Christine Sylvester – författare

We have long saved--and curated--objects from wars to commemorate the war experience. These objects appear at national museums and memorials and are often mentioned in war novels and memoirs. Through them we institutionalize narratives and memories of national identity, as well as international power and purpose. While people interpret war in different ways, and there is no ultimate authority on the experiences of any war, curators of war objects make different choices about what to display or write about, none of which are entirely problematic, good, or accurate. This book asks whose vantage points on war are made available, and where, for public consumption; it also questions whose war experiences are not represented, are minimized, or ignored in ways that advantage contemporary militarism. Christine Sylvester looks at four sites of war memory-the National Museum of American History, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, and selected novels and memoirs of the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq-to consider the way war knowledge is embedded in differing sites of memory and display. While the museum shows war aircraft and a laptop computer used by a journalist covering the American war in Iraq, visitors to the Vietnam Memorial or Arlington Cemetery find more prosaic and civilian items on view, such as baby pictures, slices of birthday cake, or even car keys. In addition, memoirs and novels of these wars tend to curate ghastly horrors of wars as experienced by soldiers or civilians. For Sylvester, these sites of war memory and curation provide ways to understand dispersed war authority and interpretation and to consider which sites invite viewers to revere a war and which reflect personal experiences that show the undersides of these wars. Sylvester shows that scholars, policymakers, and other citizens need to consider different types of situated memory and knowledge in order to fully grasp war, rather than idealize it.

Feminist International Relations is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in International Relations. Edited by Christine Sylvester, a leading scholar in the field, it is a five-volume collection which brings together the best and most influential cutting-edge and canonical feminist IR scholarship.Feminist International Relations can be seen as a project by feminists to influence international relations—both as a set of practices (e.g. war, diplomacy, terrorism, aid, and trade) and as a set of theories (such as realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism). Adopting a combined thematic and chronological structure, the collection brings together the work of indisputable luminaries in this project, as well as vital research from new generations of scholars.Volumes I and II (‘Muses’) cover the years before 1985 and collects key works that influenced early feminist IR thinking. Work from women’s studies, philosophy, history, sociology, and the history of science is included here. Volume III (‘1985–96’) brings together the most important earliest recognizably feminist IR writings from that period. The fourth volume in the collection (‘Wider Influences’) gathers the best of newer writings from cognate fields and from the rise of cultural theory, postcolonial studies, and gay and lesbian studies. The final volume (‘1997–2009’) focuses on scholarship produced from the mid-1990s to the present day, material that is characterized by a broadening of themes, geographical interests, and theories.With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editor, which place the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Feminist International Relations is an essential collection destined to be valued by scholars and students of IR—and those working in cognate disciplines—as a vital research resource.

This edited collection explores aspects of contemporary war that affect average people –physically, emotionally, and ethically through activities ranging from combat to television viewing.The aim of this work is to supplement the usual emphasis on strategic and national issues of war in the interest of theorizing aspects of war from the point of view of individual experience, be the individual a combatant, a casualty, a supporter, opponent, recorder, veteran, distant viewer, an international lawyer, an ethicist or other intellectual. This volume presents essays that push the boundaries of war studies and war thinking, without promoting one kind of theory or methodology for studying war as experiential politics, but with an eye to exploring the possibilities and encouraging others to take up the new agenda. It includes new and challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, new wars in the Third World, gender and war thinking, and the sense of the body within war that inspires recent UN resolutions. It also gives examples that can change our understanding of who is located where doing what with respect to war –women warriors in Sierra Leone, war survivors living with their memories, and even an artist drawing something seemingly intangible about war –the arms trade.The unique aspect of this book is its purposive pulling together of foci and theoretical and methodological perspectives from a number of disciplines on a variety of contemporary wars. Arguably, war is an activity that engages the attention, the politics, and the lives of many people. To theorize it with those lives and perspectives in mind, recognizing the political contexts of war, is long overdue.This inter-disciplinary book will be of much interest to students of war studies, critical security studies, gender studies, sociology and IR in general.

This edited collection explores aspects of contemporary war that affect average people –physically, emotionally, and ethically through activities ranging from combat to television viewing.The aim of this work is to supplement the usual emphasis on strategic and national issues of war in the interest of theorizing aspects of war from the point of view of individual experience, be the individual a combatant, a casualty, a supporter, opponent, recorder, veteran, distant viewer, an international lawyer, an ethicist or other intellectual. This volume presents essays that push the boundaries of war studies and war thinking, without promoting one kind of theory or methodology for studying war as experiential politics, but with an eye to exploring the possibilities and encouraging others to take up the new agenda. It includes new and challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, new wars in the Third World, gender and war thinking, and the sense of the body within war that inspires recent UN resolutions. It also gives examples that can change our understanding of who is located where doing what with respect to war –women warriors in Sierra Leone, war survivors living with their memories, and even an artist drawing something seemingly intangible about war –the arms trade.The unique aspect of this book is its purposive pulling together of foci and theoretical and methodological perspectives from a number of disciplines on a variety of contemporary wars. Arguably, war is an activity that engages the attention, the politics, and the lives of many people. To theorize it with those lives and perspectives in mind, recognizing the political contexts of war, is long overdue.This inter-disciplinary book will be of much interest to students of war studies, critical security studies, gender studies, sociology and IR in general.

This book is a major new contribution to our understanding of war and international relations (IR). Divided into two sections, the first part surveys the state of war and war studies in international relations, security studies and in feminist international relations. The second part addresses a missing area of IR studies of war that feminism is well-placed to fill in: the emotional and physical aspects of war. The author examines a wide variety of conflict situations, such as the Israel/Palestine dispute, the Cold War, Vietnam, Nicaragua, wars of liberation in Africa, genocidal war in Rwanda; humanitarian interventionist war in the Balkans, the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 'war on terror'. Drawing on the latest feminist thinking, the author demonstrates how war is experienced as a body-based politics and in so doing provides an innovative and challenging corrective to traditional theories of war in international relations. This will be essential reading for all those with an interest in gender, war and international relations.

This book is a major new contribution to our understanding of war and international relations (IR). Divided into two sections, the first part surveys the state of war and war studies in international relations, security studies and in feminist international relations. The second part addresses a missing area of IR studies of war that feminism is well-placed to fill in: the emotional and physical aspects of war. The author examines a wide variety of conflict situations, such as the Israel/Palestine dispute, the Cold War, Vietnam, Nicaragua, wars of liberation in Africa, genocidal war in Rwanda; humanitarian interventionist war in the Balkans, the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 'war on terror'. Drawing on the latest feminist thinking, the author demonstrates how war is experienced as a body-based politics and in so doing provides an innovative and challenging corrective to traditional theories of war in international relations. This will be essential reading for all those with an interest in gender, war and international relations.

This book evaluates the major debates around which the discipline of international relations has developed in the light of contemporary feminist theories. The three debates (realist versus idealist, scientific versus traditional, modernist versus postmodernist) have been subject to feminist theorising since the earliest days of known feminist activities, with the current emphasis on feminist, empiricist standpoint and postmodernist ways of knowing. Christine Sylvester shows how feminist theorising could have affected our understanding of international relations had it been included in the three debates. She elaborates a feminist method of empathetically cooperative conversation which challenges the identity politics of IR, and illustrates that method with reference to the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and the efforts of Zimbabwean women to negotiate international funding for their local producer cooperatives.

In this book, Christine Sylvester examines the history of feminists' efforts to include gender relations in the study of international relations. Tracing the author's own 'journey' through the subject, as well as the work of other leading feminist scholars, the book examines theories, methods, people and locations which have been neglected by conventional scholarship. It will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, women's and gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

In this book, Christine Sylvester examines the history of feminists' efforts to include gender relations in the study of international relations. Tracing the author's own 'journey' through the subject, as well as the work of other leading feminist scholars, the book examines theories, methods, people and locations which have been neglected by conventional scholarship. It will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, women's and gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

This collection explores the concepts and practices of masquerade as they apply to concepts and practices of war.The contributors insist that masquerades are everyday aspects of the politics, praxis, and experiences of war, while also discovering that finding masquerades and tracing how they work with war is hardly simple. With a range of theories, innovative methodologies, and contextual binoculars, masquerade emerges as a layered and complex phenomenon. It can appear as state deception, lie, or camouflage, as in the population-centric American warfare in Iraq that was sold as good for the local people, or the hidden violence Russian military forces used on each other and on local men in Chechnya. Masquerade can also be part of a people's war logic as exemplified by the Maoist movement in India. Yet masquerade can also be understood as a normal social mask that people don to foreground an identity or belief from one's cluttered repertoire in order to gain agency. Elements of masquerade can appear in texts that proclaim seemingly unequivocal positions while simultaneously yet subtly suggesting opposing positions. Masquerades of all kinds also seem ubiquitous in fieldwork research and in resistance movements in war zones. Perhaps masquerade, though, is ultimately the denial of death lurking behind the clarion call of security, a call that bolsters war by making militarized policing normal to secure populations from terrorists. These interpretations and others comprise Masquerades of War.This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, critical security, conflict studies and IR in general.

This book explores the concepts and practices of masquerade as they apply to concepts and practices of war. It is designed to helpful for students interested in critical war studies, critical security, conflict studies and international relations.

Art/Museums takes the study of international relations to the art museum. It seeks to persuade those who study international relations to take art/museums seriously and museum studies to take up the insights of international relations. And it does so at a time when both international relations and art are said to be at an end-that is, out of control and beyond sight of their usual constituencies. The book focuses on the British Museum, the National Gallery of London, the Museum of Iraq, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Getty museums, the Guggenheim museums, and "museum" spaces instantly created by the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. The art includes works over which museums might struggle, acquire through questionable means, hoard and possibly lose, such as the Parthenon sculptures, Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks, the ancient art of Babylon, modern art, and the art/museum itself in an era of rapid museum expansion. Bringing art, museums, and international relations together draws on the art technique of collage, which combines disparate objects, themes, and time periods in one work to juxtapose unexpected elements, leaving the viewer to relate objects that are not where they are expected to be.