Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

For at least three decades, the reflectivist perspectives of International Relations have established themselves as the main alternative to the realist-liberal mainstream that prevailed in previous times, thus giving rise to a broad theoretical and epistemological renewal of our discipline. This rise of reflectivism has led to its identification, almost interchangeably, with the broader concept of “critical theories”; that is, understood – according to the well-known distinction of Robert Cox – as those that are not limited to maintaining the established order, but rather to questioning it and seeking to transform it. Other visions that are still equally critical, such as those inspired by the emancipatory tradition of the labour movement initiated by Marx and Engels, seem to have been relegated to the background. Neo-Marxist structuralism even appeared as the main alternative to realism and liberalism in the “interparadigmatic debate” that supposedly developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, instead, that space has been occupied by social constructivism and reflectivist approaches, although among them we can include a perspective inherited from the Marxist tradition: namely, neo-Gramscianism. This paper presents some of the main directions in the political thought of Manuel Sacristán Luzón (1925–1985), whose intellectual contribution – despite dealing with some of the most debated topics in International Relations during the past decades, such as epistemology, ethics, pacifism, or anti-imperialism – has been much less studied within IR than in other academic fields, such as especially philosophy and political theory. Widely regarded as the foremost Spanish Marxist philosopher of the 20th century, he developed an original theory that combined a rigorous study of Marx, Engels and other classical authors with the new concepts elaborated by Gramsci, of whom Sacristán was the most responsible for introducing into Spain. Likewise, his academic training in epistemology and the philosophy of science led him to try to reconcile the emancipatory and ethical aspirations of the Marxist tradition with the knowledge obtained from the positive sciences. His practice as a Communist intellectual and militant during the Cold War saw him maintaining a critical denunciation of both U.S. imperialism and the despotism of the Soviet leaders. In the final stages of his life, he established a fruitful dialogue between the radical left and other social movements, which allowed him to develop his thought into tackling new problems, such as the prevention of nuclear war or the protection of the environment. The article is divided into four sections. The first focuses on Sacristán’s reflections on epistemology and philosophy of the social sciences, seeking to reconcile the ethical value and emancipatory potential of the Marxist tradition with empirical scientific knowledge- an issue that is clearly connected with contemporary IR debates between positivism and postpositivism. The second section examines the Gramscian influences on his thought, which was very intense, despite the differences between Gramsci’s attention to ideology and culture, on the one hand, and Sacristán’s materialism and scientific positivism, on the other. The third and fourth sections move from the theoretical level to his practical commitment, as a Communist militant and public intellectual, focusing on his criticism of the USSR and his evolution toward a pacifist and anti-militaristic Marxism. Finally, the conclusions offer a synthesis of his contributions that are most relevant for today’s world, in a context in which some Cold War debates that seemed outdated have once again become fully topical. Sacristán's most original and innovative contributions, which can undoubtedly be of help to our current reflection on International Relations, can be summarized in three points. The first of these is his constant effort to apply a rigorous concept of science to the Marxist theoretical canon, differentiating those empirically proven arguments from others that, without losing their value as a political reference, did not satisfy the epistemological standards of the positive sciences. Yet this analysis, unlike the most exacerbated scientism, managed not to lose sight of the fact that the ultimate purpose of the theory was of a normative nature: the moral imperative to eradicate injustices, through the emancipation of the classes exploited by capitalism. This primacy of the commitment to the construction of a world where there would no longer be oppressors or oppressed is what, for example, allowed Sacristán to overcome his differences with the idealism and culturalism of Gramsci, preserving both the admiration for the testimony of his sacrifice, as well as the deep bitterness of empathy with his defeat. The contradictory relationship between ethics and scientific knowledge is thus resolved through a reconciliation of both in the field of practice. The second aspect is one that refers to Sacristán’s role as a critical intellectual; a manner of critique that he knew how to extend to the Communist movement of which he was a part, once again setting an example of an ethics deeply committed to the truth, even if this caused him personal harm. Thus, at a time when the myth of the October Revolution was still fully valid among his fellow activists, he did not hesitate to denounce the atrocities of Stalinism or the repression of the "Prague Spring", revealing the enormous gap that separated the propagandistic image of the USSR from the real behaviour of its leaders. This integrity was not manifested in a political environment in which it could bring him some material benefit, but rather the opposite. His life was a succession of continuous sacrifices and precariousness, without obtaining the recognition he deserved within the academic world due, precisely, to the priority he gave to his clandestine militancy against Franco’s dictatorship. Finally, we can highlight his ability to adapt to social and historical changes, exemplified by the elaboration – in his last years – of a pacifist Marxism, incorporating the ideas of the European peace movement into his conception of the Cold War. Although his positions ended up being defeated in the Spanish referendum on NATO membership, his writings and those of his colleagues from those years remain an ethical reference against the dangers of militarism and imperialism in the nuclear age. This is a pacifism that, without denying the need or legitimacy of the use of force for defensive purposes, continues to remind us that the definitive solution to conflict must necessarily go through other types of measures if we want to preserve the long-term survival of our species and that of the rest of the planet.      

This article aims to contribute to a recent debate to re-evaluate Latin America's contributions to International Political Economy (IPE) from a broader and more pluralistic perspective offered by Global Political Economy (GPE). This approach emerges as a set of conversations and questions about the world order that are answered from diverse perspectives and conceptual umbrellas. Thus, rather than a discipline, it represents a field of study where diverse theoretical, methodological, epistemological and ontological positions coexist with a local basis for the equal recognition of theories and contributions generated in the Global South (Seabrooke and Young, 2017). Although it does not represent a counter-hegemonic approach to Western thought (Vivares, 2020), the GPE recognises that each region has its own intellectual traditions and, above all, intellectual production that does not always find space in the dominant theories of the North for its demand for agency (Deciancio and Quiliconi, 2020). Hence, I question the applicability of the prevailing theories of IPE as limited in terms of explanation and replicability for Latin America. Northern IPE has had a dichotomous view of the world divided into positivist versus interpretivist in terms of knowledge production, or, more broadly, a geopolitical division into North American versus British schools focused on power politics and economics under very different points of view. These are self-centred perspectives on Anglo-Saxon thought that place Latin American ideas on the periphery, considering them as area studies rather than regional contributions to IPE (Tussie, 2020). It has not been taken into account that, since the late 1940s, Latin America has questioned the alleged universality of growth theories, constructing a local debate separate from the prevailing theories given its own discussions on development. The Latin American schools of structuralism and heterodox economics took a critical view of the ontological basis of orthodox trade, arguing that knowledge is always partial or fragmentary in origin and that international trade is unevenly distributed between developed and developing countries. Nor has consideration been given to later discussions of regionalism, financing for development and more recently to studies of varieties of capitalism that have arisen in Latin America.Despite the relevance and continuity of debates in Latin America, these ideas, which were put forward even before IPE was formally constituted as an area of study in the North, have been ignored by the dominant currents. As if this were not enough, within the region itself, it has been claimed that neoliberalism conquered this space and that, along with it, the critical debate on IPE had disappeared in Latin America (Palma, 2009). Against this background, this paper highlights how the GPE can contribute to a broader research agenda in which the contributions of the Global South are recognised. From a historical analysis, it proposes to compare the most relevant political and economic events that led to the creation of a regional field in GPE. The article contrasts the seminal contributions of structuralism, development and dependency theories to the GPE and the debates that subsequently emerged on regionalism, financing for development and the varieties of capitalism that constitute a Latin American school of thought in the GPE. In this way, it addresses how structuralism and development theories became the pillars of a Latin American school of thought that has had international insertion as an articulating concept in the regional search for spaces of agency within the international system. Latin American contributions to the GPE have always revolved around the themes of development and international insertion based on their own epistemological and methodological contributions. At the ontological level, Latin American theories broke with the acceptance of the universality of positivist and orthodox theories by establishing the need to incorporate reflectivist and critical approaches, and above all, theoretical debates around economics and development have contributed to the generation of an innovative methodology based on historical structuralism. Dependency theory mainly contributed to this methodological transformation, highlighting the importance of understanding the region's international insertion based on the relationship between internal structures 'as agents' and the political and economic power of the rest of the world as 'the structure'.Under a historical-critical analysis based on the peripheral condition, the region promoted a new understanding of IPE that examined how external and internal factors determined the political economy and social relations in Latin American countries. While structuralism favoured an inward-looking development policy, largely through import substitution industrialisation (ISI), dependency theory suggested the need for a new international economic order and, in one of its strands, a transition to socialism as a way out of the problem of underdevelopment; for many dependentists the goal was to reform capitalism domestically and internationally (Kay, 1998).Contributions on regionalism and financial issues have also been important for the development of the Latin American GPE. Historically, both ideas on Latin American regionalism and debates on financing for development emerged as a way of resisting great power interventions or achieving autonomy (Deciancio, 2018; Simonoff and Lorenzini, 2019). Thus, economic integration, regionalism and financing for development became key themes in the Latin American School of IPE, underpinning the quest to improve patterns of international insertion.It is argued that these contributions can be identified as a particular strand built primarily on the terms of trade debate and development studies in general, but with later ramifications that have inserted debates in the region on regionalism and international insertion, as well as financing for development and varieties of capitalism, into a discussion that has grown in recent decades and has become effervescent and eclectic. In particular, it is argued that Latin American GPE has developed on the margins of conventional IPE but within a rich and vibrant regional debate, which has generally been related on the one hand to the political practice of development (Tickner, 2008; Tussie, 2020) and, on the other, to the creation of regional integration initiatives (Perrotta, 2018).The article is divided into four sections that address the main contributions of the Latin American GPE. First, the seminal debates in the construction of the field of Latin American GPE from structuralism and dependency theories are synthesized. Second, it highlights the importance of regional integration and regionalism as central pillars of the Latin American School of EPG. Thirdly, it discusses how more recent analyses of financing for development and varieties of capitalism have contributed to nurturing the Latin American GPE. Finally, it examines whether the GPE field is global in nature or is facing a new phase in which the contribution and uniqueness of regional debates is revalued and highlighted.

The purpose of this study is to outline preliminary steps towards a history of emotions in IR. The primary contribution – and argument – of this study emerges from the observation that IR scholars have tended to write emotions ‘out of history’ in order to make sense of the present. Building on the works of historian Barbara Rosenwein, this study argues that much of the discipline of International Relations has incorporated into its thinking a strong but flawed ‘grand narrative’ of emotion. In brief, the narrative is this: the history of the West is the history of increasing emotional restraint – a progressive historical development that moves from ‘primitive’ emotional cultures, which give people much more liberty to manifest emotions they experience, to ‘civilized’ modernity and the bureaucratic rational state, which require social control of emotions. I assess two different arguments for this conclusion. The first argument concedes that at least some IR theories do take seriously the historical representation of emotions but holds that much of IR theorizing rests on a temporal binary that uses a linear-progressive conception of emotional history, in which the experience and expression of emotion increasingly became subject to emotional control by social forces. Certainly not all IR theories insist on the universal validity of specific models of emotion concepts, as I will show below. But even those IR theories that do take history seriously, cannot avoid incorporating the grand narrative of emotional restraint outlined above into their thinking. The second argument holds that the grand narrative, which represents the history of international relations as a history of increasing emotional restraint, is predominantly a Western historical narrative. This argument introduces a spatial binary that rests on a spatial misrepresentation of emotional history in IR. This second binary constructs the history of international relations as a narrative of an increasingly rationalized Western world against an emotionalized non-Western world that remains stuck in its violent past. I suggest that this double binary – temporal and spatial – is deeply problematic because it is rooted in a questionable historical understanding of emotions in IR: it employs a linear understanding of emotions that underappreciates and misrepresents the emotional epistemologies of previous eras. The alternative that this study develops of a history of emotions in IR is to advance the argument that the history of international relations resembles a history of emotional communities. Emotional communities are “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions” (Rosenwein, 2006, p. 2). Precisely, the idea is to suggest non-linear ways to study emotions in IR as embedded in and expressed through various emotional communities in particular times and spaces. The most promising research strategy to develop such a cross-historical comparison of emotions is to historicize them. To historicize emotions means “subjecting discourses on emotion, subjectivity, and the self to scrutiny over time, looking at them in particular social locations and historical moments, and seeing whether and how they have changed” (Abu-Lughod and Lutz, 1990, p. 5). This approach avoids some of the problems stemming from the double binary outlined above. First, it allows for a mapping of multiple emotional communities without introducing a particular temporal and spatial hierarchy. Second, the study of emotional communities enables us to evaluate contemporary notions of what is “emotional” in IR and if or how emotions have changed in their historical meaning and relative importance. Moreover, by historicizing emotions in this way, we can learn a lot about the moral values, power relationships and identities of various political communities of the past and present. Finally, to historicize emotions in this way lets us assess how different emotional communities interacted over time, contributing to a fuller understanding of globally entangled emotional histories. I illustrate this based on three interrelated approaches: communitarian, communicative, and comparative-connective. The analytical value of historicizing emotions through emotional communities is that it provides detailed insights into how emotions (or more precisely their meaningful expressions) change over time, how emotions are not merely the effects of historical circumstances but are actively shaping events and enriching historiographical theories in IR. First, this study contributes to the historical turn by further bridging the so-called ‘eternal divide’ between History and Political Science/International Relations (Lawson, 2010). Precisely, it problematizes the Eurocentric and presentist character of much of IR in a novel way by engaging in a critical dialogue with a linear process of emotional control. As many scholars have argued, the scholar’s choice of theorizing history becomes constitutive of the way IR is theorized and understood. My aim here is to sensitize IR scholars about how they include emotions in their work and to warn against how an unconscious and anachronistic treatment of emotions may distort our view of history in IR. A more nuanced inclusion of emotions may add to our understanding of the complex historical processes that underpin and have underpinned global politics. For example, there has been a renewed interest in the study of hierarchies in IR (Zarakol, 2017). As pointed out above, emotions are important, yet underappreciated, manifestations of such historically constructed international hierarchies. That said, it should be pointed out that the approach put forward here still represents only one way of ‘doing’ history in IR. It is not meant to diminish existing approaches or to simply replace an existing grand narrative with a new one. As Lawson and Hobson (2008) have rightly pointed out, “history comes in plural modes rather than in singular form” and this study welcomes such pluralism. Second, the study furthers the emotional turn by highlighting the historical dimension of researching emotions in world politics. Many IR scholars – with some important exceptions – study emotions in ahistorical ways through a universal psychologizing of international relations. Essentially, they suggest that today's emotions were the emotions of the past and will remain those of the future. But this viewpoint neglects the crucial fact that contemporary emotional categories and meanings are themselves the product of historical processes. While this has been increasingly recognized by some scholars (Hutchison, 2019; Linklater, 2014), it remains unclear what exactly is historical about emotions and how we should use history in their study. My point here is that before we can genuinely appreciate diversity or pluralism in and among emotional histories, we need to dispense with this grand narrative and its tendency to universalize emotion as regressive or atavistic tendencies. To this end, I suggest that the notion of emotional communities provides us with a novel historical perspective to open up space for a broader research agenda to analyze emotions in IR.

The Anthropocene as a new epoch brings into question the traditional modes of conceptualising International Relations. We believe that it does this by forcing students and practitioners of International Relations to think through how the discipline works as a set of ideas and practices, in fact, as a way of understanding the nature of problems and policymaking per se. As a discipline, International Relations is particularly sensitive to the questioning of the problematics of human exceptionalism, rationalist problem-solving and liberal modernist imaginaries of progress, which have shaped the agendas of international peace, development and democracy. Beyond the dark days of the Cold War, when International Relations was essentially a strategic exercise of Realpolitik, the discipline has staked a lot on the basis that Enlightenment liberalism is the universal panacea to human ills and that irrational structures or agencies can be civilised or tamed to further the interests of humanity, both in national or global regimes of good governance and the rule of law. These dreams of liberal universal solutions appear to have run aground in the Anthropocene as the last decade has marked a shift away from universal, modernist or ‘linear’ understandings of power and agency. In a world, construed as more complex, contingent and relational and replete with crises and unpredicted ‘tipping points’, traditional assumptions are up-ended and unintended consequences seem more relevant than ‘good intentions’. Concomitantly, the methodological focus has switched away from understanding the essence of entities and towards privileging the analysis of relations, networks and contexts. Key to this has been debates focused around climate change and global warming which explicitly cast policy problems not as external threats to the ‘good life’ (that requires securing) but as instead questioning the starting assumptions of separations between inside/ outside, humanity/ nature, solutions/ problems and referents/ threats. This elicits a very different way of thinking. If natural processes can no longer be separated from the historical impact of human development and are no longer merely the backdrop to a purely human drama of domestic and international political contestation, then the modernist understanding of the nature/ culture divide, separating social and natural science, no longer holds. Nature can no longer be understood as operating on fixed or natural laws, while politics and culture can no longer be understood as operating in a separate sphere of autonomy and freedom. These assumptions, central to modernist constructions of progress, are seen to no longer exist or to have always been problematic. Thus, the Anthropocene is not merely a question of new or more pressing problems, such as climate change and extreme weather events, but also a matter of the tools and understandings that are available to us: in other words, it is a matter of how we know —of epistemology— and also of what we understand the world to consist of —i.e. questions of ontology. Consider, for example, the conventional understanding of security as the protection of a valued referent against external threats. The condition of the Anthropocene challenges such a notion of security. The Anthropocene as a condition, problematises easy assumptions about ‘us’ as the security ‘referent’ —as the object to be secured. The problematisation of ‘us’ —the privileged gaze of the Western policymaking subject— opens up a substantial set of problems which deeply impact the disciplinary assumptions of International Relations. This is expressed, for example, in Bruno Latour’s concept of Earthbound people, i.e., an imaginary collective of people who consider themselves sensitive and responsive, due to being bound by and to the Earth. We are the problem as much as the solution, the ‘them’ as much as the ‘us’, the ‘enemy’ as much as the ‘friend’. Accordingly, the Anthropocene condition calls for reflection upon —and ultimately transition away from— the idea of a separation between nature and humanity. To perform this shift in perspective, concepts such as “worldly” or “ecological security” have been proposed. Matt McDonald develops a notion “ecological security” through an engagement with existing discourses of climate security. According to him, established ways of thinking about climate security would reinforce a problematic nature-culture divide by either presenting climate change as an external threat to vulnerable human communities or, conversely, human actors as a threat to fragile nature in need of protection. Ecological security would instead focus on supporting and sustaining the long-term resilience of ecosystems —understood as entangled systems of both human and non-human elements. Ensuring that “ecosystems can continue to function in the face of current and future change” is accordingly, the only defensible approach to security in the condition of the Anthropocene. Similarly, a worldly approach to security stresses that threats such as war, major industrial accidents, or ecological collapse do not affect humans in isolation but rather endanger the common worlds co-constituted by humans and diverse nonhuman beings. Harrington and Shearing hold that security in the Anthropocene should become oriented towards an “ethics of care”. Care, according to them, is able to emphasize the types of deep relational thinking that are so appropriate when discussing the Earth’s ongoing and unknown patterns of interactions and responses. It allows one to see security as a radical entanglement between humans, non-human animals, plants, bacteria, materials and technology. Learning how to navigate this entanglement with care will be a primary task for International Relations in our Anthropocene world. This article is organised in three sections. Firstly, we introduce the concept of the Anthropocene. We refer to the Anthropocene as a condition that we are in rather than as an external set of problems which we are confronted with. Understood as a condition which we are in, rather than merely a set of strategic and tactical problems which we confront, the Anthropocene enables us to go beyond the traditional binaries of our disciplinary tradition. The second section provides some background to the disciplinary history of International Relations, here we seek to briefly flag up the importance of thinking the Anthropocene in relation to the history of the discipline, which could be understood as moving from an ‘inter-national’ or state-centred focus during the Cold War to a global set of much broader concerns from the 1980s to the 2000s, to an increased interest in the Anthropocene, understood as a ‘planetary’ challenge to the liberal universal assumptions that followed the decline of ‘realist’ hegemony. The third section focuses on the implications of the Anthropocene for three key themes: knowledge, governance and security.

In the last decade, politicians, analysts and journalists have reactivated the concept of the Cold War (CW) to apply it as an analytical category to situations of the present. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has brutally brought the concept of the New Cold War (NCW) or Second Cold War (SCW) to the forefront. The application of concepts identifying events or stages of the historical past to situations of the present illustrates the opportunities and limits of the these categories of historical analysis to International Relations.   Our analysis seeks to answer three main questions: 1. To what extent is the use of the historical analogy of the CW a useful tool to give meaning to the current international reality and in particular tensions between Russia and the West?; 2. In what ways is a given interpretation of the end of the CW projected as an interpretative framework by Vladimir Putin's Russia to justify its foreign policy and particularly in relation to Ukraine?  3. Is the application of the concept of NCW relevant to the rivalry between China and the United States?   The article is structured in four parts: Section one sets out the theoretical and methodological foundations that frame the research. Section two discusses the application of the category of NCW or SCW to current relations between Russia and Western countries such as the US, and also NATO. Given the centrality of the historical account of the end of the CW in Putin's public discourse as a justification for Russia's current foreign policy, section three examines the contribution of academic historiography to the debates on the events of 1989-1991, and in particular to the question of the promises made to the USSR, and later to Russia, on the expansion of NATO, and its contribution to the framing of current international relations. Section four discusses the extent to which the concept of CW and its reformulation as NCW or SCW provides clarity in conceptualizing the relations between the United States and China. Finally, a section of conclusions illustrates the main contributions of the article, and proposes future lines of research and debate around the object of study.   The theoretical basis of the analysis is configured by the theory of framing of communicative processes (Goffman, 1974), applied to the use of historical analogies in international relations. We consider the use of historical analogies as a particular framing technique that attributes a relationship of similarity between events, characters or phenomena of the past and present to deduce patterns and generate networks of meanings relevant to the understanding of current phenomena. The use of historical analogies has been part of the tradition of the discipline of International Relations since its origins, and specifically the use of historical analogy has been considered as a privileged way in which history influences statecraft in foreign policy (Brands & Suri, 2015). Constructivist approaches have drawn attention to the way in which the enunciation of metaphors, discourses and analogies shapes international politics and constitutes the world experienced by virtue of the performative function of language (Debrix, 2003).   Throughout the article it is shown how the use of historical categories shapes internationalist analysis about the present, projecting interpretative frameworks that guide and at the same time constrain the understanding of international complexity. As far as the current relations between Russia and the West is concerned, we can identify since 2005 a meticulous construction by the Kremlin of a narrative perfectly adjusted to Russian geopolitical interests, consisting of the reconstruction of territorial power and global influence lost between 1989 and 1991. A mid and long-term framing project is a posteriori envisaged, strategically planned, and progressively and effectively put into practice.  This has the argument of a traditional Western aggressiveness towards Russia at its core, one which must be faced today, as in the times of the CW, to not succumb to it. By framing current Russian foreign policy in the logic and dynamics of the GF — which from a Soviet perspective had always been defensive — Putin sets the mental framework for his domestic stakeholders while justifying his foreign policy agenda that culminated — for the time being — with the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.   That historical analysis is essential to adjust distorted historical references at the service of foreign policy interests to the factual reality is evident in light of the controversy over the alleged Western promises to not expand NATO to the East. The historiographical debate has helped to clarify without a doubt as false one of the central premises of Putin's narrative to justify the use of force in Georgia and Ukraine since 2008, since no formal or informal agreements in this regard were explicitly or implicitly made either during the negotiating process for the reunification of Germany or in the years that followed.   In relation to a possible NCW between Beijing and Washington, the analysis highlights a number of analogies between the historical conflict and the current Sino-American relations. These include the fact that only these two can currently be considered superpowers, or that there is a potentially hot conflict around Taiwan, with a dynamic of deterrence and persuasion typical of the CW. In this context, there is a certain political rhetoric and orientation in the American academic sphere demanding, as George Kennan did in 1946, a determined containment of China at all levels. However, there are also a number of indicators that weaken the NCW as a valid interpretative category. The absence of military friction along with the possibility of achieving hegemony through economic factors make it less likely to fall into an arms race dynamic. At the same time, the very intense interconnection of the Chinese and American economies creates a de facto interdependence that, if separated through confrontation, would result in a great loss for both. Moreover, Chinese communism does not aspire to expand globally, like Soviet communism did,and its focus on economic growth should theoretically lead China to seek harmonious relations with the rest of the world. More than a NCW, the conceptualization of the West's relations with China requires more complex interpretive models that take into account that China is, depending on the level of analysis, both partner, competitor and rival.  

This article’s objective is to place the modern history of Iran in relation to nonviolent struggles within the optic of the role of women within them, and to link these episodes with the feminist struggle in Iran. It will cover the years that span from the 1870s until 2021 by placing at the centre of the discussion the role of women in civil resistance struggles. Of particular interest will be national governmental changes, from the monarchic era to a theocratic republic; the presence of Britain and Russia, and later the United States; the mass mobilizations during the end of the nineteenth century and the Iranian Revolution; and gender equality campaigns, as well as more individual acts of resistance through cyber feminist campaigns. This paper aims to show the role of women in these struggles as interconnected with the Iranian feminist movement both inside Iran and in the diaspora. Various episodes in Iranian modern history, such as the Tobacco Protests at the end of the 19th century, the Constitutional Revolution at the beginning of the 20th century and the Iranian revolution of 1979, as well as uprisings that preceded it between 1977 and 1979, have been studied within the civil resistance literature. All of these events showed that ordinary people had the power to topple authoritarian rule in their country through the use of nonviolent strategies. One of the most important references in nonviolent action studies, Gene Sharp, has suggested that 198 methods exist to efficiently overthrow dictatorial regimes around the world, and that these methods and techniques had to be collectively put into practice in order for them to be successful (Sharp, 1973, 2005). Various studies, mostly based on quantitative analysis and historical documentation, have demonstrated that nonviolent strategies have been in many instances much more successful than violence in achieving freedom from authoritarian rule (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011; Chenoweth, 2021). In the Iranian socio-political context, the three aforementioned civil resistance struggles managed to establish a constitution and the creation of a parliament at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the ousting of an autocratic leader in 1979. All of these episodes are considered to be examples of civil resistance techniques that have managed to topple the authoritarian regimes present at that time in Iran. All of these struggles included the nonviolent participation of Iranian women, even though that participation has not sufficiently been brought to light in the Iranian history scholarship. The Tobacco Movement and the Constitutional Revolution represent the origins of a feminist conscience in Iran, and of women’s engagement with gender politics (Mahdi, 2004). Policies relating to women’s health, education, work and public life in general were present in both Pahlavi monarchies. However, whilst attempts were made to democratise the image of women, as well as their status, the Pahlavi regime did not achieved gender equality in Iran due to the strengthening of the class divide and its intensification by the persistent presence of British and American interests in the country. With the installing of the Islamic regime in Iran in 1979, the advances in women’s rights that had been accomplished during the previous decades, thanks to the increased presence of women in public life, disappeared in the blink of an eye. The very many risks, nonetheless, have not prevented Iranian women from fighting for their rights through campaigns such as the One Million Signatures Campaign (1MSC) (2006-2009), or more recent internet gender campaigns such as My stealthy Freedom and White Wednesdays. Studies that have connected civil resistance struggles in Iran to women’s rights (see Beyerle, 2008; Davoudi Mohajer et al., 2009) have begun to pave the way for further developments and it is from this standpoint that the paper wants to make its contribution. The field of Resistance Studies where the subfield of civil resistance is located has been getting wider and deeper, incorporating different meanings and types of resistance acts, where collective as well as more individual stands have been taken into consideration. Poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist outlooks have expanded the subfield of civil resistance, and the Iranian case clearly shows that the civil resistance scholarship can be applied to situations that involve the toppling of authoritarian regimes, internet gender equality campaigns, and also to those perspectives that take into consideration the transnational field. By placing attention on the links between nonviolent action and the Iranian feminist movement this article also shows the continuities and discontinuities of the participation of women in the civil resistance struggles in Iran, which in turn have to do with the different historical circumstances. As the paper will show, one key aspect has to do with the role of Iranian feminists in the diaspora who have supported and sometimes created civil resistance movements for gender equality in Iran. Sharp took the role of third parties into consideration (1973) within civil resistance movements, but it was not until Andrew Rigby’s study on the Palestinian diaspora and civil resistance (2009) that actors such as diasporas have been placed under increasing interest as supporters of civil resistance movements in their countries of origin (Dudouet, 2015; Stephan and Chenoweth, 2021). Part 1 locates the arguments within a theoretical framework that links the subfield of nonviolent action with feminist perspectives from the fields of International Relations and Resistance Studies. Following this first section, the paper is divided into another five sections. Part 2 deals with the civil resistance struggles at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as well as the role of women in them and the feminist movement. Next, part 3 of the article centres itself on the Pahlavi Monarchy that preceded the Islamic Revolution by looking at the position of women in Iran as well as the Iranian feminist movement. Part 4 looks at the nonviolent orientation of the Iranian revolution and the role of women therein, while part 5 locates the discussion on civil resistance within a more recent period and the conjunction with the Iranian diaspora. The article ends with a section dedicated to concluding remarks where future research lines will be suggested.  

UNESCO's Open Science Recommendation, approved last November, proposes to promote a global consensus on its values and actions. The pillars of openness proposed by this project are: open scientific infrastructures, dialogue with different knowledge systems, as well as engagement with different social sectors, namely citizen and participatory science. The five main manifestations of open science are: open access to scientific publications, open access to research data, open educational resources, open software and hardware. However, in order to create an enabling policy environment for open science, the Recommendation calls for the promotion of responsible research evaluation practices that encourage quality science, recognising the diversity of results and stimulating the different missions of the university. Promoting a culture of open science is a complex task that requires integrated information systems to understand, promote and evaluate the universe of research outputs and activities. For this reason, one of the main concerns raised in this Recommendation is that, even with its good intentions, open science could widen the gap between technologically advanced countries and poorer countries with precarious digital infrastructure. Thus, the unilateral growth of open science platforms in dominant countries would not only increase inequalities in access to science, but also enable different forms of exaction of data or commercial use of the efforts made in the periphery. The dominant role played by English as interoperable code also increases the existing asymmetries, putting at risk multillingualism and bibliodiversity that are critical for the equitable advancement of science. The Open Science movement emerged from the scientific community and has spread rapidly throughout the different nations, demanding the opening of the doors of knowledge. Academics, publishers, librarians, students, officials and citizens are joining this call. In this work we analyze the progress in terms of open access in non-hegemonic countries, as well as its obstacles and asymmetries. In Latin America, progress has been made in collaborative infrastructures, digitization processes, repositories, editorial professionalization, national regulations and other forms of government support. But these advances contrast with a very incipient incidence of the incentives for open access publication and even less for open access to research data in the systems of categorization and promotion of researchers. The same occurs with project financing instruments, even in countries with a national open access law, where it is observed that the impact factor of publications continues to define successful projects and there are practically no evaluation criteria that weight open science. At tenure and categorization systems for researchers, there is still a predominance of global criteria of excellence and university rankings, which reveals a sort of alienation between government efforts at the service of non-commercial open access and the evaluation systems still anchored in the laws of the prestige industry created by the publishing oligopolies. This also explains that despite the regional development of indexing systems that guarantee the academic quality of the published production, Latin American journals, the vast majority of which are diamond access, still encounter many difficulties in gaining legitimacy in the academic community. The paper addresses the vital importance to advance in the integration of information systems and repositories in CRIS systems, delving on the particular relevance of the Norwegian model, to promote the shift towards a comprehensive evaluation. These services are the unique mean to includes all local scientific production, in all languages and formats, while rewarding open science practices. The pilot experiences of Brazil and Peru analyzed in this paper shows that compared to institutional CRIS, the national CRIS have a great starting complexity, but they foster a true integration of all the universities and organizations. And for those institutions that develop an institutional CRIS with software and interoperable links in the public domain, they will be able to integrate decisively to strengthen these national scientific information systems and will use its benefits for their own needs. The fact that the Latin American CRIS pilot projects are national and not institutional, as in Europe, is due to the way in which the databases and information systems are financed. Most of the universities that contribute to scientific and technological research in the region are public and participate in national information systems. Given their reliance on public funds, these institutions rarely have the resources to finance an institutional CRIS system, much less purchase it as a package from the large companies that offer these services. It also contributes in this direction that the CRIS pilots appear in the public domain, which will be a strength in the medium and long term. Open software such as dSPACE, used as the basis of the platform in Peru, for example, guarantees that scientific information contributes to fulfilling the promise of open science, but at the same time offers a fruitful path to repatriate data and fight against asymmetries in the circulation of knowledge produced. The paper addresses broadly the structural inequalities affecting low- and middle-income countries, pointing out the main asymmetries that condition open science pathways in the global South. The first part describes the global endowment of repositories, integrated scientific information systems and scientific journals. The second part focuses on the experience of Latin America, which has a collaborative infrastructure that has been developing since the 1950s, but still faces major challenges in making the transition from open access to open science. Finally, it discusses the critical role of evaluation systems in the region to produce a transformation of the magnitude of open science, without giving up sovereignty and social anchoring.

For some time, the theoretical debate in international relations has occupied an ambiguous place in the discipline. For some, the remarkable diversity of theoretical production expresses the dynamism of a field that has grown thanks to its capacity for dialogue with a wide range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, and even the exact sciences. Others, however, see this process as a symptom of the decline of the discipline, reflected in its fragmentation and inability to produce a more or less coherent (or consensual) set of research problems. We could also mention a current of opinion that sees the supposed exhaustion of International Relations as a process that we should not regret, since the evolution of the field would be irremediably associated with a colonial power project that produced unequal and discriminatory world orders. For the latter, the theories of International Relations offer few possibilities for the construction of a critique of world politics and, therefore, would not deserve significant intellectual investment. This view echoes the controversial debate about the 'end of IR theory' waged in the pages of the European Journal of International Relations in 2013 (Dunne, Hansen, and Wight 2013). This declaration of death seems premature, yet the current state of the debate may suggest a fund of truth for pessimistic assessments. Had the 'critical turn' project fallen victim to its own success? Has the drive towards greater theoretical pluralism produced a fragmentation that impedes the evolution of the discipline? Has the critique of the limits of international studies - in particular its supposed universality - compromised our ability to think of the international as a planetary political space? This diffuse dissatisfaction with international theoretical work has a very broad scope, reaching both Anglo-American and continental European academic cultures and the many other continents where research in International Relations is conducted today, testifying to the increasingly global breadth of the discipline. The paradox that stimulates the reflection developed here - proposed in this issue of Relaciones Internacionales journal - expresses, precisely, this tension between a pluralism, transdisciplinarity and diversification that are indispensable for the relevance and expansion of the area, and its survival as an academic discipline whose research paradigms and programmes give it coherence and legitimacy. The answers to the problem in question are, as we suggest, very varied, ranging from the colonisation of international studies by the humanities to the return to geopolitics, to mention only two of them. It would not be pertinent, in this context, to evaluate all the attempts to give direction to a drifting discipline. The aim of this article is more modest. It is to situate the subfield of international political sociology (IPS) in the process indicated above, that is, in the intellectual pluralization of the field in the last twenty years; as well as to indicate its contribution to the restructuring of the lineage of critical thinking in International Relations. To this end, we unfold the argument in two propositions: international political sociology emerges from the collective intellectual project known as the 'critical turn' in International Relations; and secondly, IPS seeks to articulate critical thinking at the borders of the international and the discipline, problematizing the ontological status of both. Based on these two points of departure, the article is organised in three steps. The first section discusses how IPS emerges as the expression of an intellectual lineage dedicated to rethinking the 'modern international' through a new topology; that is, through an alternative conception of the place of politics and the problematisation of its spatio-temporal assumptions. We will see how IPS proposes to imagine the international from the problematization of the practices of border production. The second section discusses some of the main concepts from which IPS rethinks the international or, in other words, how and where social and political relations are structured in what we may call transversal spaces. To this end, we analyse how networks, fields and assemblages contribute to the task of proposing a less restrictive topology of the international. Finally, in the third section we address how SPI conceives its research project from a processual and relational logic that privileges the production of the new, practices and flows in order to open spaces for a politics that affirms difference, divergence and the continuous transformation of what exists.

Review of: Domínguez de Olazábal, I. (2022). Palestina: Ocupación, colonización, segregación. Los Libros de la Catarata, 220 pp.

The article reviews the Brazilian academic contribution to the sub-discipline of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) over the last twenty years published in the main Brazilian and Anglo-Saxon journals. We argue that the Brazilian academic production in FPA should continue focusing on producing middle-range theories. We note that, more recently, as occurs in the global sub-discipline of FPA, the Brazilian academy has opted for medium-range theorization (as opposed to that linked to the great paradigms of International Relations), that is, focused on the elaboration of models aimed at well-defined empirical problems that can be more easily verified. Our review shows a harmony between the Brazilian sub-discipline of FPA and the Anglo-Saxon core. The Brazilian academic community very often uses FPA instruments rather than relying upon IR's great theoretical paradigms (Realism, Liberalism, Marxism). In the last two decades (more in the last one than in the previous one) the efforts to use and also, to a lesser extent, propose medium-range theories clearly framed FPA research in and on Brazil. In fact, even the previous production, not so committed to the development of theoretical models, had accumulated theorizing comparable to eclectic medium-range theorizing. This article briefly presents the typical middle-range theorization (which not a few authors in the area defend as the ideal one), then it exposes the factors that explain the remarkable growth of Brazilian production on foreign policy in the last two decades, and lastly, it points out the main trends in the local production in the sub-area. In addition to gauging the growth in the use of FPA models and concepts and verifying the preference for medium-range theorizing in Brazil, we identify the research areas that present a greater density: the use of models on actors and decision-making processes and those focused on the role of ideas (including norms and identities) in foreign policy. We also detect that the study of public opinion in foreign policy on the one hand and the research that connects the FPA to Public Policy Analysis on the other have good development potential. We point out some recent efforts by Brazilian scholars to build original models replicable in other contexts. The first is the set of articles published in 2017 in International Affairs around the concept of the "graduation dilemma" (Milani, Pinheiro and Lima, 2017; Milani, da Conceição and M'Bunde, 2017; Harig and Kenkel, 2017). The authors build the concept by taking into account (1) the scope of the international ambition of decision-makers, the material capacities of the country, and the permissiveness of the system; (2) the possible contradictions related to the expectations of the international and domestic public in relation to the country’s identity; (3) the uncertainty associated with unforeseen results and perceptions of third countries in relation to political decisions. We consider that the authors have constructed a typical middle-range theory, in which an empirical problem (the dilemma) guides the construction of a more general concept and analysis model. The second example is the article published in Latin American Politics and Society by Feliciano Guimarães and Maria Herminia Tavares de Almeida (2017), in which the authors seek to refine the discussions on the controversial concept of "middle power" by coining that of entrepreneurial powers, a more specific sub-concept referred to the performance of this category of countries in international crises. Like the previous example, the model has the potential to be replicated beyond the case of Brazil. Our third example is the article published in Foreign Policy Analysis (2022) resulting from the collaboration of three Brazilian researchers (Pedro Feliu Ribeiro, Dawisson Belem Lopes and Guilherme Casarões with the Argentine researcher based in the United Kingdom Luis Schenoni (Schenoni, Ribeiro, Belém Lopes and Casarões, 2022). Starting from the paradigmatic case of Brazil, the authors model the situation they call “overstretch”, described as one in which the costs of a foreign policy strategy far exceed the means available to implement it, and the eventual benefits of it. Thus, the recent use of middle-range theorizing in Brazil is, in our opinion, a positive trend, because it favors the replication of models in other regional environments beyond Latin America and the internationalization of national production. Our positive view of the Brazilian trend toward middle-range theorizing is based on three reasons. First, eclectic theorization focused on specific problems largely avoids the ideological biases of the great theoretical narratives of IR (which would anyhow be difficult for the North to accept coming from the South). Second, as the middle-range models are potentially replicable (which does not mean universal) in other regional environments beyond Latin America, the accumulation of knowledge is facilitated, especially in Global South contexts where research fragmentation frequently takes place. Third, middle-range theorizing allows taking advantage of concepts and arguments (on autonomy/dependence, relations with the US and other powers, among others) already present in traditional discussions (academic and pre-academic) on Brazilian foreign policy. In sum, our review of the local production allowed us to identify the main trends in its evolution in recent decades: a significant increase in analyzes that use concepts and models from the academic sub-discipline of FPA; preference, as in FPA, for middle-range theorizing as opposed to that based on the great paradigms of International Relations; greater concentration of research on models on actors and their decision-making process; respectable production on the role of ideas (including norms and identities) in foreign policy; incipient research, but with growth potential, on public opinion and research that connects FPA to public policy analysis. Those trends and the examples of indigenous middle-range theorizing with good potential for use in comparative studies allow us to glimpse a change in the international division of labor in the academic market and, specifically, the role of the Brazilian academy in that market. Many local scholars seem to have realized that, to become an international reference for high-quality research in FPA, they need to look beyond Brazil and Latin America.