Poststructural International Relations

This post was written in August 2016, I was able to retrieve it from my old host server after being shutdown. Saying that the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) is based on interests will not suffice in explaining how the EU emerged. To start with, politics can be defined as a social activity that deals with conflicts, which stem from conflicting interests of different people, and a search for resolving these conflicts with cooperation, compromise, and conciliation (Heywood 2013). However, interests don’t show the whole painting but part of it. You can imagine social life as a painting, and people compete and cooperate in defining what colors will be used in this painting. They compete when their interests diverge and cooperate when they converge. Yet seeing politics based on interests only is like seeing the painting with black and white colors, corrupting the painting and disabling the viewer from seeing the reality. It’s a matter of perception; the way you per...

This post was written in August 2016, I was able to retrieve it from my old host server after being shutdown Short introduction to Refugees. To classify Refugees, Egon F. Kunz divided them into three distinct groups according to their attitudes towards their displacement.

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, from a genealogical analysis, terrorism can be identified since the emergence of liberal ideologies   (Blain, 2005) . Yet historical developments influences terrorism which makes it more complex to be studied. In order to avoid any controversies, this paper rely on Kis-katos et al  (2014) research paper in identifying the characteristics of terrorist groups which will be helpful in identifying the aims, objectives and motives of the groups that will be examined in this paper. This paper will examine two groups from the same terrorist category, namely; the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Hezbollah which both are categorized as religious terrorist groups. The rationale behind Kis-katos et al analysis is to show that terrorism is not a homogeneous phenomenon and therefore a group must be approached through its ideology, thus, this paper’s purpose is to show that sharing the same geography does not necessarily imply that differen...

The main issue in terrorism does not lie in defining it. There are many works provided by scholars in an attempt to define it. The main issue is that these definitions are not relevant with the varying and competing power/knowledge relations that exist in the international system, therefore to resolve this problem the question that must be answered is “whose knowledge matters?”. Every political actor provides definitions to political concepts that best serve their interests. In the following, the issue raised above will be examined by analysing the genealogy of terrorism, arguing that the reason behind terrorism being a contested concept lies not in the inability to define what terrorism means, but in the variety of political actors and thus the variety of what terrorism stands for, due to the conflict of interests. Fletcher distinguished the elements that differentiate what a terrorist act is from other forms of violence, yet the title of his article states that terrorism is indef...

The modern political system is made up of nation-states, each has its own understanding of the nation and citizenship that characterizes it from the rest. The state, or the nation-state, consist of citizens, as Aristotle puts it. However, both the ideas of the state and citizenship were under constant change throughout history due to changes the political structure, of the time, came through. During the times of Aristotle citizenship was associated with the polis , or the city-state, it was not until the eighteenth century that the idea of the nation emerged, and before that people were considered subjects and not citizens. It is interesting how the emergence of the nation-state was followed by the spread of immigration, specially that the Nineteenth century is regarded as the golden age of immigration. How did the emergence of the nation-state affect immigration? This paper will examine the nation-states of Britain, France and Germany in relation to immigration, it will begin by exa...

Surveillance in the sense of gathering information about people existed throughout history, a simple example can be given from the Roman Empire when Caesar Augustus issued a decree for taking census throughout the empire, in order to maintain the functioning of the Empire and collect taxes (Claytor & Bagnall, 215;  Lyon, 1994, p. 22) . Therefore, since it’s an old social event, one wonders what’s the matter with surveillance today? Why so much attention is increasing in regards to surveillance since the last decade? Are there any differences between the surveillance since the times of the Roman Empire with surveillance today? And if so what are they? All these questions will be answered in this paper. It will begin by attempting to define what is surveillance, then it will examine the 2009 House of Lords Report (HOL) on this subject, then it will critically examine some of the issues raised in the report; particularly how surveillance shapes the relationship between the citiz...