Beyond Appeasement

Lynch, Cecelia M.

doi:10.7591/9781501728310

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…In 1919 the world had just emerged from what would almost immediately become known as the unnecessary war for large numbers of people: There appeared to be no justification, or moral rationale, for the huge loss of life, destruction of landscapes and economies, or social trauma resulting from 'the Great War'. 28 The line of Yeats's famous poem quoted above reflects and refracts many of the anxieties of trying to make sense of a conflagration that IR theory continues to debate.…”

Section: Morality Debates At the Close Of The Great Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Proponents of what would become known as liberal morality in Europe and the United States viewed the war that had just ended as giving arms manufacturers license to create ever more destructive forms of weapons, and they particularly feared the potential combination of chemical weapons and bombers that might be harnessed to deliver them to injure and kill vast numbers of civilians. 30 The liberal dream of comparative advantage had been perverted by ever-powerful 'munitions makers'.…”

Section: Morality Debates At the Close Of The Great Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…(I use the term emergent because it was during this period that the label was created in IR; and put it in quotation marks because those concerned created a self-referential label to differentiate themselves from non-realist others. 31 ) At the same time, they created a universalized framework to delimit the moral authority of such concerns. As Yeats presciently noted, the 'mere anarchy … loosed upon the world' was quickly normalized and theologized as the primary foundation for interpreting what had happened.…”

Section: Morality Debates At the Close Of The Great Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The moral aporia of race in international relations

Lynch

2019

International Relations

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Drawing on recent scholarship on race, post-colonialism, and ethics in the field of international relations, I return to the ‘first debate’ in the field regarding realism versus liberalism to highlight how racialized international political practices a century ago shaped theoretical assumptions, deferrals, and absences in ways that continued to resonate throughout the century. In reviewing several prominent periods of the past 100 years, I argue that (a) a powerful, ongoing moral aporia regarding race has marked the practice of international politics and the study of international relations over the century, despite important challenges and (b) it is critically important for the field as a whole to confront both the aporia and these challenges to understand its own moral precarity and to dent ongoing racialized injustices.

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Section: Morality Debates At the Close Of The Great Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Morality Debates At the Close Of The Great Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Morality Debates At the Close Of The Great Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The moral aporia of race in international relations

Lynch

2019

International Relations

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Women’s international thought: toward a counter-archival transformation of global power–knowledge

Morefield

2021

Int Polit Rev

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Conversations with sympathetic but slightly skeptical colleagues about the near total absence of women and people of color from the canonical literature associated with international relations (IR) often follow a certain, familiar pattern. Yes, these colleagues acknowledge, the important, foundational texts were written largely by white men. Yes, this unfortunate. Yes, gender, race, and class should be taken seriously when analyzing international politics. But, they say, the problem with faddish pedagogical movements that ask us to expand or "decolonize" the curriculum is this: when it comes to history, you can't change the past. Women and people of color just weren't there when the crucial ideas were forged. Adding them to survey courses thus requires amplifying the voices of people who were only marginally relevant while watering down the truly crucial concepts with which students must be familiar. From this perspective, expanding the IR canon is curricular violation, a revisionist act of historical wish fulfillment.The problem with this historical/conceptual/political framing is that it isn't true. As Patricia Owens, Sarah C. Dunstan, Kimberly Hutchings, and Katharina Rietzler argue in the Introduction to this truly astonishing collection, women were not just present for some of the earliest discussions about what constituted the intellectual substance and political practice of international relations; they "helped to produce the very notion of international relations" in the first place. (p.2) Circumstances conspired to make this so. As a "relatively novel field," Owens notes in her Introduction to the first section, "research and teaching in IR allowed large numbers of middle-and upper-class women to break new ground within the institutionally racist and patriarchal setting of the university." It is not an accident, she continues, that both "the first African American woman to earn a graduate degree from Oxford and Harvard as well as Oxford's and Edinburgh's first women professors were IR scholars."(p.24). Women played crucial roles in setting up the institutional infrastructure of IR, founding and co-founding some of its earliest research centers and think tanks. And while a goodly number of women worked within these academic and institutional settings, others wrote about international politics from the adjacent worlds of "journalism, activism, social work, and teaching." (p.2) Wherever their location, however, throughout the early twentieth century and the long midcentury, women were engaged with major themes of the day; nationalism, colonial administration, war and peace, imperialism, international institutions and law, and global economic issues. They helped define and transform the discourse of international relations in Britain and North America and their contribution was "well known and influential in its time." (p.1) And yet, despite these contributions and this public influence, the international thought of both historical women and people of color has been largely erased from surveys of the field. ...

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The Illusion of Power and the Disruption of Moral Norms: Thucydides' Critique of Periclean Policy

Monoson¹,

Loriaux²

1998

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Scholars in both international relations and political theory have been turning their attention to Thucydides with increasing frequency but with dissimilar questions. We draw on both traditions of inquiry to reexamine Thucydides' view of Pericles. We argue that antithetical reasoning is present in the treatment of Pericles and is manifested in the opposition between the statesman's brilliance and the infelicitous consequences of his statecraft, as become evident in the work as a whole. This antithesis undermines the claim advanced by certain figures in the History, as well as by contemporary realists, that states (statesmen) should not be held to the same moral standards as individuals because to do so subverts their capacity to conduct prudent policy. We propose that Thucydides' work suggests, instead, that it is precisely when the norms of moral conduct are disrupted that states and individuals find it next to impossible to chart a prudent course of action.

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Beyond Appeasement

Cited by 4 publications

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The moral aporia of race in international relations

The moral aporia of race in international relations

Women’s international thought: toward a counter-archival transformation of global power–knowledge

The Illusion of Power and the Disruption of Moral Norms: Thucydides' Critique of Periclean Policy

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