"SUBVERSIVE STRATEGIES" OR SUBVERTING STRATEGY: TOWARD A FEMINIST PEDAGOGY FOR PEACE

Despite the many merits of [Beverly Neufeld]'s project,(f.6) her conclusion resists, rather than offers, opportunities for reconceptualizing peace and war and reconciling their attendant "disciplines" of inquiry. As Neufeld sees it, the future of both fields lies with one of the three emergent approaches to IR: critical theory, feminism and postmodernism. While the last approach does provide a relevant reconstruction of political space, its dependence on deconstruction renders its politics difficult to identify and, in the author's view, rejects political philosophy.(f.7) Nor does feminism fare too well in Neufeld's analysis. While it holds more potential than postmodernism, the characteristics of feminism, which are most applicable to the projects of peace research and IR are precisely those of critical theory. "Indeed," Neufeld writes, "critical theory is not as reluctant to explicitly prescribe as postmodernism, and is more unified as an international theory than feminism."(f.8) [Anne Sisson Runyan] and [V. Spike Peterson] examine a vast amount of work within feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory and feminist postmodernism, in order to determine their "strategic implications" for IR's subfields of development, international political economy and peace studies; theories of the state and state formation; and the key organizing concepts of sovereignty, power and security, which arise from the realist state system. Although space and time does not allow a comprehensive review of Runyan and Peterson's comprehensive review, their conclusions warrant consideration. In their opinion, feminist postmodernism (via deconstruction), holds the most promise for understanding and transforming the metatheoretical foundations of positivist and realist discourse, inasmuch as it deconstructs discipline-defining boundaries and exposes "the essentialized dualism of male over female as fundamental to the metaphysics presupposed in Western philosophy, generally, and in its political philosophy, specifically."(f.39) Going beyond metaphysics and its naturalizing claims requires, therefore, historicizing metaphysics. It means examining the Athenian texts, as well as contexts which establish "the political 'givens' of the Western tradition."(f.41) In so doing, "we discover the mutuality of Western statemaking. We discover that the instrumentalism of Western metaphysics is inextricable from the accumulation dynamic, militarism, and legitimation of new authority relations