Feminist Ethics and Political Violence
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Feminist Ethics and Political Violence Kimberly Hutchings International Relations Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
This paper argues that the debates between different ethical perspectives within feminism cannot be resolved in principle. Nevertheless, these debates point to a different feminist way of thinking about ethics in world politics. This feminist perspective puts the distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘world politics’ into question in relation to feminism’s defining concern with the sources and effects of women’s oppression. International Politics (2007) 44, 90–106. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800160 Keywords: feminism; ethics; world; politics; violence
Introduction The term ‘world politics’ can obviously be defined in a variety of ways. As I use it here, ‘world politics’ refers to relations of power (in a Foucauldian sense) that work through and across boundaries of state and nation (Foucault, 2000). World politics encompasses practices (from war to trade and civil society activism), institutions (such as states, inter-state regimes and organizations, international law) and socio-economic structures (such as class, race and gender). The expression ‘ethics in world politics’ sets up a series of expectations about its constituent terms. It suggests that while ‘world’ and ‘politics’ may be bracketed together as a conjoint reality, ‘ethics’ remains something apart, something that may or may not be found ‘in’ world politics, but which could be introduced into world politics as an additional transformative ingredient.1 The different contributions to this volume provide different interpretations of the meanings of the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘world politics’ and of the relation between them as it is or ought to be. In the argument below, I explore the implications of thinking about ethics in world politics from a feminist perspective. The paper begins by drawing out the implications of feminist arguments for thinking about ethics in world politics as a series of attempts to establish the substantive ethical values by which feminist struggles to transform world politics should be oriented. It then goes on to analyse the implications of these values when it comes to feminist assessments of the ethical legitimacy of the use of violence for the pursuit of collective political ends in the context of world
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politics. Such uses of violence include war, revolution, terrorism and humanitarian intervention.2 It will be argued that the debates between different ethical perspectives within feminism are unable to be resolved through settling the ethical superiority of one or other approach in principle at the level of either its grounds or consequences. Nevertheless, these debates point to an alternative way of thinking about ethics in world politics from a feminist perspective, one in which the distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘world politics’ is put into question in relation
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