No abstract

This article reviews various gaming and simulation traditions in international politics, leading to a detailed discussion of network simulations in general and the ICONS project in particular. Through extensive preparation, simulation, and postsimulation activities, ICONS participants test negotiation strategies, improve communication skills, deal with interdependence of issues, experience cultural differences, work in teams, and master communications technology. ICONS addresses the call for internationalization of the curriculum as well as the need for integration of technology into the classroom.There is something of a tradition in international politics in classifying simulations into three types: all human, human-machine, and all machine. This article will not attempt a comprehensive review of these various approaches. Rather, it will focus on the human-machine variety and on the International Communication and Negotiation Simulation (ICONS) approach almost exclusively. First, however, a bit of background.In the field of international relations, the group of kindred activities referred to as political gaming, simulation games, crisis games, and the like, has been around in various forms for several decades. Their roots are in military strategy, diplomatic analysis, organizational sociology, operations research, econometrics, and computer science.2 Early simulations were developed by and for policy analysts whose goal was to capture the subtlety of international political issues through the use of fairly detailed scenarios, which focused on real or plausible policy problems. These simulations were free-form, with country-teams often staffed by foreign-policy experts and area specialists whose decisions were constrained not by the rigid input

No abstract

Nationalism and the nation-state are both intimately connected to citizenship. Citizenship and nationalism are also linked to gender, as all three concepts play a key role in the process of state-building and state-maintenance as well as in the interaction between states, whether overtly or covertly. Yet women do not figure in the analysis of nationalism and citizenship in the mainstream literature, a gap that feminists have been trying to fill. By interrogating gender, along with the notions of masculinity and femininity, feminist international relations (IR) scholars shed light into the ways that gender is socially constructed. They also investigate the historical process of state formation and show where women are located in nationalist movements. Furthermore, by unpacking the sovereign state, feminist scholars have argued that while mainstream IR views the state as a rational, unitary actor, states are actually gendered entities. Two kinds of feminist literature in IR in regards to the state can be identified: women and the state (how women are excluded in terms of the public–private divide, and through citizenship), and gender and the state (gendered states). In general, feminist scholarship has led to a more complete understanding of the gender-citizenship-nationalism nexus. Nevertheless, some avenues for future research deserve consideration, such as the political and cultural exclusions of women and others in society, the inequalities that exist within states, whether there is such a thing as a “Comparative Politics of Gender,” and the concept of “global citizenship.”

No abstract