International relations are based on patriarchal norms – states are constructed and legitimized through masculinity making violence inevitable

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Globalization + Feminism

Globalization has created opportunities for pathbreaking in China – gives them room to develop more individual identities and influence the international theatre

Li 1(Li Xiaojiang is the founder and pioneer of women's studies in China and the Professor and director of the Gender Research Center of Dalian University “"Modernization" to "Globalization": Where Are Chinese Women?”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2001, vol. 26, no. 4, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175370, accessed 7/10/16//KR)

Pathbreaking (jiegui) was a ubiquitous key term in the 1990s and has saturated virtually all professions and callings. This term in fact harbors wthin itself a certain larger process. Before and after pathbreaking in China, this process has involved two terms representing two, not exactly identical, social subjects and development objectives. One, modernization, was born at the same time as the late era of social reforms in the 1970s; its social basis lay in nationalism, and it aimed at strengthening China. This agenda involved a race to catch up with Western industrial civilization, a breaching of Chinese confinement, and what we Chinese call a "heading for the world" (zouxiang shijie) -that is,globalization, the second term of what became, in the 1990s, the prime Chinese social development objec- tive in relation, of course, to the modernization of the 1980s. Without a doubt, globalization transcended modernization in China, since we also had at our disposal the Chinese term social countermodeling (shehui zhuan- xing). Women's development and the gender question both stand in rela- tion to "pathbreaking" and to "countermodeling," and, although in the end this relation was transitory, it is still registering influence. Two necessary brief asides will provide explanations of some essential matters. The first of these relates to globalization itself. Early in 1992, at Boston's Northeastern University, historian Patrick Manning gave a talk in which he argued there was a trend toward globalization. In those days, international society was feeling profoundly the dismemberment of the So- viet Union and Eastern Europe and the sanctions imposed on China by Western countries. Globalization seemed to be hot air then. But, in China, within not even three years (from late 1994, when the drive to enter the market economy began), globalization not only became an objective linked to the slogan of pathbreaking, it had already become an accomplished real- ity in many domains. To an extraordinary degree, China's activist (albeit nationalist) political process fortuitously seized upon globalization and forcefully promoted it, rather than serving as a powerful obstacle to it in the way so many (Western) people had imagined. The second aside concerns models. Contemporary scholars (particularly in the West) are too habituated to systems of thinking that draw on classi- ficatory models and have situated China in the "Asian development model" or "postsocialist model." Yet China and the other Asian nations have never developed according to the same model, and thus there really is no com- mon foundational developmental model at all. Those analyses prematurely claim that China is "postsocialist, because even now China strictly upholds a socialist (political) system and ideology. Because China undertook glob- alization from within its own particular system scholars must study China in its singularity if they wish to understand the relationship of contempo- rary China to globalization. The concept of globalization emerged out of Western society. Initially, it was both an economic movement and a Western concept or value, albeit popularized on the global scale. In China, the analogous concept to this Western value was the notion of "heading for the world." A nationalist slogan of self-strengthening, it enabled China to be pathbreaking through countermodeling, thus giving globalization a Chinese nationalist content. Consequently, the Western concept of globalization came to be used in- strumentally in China as a nationalist battle cry. In China, in other words, globalization became the historical turning point for the nation's encounter with the world. While all of the above is background knowledge, it serves to clarify how the concept of globalization was historically produced in China and to explain globalization's particular regional inflection, all of which will enable us to consider the status, attitude, and actions of and potential questions facing Chinese women and to understand and establish a method of explicating those questions. The preparatory meetings for the 1995 Women's Conference, which began in late 1993, drew Chinese women into the processes of globaliza- tion, even before they had became involved in so-called modernization, and they were the first social group to encounter globalization. How do we look into (Chinese) women's status and the woman question in the processes of globalization? The made-to-order method (and this includes the thinking of Sins' spe- cial issue editors) is most often as follows: in societies moving toward eco- nomic marketization, women are the consumer group, and the sex (the xing) of women (nuxing) becomes a mass consumer item, the labor power of women is exploited, and so on. From the perspective of developed West- ern nations and the reflections of postmodernism on modernization, this is the absolute reality of economic marketization. But why is it that, in countries where these questions are actually at stake, they are not raised by the very women in question but are, on the contrary, precisely the objec- tives that people swarm toward as fast as they can? To take another ex- ample, the most exploitative labor categories are those with the highest concentrations of workers. Yet as of this time, these jobs have allowed un- told numbers of rural women to take the road toward casting off poverty, casting off the influence of the clan, and transforming their own selves. In today's China, the development of women does not fall within that stereotyped model, because of the very substantial influence of regional variation, or for personal reasons (or opportunities). In every arena, indi- viduals who have the material resources or the personal opportunity to "pathbreak" do so, no matter what sort of new problems or what sort of oppressions or misuses they encounter as a consequence. Their life condi- tions and their degree of self-autonomy are so much greater than those allowed in traditional regions and in the traditional social life of the indi- vidual that it does not matter that women in foreign enterprises are clearly being paid less: they will still choose the exploitative wages of foreign en- terprises and turn down the housewifery of state enterprises. The "woman question" raised by the process of globalization clearly di- verges from recognized models, and whether it can easily be judged by mod- ern or postmoder standards of value is hard to say. Still, it is of the greatest importance that we recognize the existence of continuous, ongoing pro- cesses of displacement of positions and the consequent displacement of a universal standard of value. This is a social method for our recognizing the processes of globalization and their transformation of women's status and the women/gender question. The concepts of globalization and "indige- nous consciousness," "development" and "sustainable development," are mutually contradictory, and, moreover, their original standpoints are in- commensurable. From one perspective (the macroscopic, globalized per- spective, a perspective that has reflected on "modernization" and capital- ism), we see capitals accelerating exploitation of women in the developing countries. From the other indigenous perspective, we must squarely face the fact that women's lives and status in modernization and globalization have improved for the better; even though, compared with the West, their lives appear impoverished, individuals may actually have (compared to the past) greater affluence. Again, if the labor market is slanted toward developing countries, the marriage and sex markets actually offer women increased opportunities for choice (including the choice of sexual services) and con- sequently improve the situation of women, although to women of the de- veloped regions and countries this may constitute a sort of oppression. But, at the same time, the positive value to women is not only not uniform, it may, on the contrary, be quite the opposite. Each of these events give rise to women questions whose methods of resolution may also be poles apart. During the modernization of the 1980s, the basic attitude of Chinese women (particularly urban, professional women) was passivity; as a result, their development lagged behind social development generally. Then "en- lightenment" became the prime subject of Chinese social agenda. This dis- course aimed to mobilize women to plunge enthusiastically into the total modernization of society and the improvement of their own circum- stances. From that perspective, the globalization of the 1990s has offered Chinese women an unexpected opportunity to overtake Chinese society's entire developmental level while at the same time pathbreaking into the world and becoming individual persons. They can also cast off the en- tanglements of nationalism, taking themselves "toward the world." This is absolutely crucial in the history of Chinese women's liberation and devel- opment. For all of history, Chinese women have always been contained in the family, the clan, the community; that was why the processes of Chinese women's liberation were always involved with nation, society, and the state. For this reason, when I see the process of Chinese women's globaliza- tion, I also see the fortuitous processes of her individuation. When the Chinese reforms began in the 1980s and it appeared as though modernization would discard or abandon women, I felt that this would actually be a good thing for Chinese women and would awaken in Chinese women their female subjective consciousness. Today I feel similarly that globalization is, for Chinese women, a difficult historical opportunity, holding out the chance to every woman to exceed family, society, nation, and state and leading in the end to more opportunities and more chances to choose to become an individual. No matter how many new problems it produces, what single thing could be more important than choice? If the catchword of the Chinese women's movement of the 1980s was (social) enlightenment, today's objective is (individual) development. These will certainly seem dubious from the postmodernist perspective, and such reservations have their laudable points. But these are all the self- conscious and self-selected choices of Chinese women themselves, and it is possible that they are brief and fleeting, a counter to countermodeling and pathbreaking. At this point, no matter how many definitions we provide at the level of theory, I think that standards for judgment must grow out of the spe- cifics of life itself. Doing what one ought or ought not to do is relevant not in the abstract but only in the context of reality. It is essential now to scrutinize reality very carefully, to evaluate the price of doing what one says is "necessary," and to try to calibrate and to reduce these costs.

State Perms

Perm, do both: State involvement is key to place-attached politics and solidarity among the oppressed through delocalization

Brun, C., & Blaikie, P. (2016). “Alternative Development: Unravelling Marginalization, Voicing Change”. Farnham, GB: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com.proxy.library.umkc.edu Brun was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Geography in August 2004, and Professor from September 2013. I am currently Director of Research in the department. She teaches and supervises students in human geography, development studies and globalisation studies. Piers Macleod Blaikie is a geographer and scholar of international development and natural resources, who worked until 2003 at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia

It was not until the 1990s that alternative, antimodernist development theories critiqued development practices for their concerns with fulfillment of basic needs with a focus on indigenous values, neoliberal self-reliance and so forth. Lund (1993) was one of the first to argue that identifying ways to empower the poor and marginalized was more appropriate than focusing solely on fulfilling needs, which were frequently inappropriately identified by ‘experts’ from elsewhere. Part of this critique questioned how men and women could sensitize themselves and act against oppressive structural forces, including patriarchy (Lund 1993). The structures affecting women’s lives – production, reproduction, socialization, motherhood, gender and sexuality – contain different contradictions and dynamics but they nonetheless contain a unity in women’s experience. Women are contextualized by the shifting social relations they inhabit and the types of labour they perform. A focus on gender and development argues that the sexual division of labour in a society is one of the relations in which men and women become dependent upon each other, and these relations must necessarily change. Gender power relations rather than ‘women in development’ are the needed focus of analysis. In addition, a focus on gender and development emphasizes that women are not a homogenous group but rather are divided by class, ethnicity, age and so forth. Women are seen as social actors within wider social contexts, and the state can be an important actor promoting women’s emancipation (Peet and Hartwick 2009). Escobar (2008: 32) approaches power over the production of locality as being tantamount to two conflicting yet at times mutually constitutive ‘processes of localization.’ On the one hand, there are the dominant forces of the state and capital, which attempt to ‘shift the production of locality in their favor,’ thus ultimately creating ‘… a delocalizing effect with respect to places,’ and, second, what Escobar refers to as subaltern forms of localization: ‘place-based strategies that rely on the attachment to territory and culture; and network strategies.’ In the first instance capital and the state mobilize the politics of scale that valorize local endeavours (e.g. some ecotourism programmes are foisted on indigenous peoples and are advertised globally as authentic, traditional experiences that do not hurt the environment). To the extent that these strategies do not originate from local places (they may come from the state or the Global North), they inevitably induce a delocalizing effect in terms of an unfolding of social and ecological life. In the second instance are subaltern strategies, which follow the Deleuzian notion that ‘the oppressed, if given the chance … and on their way to solidarity through alliance politics … can speak and know their conditions ’ (Spivak 1988: 25). Escobar advocates two strategies that focus on (1) attachment to place, and (2) attachment to redes that empower social networks to enact the politics of scale from below. These latter strategies, as suggested by some of our work in FNNR, engage ‘local movements with biodiversity networks, on the one hand, and with other place-based actors and struggles, on the other’ (Escobar 2008: 32). In what follows we highlight the FNNR project in Guizhou Province, China, where complex social and biodiverse relations between the endangered snubnosed monkey, local hillside farmers and their traditional agricultural practices, tourist policies, economic development and education interweave in ways that highlight Escobar’s delocalizing effects and place-based strategies and suggest the importance of Lund’s renegotiation of local values on a continual basis. Recent decades have witnessed considerable interdisciplinary research and conservation efforts, pointing to a fundamental question of how we can better understand the space– time complexities of humans, protected species and the environment (e.g. Ehrlich and Wilson 1991, Vitousek 1994, Jeffers 1997, Vitousek et al. 1997, Dirzo and Raven 2003, Smith et al. 2003, Turner et al. 2003, O’Connor and Crowe 2005).

The perm is the best option-their assumption that only theoretical viewpoints that have a pure ontology/epistemology encourages a theory driven approach that stops good policy and shatters the power of any IR theory

Owen in 2k2 (David, Reader on Political Theory at the University of Southampton, Millennium, Re-orienting International Relations: On Pragmatism, Pluralism and Practical Reasoning, SAGE)

The second danger run by the philosophical turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theory-construction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, ‘theory-driven work is part of a reductionist program’ in that it ‘dictates always opting for the description that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory’.5 The justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is necessary for social science because general explanations are required to characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since ‘whether there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for social-scientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry’.6 Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IR—what might be called (only slightly tongue in cheek) ‘the Highlander view’—namely, an image of warring theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to, and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right, namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious circle arises.