CIAO DATE: 08/2011
Volume: 14, Issue: 3
July 2011
Re-presenting Ireland: tourism, branding and national identity in Ireland
Michael Clancy
This article examines sources of national identity formation under rapidly changing social and economic conditions. Specifically, it links constructivist notions of national identity formation and reformulation to the growing practice of nation branding. Following a discussion of the contributions of constructivism to the literature on national identity, the article summarises the emergence of nation branding as a contemporary strategy to promote a particular image of the nation to a specific audience. While that audience was once confined to political and economic elites, it has broadened in recent years to include potential tourists, diaspora communities and even one's own citizens. The case study of tourism branding in Ireland demonstrates that while the branding message often differs from reality, its content constitutes a powerful tool for the state in reinforcing a particular notion of national identity.
Civilianising warfare: ways of war and peace in modern counterinsurgency
Colleen Bell
This article examines the emergence of counterinsurgency doctrine in Coalition interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While counterinsurgency is complimentary to the tenets forwarded by its classical military predecessors in several respects, the article shows that it is also more than a refashioning of conventional military practice. Counterinsurgency is intimately tied to institutional practices that shape global liberal governance. It can be traced to dominant trends in international humanitarian, development and peace interventionism since the end of the Cold War and it deepens the links between the social development of war-affected populations and the politics of international security. Rather than simply a shift in military practice, counterinsurgency is distinguished by its investment in civilian modes of warfare. Counterinsurgency retells the narrative of intervention as part of the evolution of political and economic liberalisation, marking a passage from interventionary force to post-interventionary governance. Modern counterinsurgency, it is concluded, exposes the widening indistinction between contemporary modes of peace and those of war in international relations.
Civil–military cooperation in crisis management in Africa: American and European Union policies compared
Gorm Rye Olsen
Cooperation between civilian and military actors has become a catchphrase in international crisis management and development policy in the 21st century. This paper examines the crisis management policies adopted in Africa by the United States and the European Union (EU), respectively. It is hypothesised that both actors’ crisis management policies are likely to be path dependent, despite recent significant changes in policy preferences. It is shown that the priority combining civilian and military resources in American crisis management is only implemented to a limited degree. It is consistent with the persistent predominance of the Pentagon and of the military instruments in US Africa policy. It illustrates the conspicuous institutional path dependency of US Africa policy, which by some is described as ‘militarised’. The EU has been able to apply both civilian and military instruments in crisis management in Africa, suggesting the policy is not path dependent. The European situation is arguably attributable to the widespread consensus among European actors that it is necessary to combine civilian and military instruments in crisis management.
What is critical IPE?
Ian Bruff, Daniela Tepe
International Political Economy (IPE) has, since its emergence in the 1970s, never been a settled discipline. From the beginning there have been disputes over whether one should seek to understand the agents acting within the international economic system or instead focus on ontological enquiries into the historical evolution of world order itself.
Where did the critical go?
Owen Worth
The study of international political economy (IPE) has long proclaimed to have a critical side or focus. Accounts of the intellectual history of IPE were often concerned with the difference between the ‘empiricist’ or ‘positivist’ and the ‘critical’ approach to the discipline (Murphy and Nelson 2002; Cohen 2008)
'What's "critical" about critical theory': capturing the social totality (das Gesellschaftliche Ganze)
Daniela Tepe, Anita Fischer
This is neither the first article to address the nature of Critical Theory,1 nor the first article to address the necessarily feminist character of Critical Theory. Given that most of the writing concerned with the latter was (largely) neglected in International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship, it seems appropriate to do so again.
Finding space in critical IPE: a scalar-relational approach
Huw Macartney, Stuart Shields
Our aim in this essay is to explore how critical international political economy (IPE) is spatially impaired, and how a scalar-relational approach offers a potential solution. By this, we mean that despite the plethora of spatial terms (national, international, global, transnational) applied as levels of analysis, the counter-hegemonic aspects of critical IPE are hamstrung by an inability to account for the production of space and the relations between particular scales.
Facing up to financialisation and the aesthetic economy: high time for aesthetics in international political economy!
Claes Belfrage
‘Aesthetics’ has been a core concern of modern European philosophy1 (and other subject areas in the Humanities) since Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750). Its reified dominant meaning is the result of deep struggle and is linked to dominant ideological forms in the capitalist economy, of which International Political Economy (IPE) forms part.
The case for a foundational materialism: going beyond historical materialist IPE in order to strengthen it
Ian Bruff
In recent years, historical materialist International Political Economy (IPE) has been criticised frequently for a worldview that, it is claimed, emphasises in principle the inherently open-ended and contingent nature of societal evolution, but in practice adheres to a deterministic outlook. This, for (especially constructivist and post-structuralist) critics, is the case in even neo-Gramscian contributions, which explicitly discuss the role of ideas and culture as well as class conflict rooted in capitalist production relations.