Suchergebnisse

Zimbabwe is a state that has undergone significant ruptures in its domestic and international politics in recent years. This book explores how Zimbabwean citizens have, under difficult circumstances, reconstructed ideas of their state by imagining the wider world. Unlike other work on international relations, which tends to focus on the state level, this book is based on the accounts of ordinary people. Drawing on interviews with more than two hundred Zimbabweans, collected over three years, Gallagher explores how citizens draw on emotional responses to the international to find and construct different 'others'. While this unique and compelling read will appeal to those researching Zimbabwe, Gallagher's wider conclusions will interest those studying and advancing the broader theoretical debates of international relations

Drawing on the example of South Africa, the article explores how the state, an incoherent and opaque set of ideas, discourses and relationships, is made into a 'thing' by its citizens. It describes how citizens encounter the state physically when they see, hear, touch and smell its buildings and how these different sensory engagements generate thoughts and impressions that help them make and unmake the state-thing. The argument is made first theoretically, drawing on work from architecture, cultural geography and urban studies on sensory engagements with buildings; and then empirically through an analysis of South African citizens' accounts of their engagements with state buildings, drawing on focus group discussions in urban centres and observations of state buildings in action. It finds that the state is reified through citizens' ability to think and feel their way from material form to idea, using sight to produce abstractions and metaphors, and the haptic senses to connect to personal memory and fantasy. This layered account of the state, described locally through the analogy of the face-brick, constitutes the making and unmaking of the state-thing that illustrates a deep but ambivalent involvement in it.

AbstractThis article draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel's theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana's early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on the one hand, and intimacy with a unified Africa on the other. By creating juxtapositions between Ghana and these idealised international others, he was able to create a fantasy of a coherent state, built on a fundamental misrecognition of the wider world. As the fantasy bumped up against the realities of Ghana's failing economy, fractured social structures, and complex international relationships, it foundered, causing alienation and despair. I argue that the failure of this early fantasy was the start of Ghana's quest to begin processes of individuation and subjectivity, and that its undoing was an inevitable part of the early stages of misrecognition, laying the way for more grounded struggles for recognition and the development of a more complex state-subjectivity.

This article contributes to recent debates about mutual recognition between states, and, more broadly, to discussions of the role of emotion in International Relations. It challenges 'moral claims' made in some of the literature that interstate recognition leads to a progressive erosion of difference or a pooling of identity, and underlying assumptions that recognition constitutes a stage in the development of states that have already established internal coherence. Instead, it claims that processes of recognition are fractious and unstable, characterised by aggression and self-assertion, as well as affection and the creation of a 'we-feeling', and that such processes are an enduring feature of state identity. Using the case of Zimbabwe — a state that is clearly fractured, with an apparently insecure collective identity — the article explores how recognition both challenges and reinforces state selfhood through dynamics that are bumpy, intense and unstable. It moves on to develop a theoretical interpretation of these dynamics by drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, showing links between individual psychic anxiety and collective need for a state that exists uneasily but inextricably in relation to others. The article concludes that international recognition works as a way both to establish and to challenge state coherence.

AbstractOn the face of it, the triumph of Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) in the 2013 elections came as a shock, not least to opposition MDC activists. However, after a period of introspection, many have begun to construct a coherent and wide-ranging account of the result which explores opposition shortcomings, and the revived relationship between the electorate and Mugabe's ZANU(PF). This article, based on interviews with political activists conducted three months after the election, outlines and attempts to explain this account. It explores the way in which a politics of polarisation that dominated Zimbabwe in recent years appears to have given way to a politics of ambivalence: where Zimbabweans once viewed their political landscape as one populated by antinomies, they now see their state and its relation to themselves in more complex and ambiguous ways. As a result, Zimbabweans' conception of the state is increasingly coming to resemble Mbembe's formulation of states as contemporaneously 'organizers of public happiness' and wielders of arbitrary violence.

This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as 'standards of proper behaviour'. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as 'understandings about what is good and appropriate'. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue and an ability to enable progress or improvement. Norms become ideal when they are able to conflate what is good with what is appropriate, standard, or proper. It is when the good becomes 'natural' that a norm appears immanent and non-contestable, and so acquires an idealized form.45Along with the other articles in this special issue, I will attempt to challenge some of the complacency surrounding the apparent naturalness and universality of norms employed in international relations.