The Social Construction of Man, State, and War - Political Science Book on International Relations Theory | Perfect for Academic Studies & Research

This book is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. Wilmer holds central concepts of research on global politics—war, violence, power, nation-states, (ethnic) identity/conflict—up to scrutiny and investigates their formation and normalization. She integrates psychology into her analysis of identity and violence at all levels, from the level of the individuals who form identity groups to the level of group dynamics. This isn’t always a popular move for scholars in international relations, who are likely to bracket psychological issues. What she gets from this integration of psychology is a cogent and humane analysis of motivation and political change that underwrites her principal questions about war and brutality: “why here?,” “why now?,” “why this way?” Wilmer does not slight structural and historical factors in her analysis of war; indeed, her social constructivist approach makes leadership, cultural practices, and political institutions central. Her contribution is in the way she sees psychological, cultural, and political factors interacting to produce the effects she analyzes. It’s also important to note that, unlike many works of social construction that have the tendency to reduce the site of study to the linguistic habits of its members, Wilmer’s social construction is a method that doesn’t sacrifice social and material relations to the putative power of symbolic representation.Wilmer uses feminist scholarship in the fields of human rights and international relations, but she also draws on other bodies of feminist literature to analyze phenomena such as the development of gender identity, social constructions of gender, feminist epistemology, and the social meanings of violence against women. Gender is a central category of her analysis of violence as she examines, for example, mass rapes in warfare in the former Yugoslavia and the role of ideologies of masculinity in war. Yet she isn’t reductive in attributing particular characteristics to categories of people. Noting that women in ex-Yugoslavia didn’t differ from men in championing nationalist causes and leaders, she’s perceptive about the need to use gender, as well as ethnicity, as an analytic lens through which to understand the normalization of states, nationalisms, and group-sanctioned violence.