalewski attends to these spaces, and these people, in her essay on the political implications of treating ‘theory as everyday practice’, which comments also on the bodies in which expertise is assumed to accrue and how these bodies and their practices are frequently overlooked in IR scholarship. ¹² Theory is ‘a way of life, a form of life, something we all do, every day, all the time’ and the constitution of this ‘we’ is of great political significance. ¹³ We theorise, Zalewski argues, about how to make a cup of tea, or avoid traffic on our daily commute, about how to make a difference in the world, or work together effectively. Theory is a form of social practice, and as such it lives in the world, simultaneously as it brings the world into existence; ¹⁴ whether we are academics, academics, activists, advocates, artists or all of these, we are all theorists. Where feminist insights can truly affect how we think about theory as a mode of doing or being, then, is in the recognition of people other than those normally afforded intellectual priority in IR scholarship as experts – as theorists – in and of their own worlds. ¹⁵

In her analysis of the ‘margins, silences, and bottom rungs’ of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, Cynthia Enloe states bluntly that ‘international relations specialists need to do more of their own homework’. ¹⁶ Specifically, in the case of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations, Enloe suggests analysts should take account of what operations of gendered power have enabled the inclusion of certain voices or perspective and the exclusion of others, take account of ‘the international politics of beef and coffee … the intra-state politics of the PRI and Salinismo, and therefore … the continental politics of NAFTA and consequently the politics of the post-Cold War world’. ¹⁷ The quality and effects of the international, as well as the quality and effects of the (gendered) power that operates to constitute the international, are central to Enloe’s analysis.

Brooke Ackerly, to whom the title of this brief essay owes an intellectual debt, ¹⁸ also shows in her analysis of the advocacy practices of women’s human rights activists, that they are always-already ‘cross-cultural theorists’, theorising not only their own conditions but the multiplicity of the international. Ackerly demonstrates that, as Rosenberg would have it, ‘the international dimension is not simply a matter of external relations: through interaction, multiplicity reaches into the inner constitution of societies themselves’, ¹⁹ concluding that ‘The process of reflecting critically on local variety may enable us to identify an overlapping consensus on human rights according to which a universal set of individual rights are respected in contexts that vary according to social practices’. ²⁰ These practices, and the relationships through which they are sustained and (re)produced, are characterised by the need to find a way to live alongside our (and our group’s) many others, by difference (and by similarities within and across borders), by interaction (again, within and across borders), by combination and the inevitability of dialectical change.

Ultimately, I am in agreement with Rosenberg: I too believe that ‘a discipline of IR should certainly try to understand what happens in international politics, but it should also elaborate the significance of societal multiplicity for the social world as a whole’ ²¹ and ‘explore the significance of the international’. ²² Where I think we differ is in the recognition of those actors who are already engaged in such endeavours. In my view, these actors – including but not limited to academics, activists, advocates and artists – are plural and diverse theorists of the international. These actors don’t necessarily inhabit IR textbooks (although some do, as illustrative cases in textboxes or figures, or even as chapter authors themselves), they are not necessarily tenured academics (although some are) nor do they necessarily speak the language of the academy (although some do). But they live – and theorise – experiences of multiplicity; they know – and theorise – the significance of the international as a conceptual and spatial domain, characterised, as Rosenberg suggests, by interaction, difference, combination, and change.

When Rita Lopidia charged the Security Council with negligence, when she stated bluntly that the atrocities to which women in South Sudan are being subjected should not be happening ‘on their watch’, she offered a theory of international organisation and of the international. If we – as IR scholars – were perhaps better attuned to the ‘interactivity’ of different forms of political agency and subjectivity, more willing to explore international relations beyond the prisms of ‘isms’, we might not have remained bound for so long in ‘the prison of Political Science’.