Publicações Ciêntificas – IRI – Instituto de Relações Internacionais

Mediating Protection? The UN Community Liaison Assistants and the Politics of Translation

Victória Motta Lamare França’s dissertation, defended at IRI in 2023, under the supervision of Professor Maíra Siman, and co-supervised by Professor Roberto Yamato, won the Best Dissertation award at the 12th ABRI National Competition for University Dissertations and Theses in International Relations, “Professor Marcos Costa Lima Award”.

The dissertation entitled Mediating Protection? The UN Community Liaison Assistants and the Politics of Translation was published in English in 2024 by Palgrave, in the collection Global Political Sociology:

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The award-winning paper analyzes how the United Nations (UN) attempts to stabilize and justify an ambivalent meaning of protection and its socio-political roles in the Protection of Civilians (PoC) agenda. The research takes Community Liaison Assistants (CLAs) as an analytical prism to reflect on the instrumentalization of language and culture in UN peace operations.

From a post-structuralist and post-colonial approach, the research promotes dialogues with Translation and Interpretation Studies by exploring the political character of translation for International Relations while delving into an actor generally neglected in UN doctrine and Peace Operations Studies.

Internationalization as Practice: A Global South Perspective on the International Political Economy of Higher Education

How does a university become international? In this chapter, Associate Professor and Director of IRI/PUC-Rio Isabel Rocha de Siqueira and IRI/PUC-Rio PhD student Nycolas Candido discuss how the practice of institutes and departments impacts the concept of internationalization of higher education and its possible applications.

With a focus on the Global South, Candido and Siqueira analyze measures implemented at the IRI itself to learn about the international experience of its student body. Among the main conclusions, the chapter identifies that historical inequalities between the Global North and South are reinforced and reinvented by concrete modes of internationalization, which calls for a critical and multidimensional conceptualization of the term.

The chapter is part of the collection “Contemporary Approaches to Internationalization in Higher Education” which can be accessed at the link below:

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From binary to intersectional to imbricated approaches: gender in a decolonial and diasporic perspective

This article proposes a re-reading of the problem of gender, or as it has been put, more often than not, ‘the woman problem,’ that resists the reproduction of modern/colonial systems of governance and their political norms, standards, ideals and pacts. In turn, it seeks to open pathways to dialogue with, rather than import, conceptions of gender that respond to the terms through which modern/colonial societies have been forged on the continent of Abya Yala, drawing inspiration from decolonial and diasporic perspectives. To this end, the article maps some of the available channels of the gender debate in what has come to be known as the global South from an array of perspectives that highlight the ways in which the relations between categories of oppression and privilege (such as race, class, sexuality and gender) are reflected and positioned so as to grapple with the coloniality of knowledge, power and being. More specifically, it focuses on three ways of dealing with power dynamics in the context of Abya Yala that have influenced how we conceive and respond to questions of gender. Its primary objective is to investigate the politico-epistemic conditions that structure gender thinking in binary and intersectional ways, and, in turn, open space for imbricated approaches forged from within (post-)colonial histories that do not take as their starting point the importation of theoretical references from places otherwise situated within a global political economy of knowledge/power/being. More than a critique of theoretical standpoints from the global North, in and of themselves, which regardless were not thought to respond to our realities, here we analyse the terms through which gender and feminisms have been put up for debate. Without effectively decentring the Eurocentred references that preoccupy gender thinking in our respective disputes, we risk continued distraction from what is at stake when gender is put on the table: the (im)possibilities of living one’s full humanity on one’s own terms.

Article published in the journal Contexto Internacional, special issue Gender in the Global South.

Authors: Andréa Gill and Thula Pires

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Masculinities, Art and Peripheral Powers

What is the importance of discussing the concept of masculinities?

Over the last few decades, gender relations have been debated and deconstructed as a result of various feminist contributions. The theme of masculinities has become a crucial point of analysis and reflection: the (re)production of unequal gender norms and standards are, however, relational. In this sense, it is very important to talk about masculinities for feminist and gender studies themselves. After all, how to think about “women” without thinking about “men”, since these identities are relational and intertwined?

It is with this objective that we produced the booklet “Masculinities, Art and Peripheral Powers”. This document seeks to broaden the field of reflection on the subject from discussions that deal with the very concept of masculinity, deepening the understanding of markers of difference, such as what it means to “be a man”, of the processes of production of sexualities through sexual relations. socially imposed norms and standards and the role of art in the construction of other masculinities. Throughout the booklet, the various artistic initiatives that, together with the GlobalGRACE Brasil project team, seek to create new references for thinking about gender, masculinity and sexuality are presented. Thinking about the “I-Body”, and its intimate relationship with the territories, especially with the peripheral territory, suggests possible paths for a more equitable and healthy life in society for all people.

This document contains records of the works of artists who integrated the Brazilian actions of GlobalGRACE: Residência Masculinidades NoBela, Residência Passinho Carioca and ELÃ – Construindo Masculinidades Outros.

The booklet is available for free download in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

GlobalGRACE is a project funded by the Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF/RCUK) that mobilizes artistic interventions to research and enable gender approaches that contribute to well-being internationally and that includes universities and NGOs from Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines , South Africa and the United Kingdom. In Brazil, it has been developed by the Institute of International Relations at PUC-Rio and the NGOs Promundo, UNIperiferias and Observatório de Favelas, in partnership with CES/Universidade de Coimbra. See more about GlobalGRACE.

Post-conflict Colombia and the global circulation of military expertise

Professor Manuela Trindade Viana has just published the book “Post-conflict Colombia and the global circulation of military expertise” by Palgrave Macmillan. The work is part of the series “Critical Security Studies in the Global South”, edited by Profs. Pinar Bilgin (Bilkent University) and Monica Herz (IRI/PUC-Rio).

In the book, Manuela proposes that we think about the “post-conflict” not in terms of the presence/absence of violence, but of changes in the use of violence. Taking Colombia and its international circulation as a “successful case” as an entry point, the analysis unfolds in two parts. The first explores the conditions of possibility of this “success story” and the web of criteria that legitimize it, as well as the silencing mechanisms that allow Colombia to circulate internationally as a formula to be replicated in other parts of the world. The second focuses on the historicization of the mechanisms by which the new rules are transmitted among the professionals of the public force, especially the transformations of military schools and training centers in Colombia from the times of “war” to the times of “peace”. Manuela argues that the key to repositioning the country in the hemispheric and global circuit of military knowledge is a discursive articulation around the military professional who moves from the “soldier-citizen” to the “soldier-expert”.

The book’s preface is open access, as is the index – both available.

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40 Years of Critical Theory on International Relations

By exploring metatheoretical and methodological debates, ethical questions, discussions on the geography of knowledge as well as empirical analyses starting form innovative theoretical frameworks, the articles in this dossier contribute, we hope, even in a small way to the relevance of critical theory in IR and, even more, to the imperative of a critical way of thinking the IR realm.

The new edition, entitled “40 Years Of Critical Theory on International Relations” can now be accessed and downloaded in full, with free access.

Contexto Internacional, Volume: 44, Issue: 1, Published: 2022

40 Years of Critical Theory on International Relations Ramos, Leonardo; Worth, Owen; Vivares, Ernesto

Text: EN / PDF: EN

Building Bridges between Dependency Theory and Neo-Gramscian Critical Theory: The Agency-Structure Relation as a Starting Point Mello, Rafael Alexandre