Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR
Edited by Naeem Inayatullah
December 2010

This volume provides a novel approach to international relations. In the course of fifteen essays, scholars write about how life events brought them to their subject matter. They place their narratives in the larger context of world politics, culture, and history.

Autobiographical International Relations believes that the fictive distancing associated with academic prose creates disaffection in both readers and writers. In contrast, these essays demonstrate how to reengage the "I" while simultaneously sustaining theoretical precision and historical awareness. Authors highlight their motives, their desires, and their wounds. By connecting their theoretical and practical engagements with their needs and wounds, and by working within the overlap between theory, history, and autobiography, these essays aim to increase the clarity, urgency, and meaningfulness of academic work.

These essays are autobiographical, but focused on the academic aspect of authors’ lives. Specifically, they are set within the domain of international relations/global politics. They are theoretical, but geared to demonstrate that theoretical decisions emerge from theorists’ needs and wounds. Theoretical precision, rather than being explicitly deduced, is instead immanent to the autobiographical and the historical/cultural narrative each author portrays. And, these essays are framed in historical/cultural terms, but seek to bind together theory, history, culture, and the personal into a differentiated and vibrant whole. This book moves the field of International Relations towards greater candidness about how personal narrative influences theoretical articulations. No such volume currently exists in the field of international relations.

Includes two essays by Ithaca College alums: Sara-Maria Sorentino (2008) and Nethra Samarawickrema (2008).

Reframing Contemporary Africa: Politics, Economics, and Culture in the Global Era
Peyi Soyinka-Airewele, Ithaca College
Rita Kiki Edozie , Michigan State University
Editors
January 2010

It is impossible to study Africa without understanding the debate about how to study Africa. At last, a book showcases the complexities and paradoxes of Africa’s recent and more distant history, while avoiding simplistic, Eurocentric conceptualizations of “black Africa.” With this book, Peyi Soyinka-Aiwerele and Rita Kiki Edozie offer students the background and perspectives they need to comprehend the dynamics of the continent as well as a clear path through the current literature and scholarly debate. With a cross-disciplinary approach that features political, historical, and economic analysis as well as popular culture and sociological views on contemporary issues, Reframing Contemporary Africa provides an unparalleled breadth of coverage.

Essays written by a distinguished and international group of scholars—including William Ackah, Pius Adesanmi, Susan Craddock, Caroline Elkins, Siba Grovogui, Mahmood Mamdani, Mutua Makau, Celestin Monga, Wole Soyinka, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza—are designed to distill original scholarship for undergraduate readers. Each contribution helps students engage with the work and arguments of luminaries while exposing them to renowned African thinkers. Contributors deliver analysis that allows students to see beyond the clichés commonly presented in the media (and even in scholarship), and helpful section openers by Soyinka-Airewele and Edozie frame forthcoming chapters, giving important thematic and historical context. Reframing Contemporary Africa will certainly provoke new debate and reflection, not merely about African issues and politics, but also about the West and its framing of Africa.

Islam, Muslims, and the U.S.: Essays on Religion and Politics. New Delhi, India: Global Media Publications, 2004.

A collection of op-eds written for the Daily Times of Pakistan, and of talks given in the U.S. immediately following 9/11, which marks a turning point both in the public discourses on Islam in the West and in contemporary Muslim understandings of Islam.  Although the essays and talks cover a wide range of issues, they cumulatively argue that in Muslim countries as well as in the U.S., power functions to silence, marginalize, and, frequently, to obliterate the Other.  Given this curious symmetry in the functioning of power in both contexts, it becomes problematic to discuss politics only in terms of the religious/secular binary.  In fact, labeling the politics of Muslim societies as always already religious and those of the West as secular essentializes the differences between them.

Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy. London: Zed Press; New York: Palgrave, 2007.

In this book, Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics. She charts its most recent militarist and masculinist configurations through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 US Presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. She warns that women’s rights rhetoric is being manipulated, particularly by Condoleeza Rice and other women in the Bush administration, as a ploy for global dominance and a misogynistic capture of democratic discourse. However, Eisenstein also believes that the plural and diverse lives of women will lay the basis for an assault on these fascistic elements. This new politics will both confound and clarify feminisms, and reconfigure democracy across the globe.

The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004; paperback version 2006.

The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant. Most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have tried to explain the conflict using the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality. Instead, Prof. Gagnon believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.

Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon’s view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon’s noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.

The Myth of Ethnic War has won the following awards:

• 2005 American Political Science Association's Prize for the Best Book on European Politics and Society
• Co-Winner of the 2006 Council for European Studies Best First Book Award

Defending the Right to a Home: the Power of Anti-Poverty Lawyers. Williston, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2004.

Examining the influence of legal professionals on the dynamics of state policy making, this book looks at the responses of poverty lawyers to the social welfare law reforms of US Congress and state legislatures. Against a political climate characterized by its hostility towards welfare programs, cutbacks in public assistance for poor families, the decline in available low-income housing and increasing levels of homelessness, Legal Services lawyers in several states initiated class action suits to protect families from losing their homes. Through five detailed case-studies, this book examines the influence of the anti-poverty lawyers on state policy making and explores the significance of right –to home claims in challenging the neo-liberal norms.

Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism (Routledge, December 2009) by David L Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah

This innovative book challenges the most powerful and pervasive ideas concerning political economy, international relations, and ethics in the modern world.

Rereading classical authors including Adam Smith, James Steuart, Adam Ferguson, Hegel, and Marx, it provides a systematic and fundamental cultural critique of political economy and critically describes the nature of the mainstream understanding of economics. Blaney and Inayatullah construct a powerful argument about how political economy and the capitalist market economy should be understood, demonstrating that poverty is a product of capitalism itself. They address the questions:

• Is wealth for some bought at the cost of impoverishing, colonizing, or eradicating others?

• What benefits of wealth might justify these human costs?

• What do we gain and lose by endorsing a system of wealth creation?

• Do even "savage cultures" contain values, critiques, and ways of life that the West still needs?

Opening the way for radically different policies addressing poverty and demanding a rethink of the connections between political economy and international relations, this thought-provoking book is vital reading for students and scholars of politics, economics, IPE and international relations.

Toxic Burn: The Grassroots Struggle Against the WTI Incinerator. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

The economics of trash and the politics behind hazardous waste disposal.

Debates over global warming and fossil fuel dependence dominate public discussions of the environment. For many of us, these debates are abstract because environmental problems do not yet disrupt our daily lives. But in communities throughout the United States and around the globe, environmental activism is not a matter of choice, it is a necessity.

East Liverpool, Ohio, is one of those places. Since 1993, the eastern Ohio River Valley has been home to a massive hazardous waste incinerator. The WTI incinerator in East Liverpool burns 60,000 tons of hazardous waste each year, has experienced dozens of accidents, and is located within 100 yards of an elementary school. Yet, it continues to operate.

Toxic Burn is a gripping account of the activist movement against the imposing WTI incinerator in this struggling rust belt town. Drawing on personal interviews with key participants as well as official documents, Thomas Shevory tells the story of building, maintaining, and resisting the incinerator. It begins in the 1970s with community leaders who responded to failing pottery and steel industries by proposing the incinerator as a source of jobs and tax revenue. The incinerator’s opponents fought back, challenging EPA permits in court. They also enlisted the support of Greenpeace and publicly called presidential hopeful Al Gore to task for the Clinton administration’s backing of the incinerator. These activists’ efforts have not only helped to curtail the industry’s expansion, Shevory concludes, but have also encouraged movement toward more sustainable models of industrial production.

Hazardous waste disposal is a hot-button issue in many communities. By analyzing the obstacles faced by the WTI incinerator’s opponents, as well as their victories, Toxic Burn shows that the actions of decent and determined citizens are powerful and essential to developing new environmental models and ultimately saving the health and lives of those in the path of potential disaster.

Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney. 

International Relations and the Problem of Difference. New York: Routledge, 2004.

This work has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. One would think that IR is in a good position to describe, explain and theorize cultural diversity, but instead it has a history of ignoring the subject. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation to the other.

Thomas Shevory. 

Notorious H.I.V: The Media Spectacle of Nushawn Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

In the fall of 1997, public authorities in Chautauqua County, New York, were granted an exception to the state’s HIV confidentiality law—and released Nushawn Williams’s name and picture to the press, deeming him a "public health threat." Williams, who is HIV-positive, had had unprotected sex with many young women and girls and infected at least nine of them.  

Prof. Shevory sorts through the ensuing media panic and legal imbroglio to tell the story behind the Nushawn Williams case. Through media reports, legal documents, and interviews with many of the participants—including Williams—Shevory exposes the significant exaggerations, misunderstandings, and distortions that riddled the Williams case from the start. He contends that Williams’s portrayal as an "AIDS monster" served political purposes; specifically, representations of Williams helped to foster the passage of HIV-transmission statutes, resulting in criminalizing a public health problem in a virtually unprecedented fashion.  

His work shows how media coverage robs individuals like Williams of their humanity, creating a pervasive atmosphere of threat that warps the integrity and fairness of the criminal justice and penal system. Notorious H.I.V. also traces the impact of such high-profile cases on communities.