International Relationship Work

Ok, forget what I said before (if you saw it, I already took the first version of this post down).  Here's my real introduction, which I think makes a good essay in and of itself.

On International Relationship Work

When I chose to study International Relations (IR) I did it without really understanding much about the field itself.  I simply knew that I was interested in the big questions of war and peace.  I read the newspaper and saw that war and violence were everywhere and I wanted to understand more about the terrible situation that the world is in and how we might begin to change it.  I discovered that an MA in IR was the degree I would need to work for the United Nations or some small human-rights focused non-governmental organization (NGO) and that’s how I, an English Literature undergraduate, ended up studying international relations.

When I actually began to study this thing called IR, I learned, however, that it was very different from what I expected.  The vast majority of my classmates wanted to work for either the State Department or were connected to the military in some way.  Human rights were barely on the horizon.  I stood out in various ways.  I was one of only three women in the incoming class and far from being a young Margaret Thatcher or Madeline Albright my politics were considered downright radical and my methods unconventional.  Not feeling like I was ever taken seriously I felt shoved into a role of providing comic relief for the more “serious” discussions of my (mostly male) classmates; discussions that were based on premises I didn’t even believe in.  Needless to say, I soon became discouraged and when I discovered a way to do my original goal (work for human rights) without the degree I left the academic program to go to Colombia.

I loved it.  It was hard and painful work but it was also beautiful, important, and meaningful.  I spent a year there and formed new relationships and friendships.  The experience left me even more curious about a different kind of international relations: that is, relationships between people across borders.  I wondered why is it that this also is not part of the IR I encountered in grad school?         

I remain committed to human rights, to holding governments and other violators accountable, to supporting and encouraging the work of indigenous and international communities to organize and resist such violence and to be a good ally to other members of the human family.  I consider the defense and promotion of human rights and the pursuit of social justice to be “relationship work”.  Relationships amongst people are the foundation of human society.  War is the most extreme form of broken relationships on a large scale.  There is something problematic with a field that does not –that cannot– see critiques that point out inherent weaknesses within its own theoretical underpinnings.

If the goal of any academic discipline is a greater understanding of the world around us, a fearless questioning, even of our most fundamental beliefs, is essential.  And yet theory must go further even than that.  Investigation and explanation without critique is not neutral.  It is to further entrench and justify the current power differentials of our world. In that light, this paper will take a critical theory approach to critiquing some of the basic premises of the realist school of thought within International Relations, including who the major actors are in the study of IR, the nature of the global environment in which they exist and what defines security for them.