Kimberly Hutchings
Biographic Data
| ID | 253907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kimberly Hutchings |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kimberly |
| FAMILY NAME | Hutchings |
| SIGNATURE | HUTCHINGS K |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3027-7337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 70 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 350 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Introduction: The International between History and Theory
Resisting the canon: Critique, Abolition and Doing Epistemic Justice in Reading the History of International Thought
The paper proceeds in two main sections. First, it sketches out the nature of critique as a de-canonising practice within IR theory and how critique has itself become the target of resistance in recent strands of feminist and decolonial inspired abolitionist thinking. Second, it explores the politics of challenging the canon drawing on the example of the WHIT project, which I suggest is better captured using the language of epistemic justice than…
Forever failing: Feminist practices of peace in war/violence
This paper explores different ways in which the nexus between peace, utopia and failure can be understood, drawing on examples of feminist peace activism. The paper addresses ways of thinking about pacifist political action in contexts in which peace is defined as the absence or alternate of war/violence and in contexts which deny a binary distinction between peace and war/violence. It argues that if we are to recognise peace in the present, then…
Recovering Women's International Thought: Past and Present Futures
Reply essay
Care and the Pluriverse: A Review, by Maggie Fitzgerald
Notes from the Editors: A Bigger Pie
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Introduction to the Special Issue: Women and the History of International Thought
This Special Issue takes forward themes and arguments from previous work on historical women's international thought, but it also points in a range of new research directions for this thriving interdisciplinary field. Notably, through its silences and aporia, as well as through its substantive content, the Special Issue as a whole speaks to the need to genuinely globalize our understanding of women's international thought, its international and t…
Doing epistemic justice in International Relations: Women and the History of International Thought
This article examines the meaning and implications of doing epistemic justice in the study of International Relations through the prism of the recovery of the international thought of Fannie Fern Andrews and Amy Ashwood Garvey and in dialogue with feminist epistemology. It argues that doing epistemic justice involves going beyond restorative justice for excluded voices in which the historical record is set straight, inclusionary justice in which …
Women's International Thought: Towards a New Canon
Technology, Progress, and Environment
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the ‘end of international theory’
Throughout the 20 th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20 th century, are almost…
Empire and insurgency: The politics of truth in Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology
I argue that the dangers inherent in Wendt's project are not that it radically undermines the project of social science as it currently exists, in positivist or interpretivist forms, but rather that it reinforces the will to knowledge that has powered the development of the social and human sciences since the late 19 th century. The ultimate significance of Wendt's argument is not ontological or epistemic but political
On canons and question marks: The work of women’s international thought
Cause and evidence: On the erasure of women’s international thought and IR’s ‘failure as an intellectual project’
Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution
Canons of intellectual “greats” anchor the history and scope of academic disciplines. Within international relations (IR), such a canon emerged in the mid-twentieth century and is almost entirely male. Why are women thinkers absent from IR’s canon? We show that it is not due to a lack of international thought, or that this thought fell outside established IR theories. Rather it is due to the gendered and racialized selection and reception of work…
How and Why to Do Just War Theory
The politics-violence frontier
This article analyses how early twenty-first century political activists in Italy construct the frontier between politics and violence. It puts these constructions into the context of more conventionally theoretical accounts of violence and politics. Analysis of internet discourse published by left/anarchist bloggers and group members focusses on how activists criticize the conventional view that electoral politics is non-violent, and endorse the…
The feminist politics of naming violence
The naming of violence in feminist political campaigns and in the context of feminist theory has rhetorical and political effects. Feminist contention about the scope and meaning of 'Violence against Women' (VAW) and 'Sex and Gender-Based Violence' (SGBV), and about the concepts of gender and of violence itself, are fundamentally debates about the politics of feminist contestation, and the goals, strategies and tactics of feminist organisation, c…
Rectification and alienation
This commentary examines Lu’s powerful account of justice and reconciliation in conditions of structural injustice. It argues that Lu takes forward decolonial critiques of mainstream models of justice and reconciliation in ways that fundamentally transform our discussions of global justice. It also points to some of the problems and difficulties that she runs into in her argument
Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse
This essay examines the idea of the pluriverse as one response to recent calls for the decolonization of international and global ethics. It argues that taking pluriversality seriously challenges prevailing understandings of global ethics as the acquisition and application of moral expertise. Instead of aiming to know the meaning of global justice and then apply it to particular contexts, a pluriversal ethics addresses the question of how to cult…
Anarchist ambivalence: Politics and violence in the thought of Bakunin, Tolstoy and Kropotkin
There appear to be striking contradictions between different strands of anarchist thought with respect to violence – anarchism can justify it, or condemn it, can be associated with both violent action and pacifism. The anarchist thinkers studied here saw themselves as facing up to the realities of violence in politics – the violence of state power, and the destructiveness of instrumental uses of physical power as a revolutionary political weapon.…
From just war theory to ethico-political pacifism
This paper accepts Zehfuss’s argument for the inseparability of ethics from politics, and her critique of an ethics of war that assumes the application of the right just war principles will deliver a type of warfare that is ethical (in the sense of being morally correct). Building on Zehfuss’s argument, I will suggest that if we wish to pursue the ethics of war as an ethico-political practice, then we need to work out how to embed ethico-politica…
Time and the Study of World Politics
The articles in this volume, and the many contributions to the Millennium Conference, ‘The Politics of Time in International Relations’ from which these articles were drawn, speak to the ongoing interest in issues of time and temporality in International Relations (IR) and associated disciplines. They also speak to the very broad range of ways in which time and temporality are seen to operate in international politics and the ways in which it (in…
War and moral stupidity
This article uses the example of Wittgenstein’s decision to go to war in 1914 to frame a contrast between two different ways of thinking about moral stupidity and moral intelligence in relation to war, those of Jeff McMahan and Jane Addams. The article clarifies how pathways for thinking about the morality of war are blocked and enabled not only by different accounts of justice but also by different understandings of war. It is argued that if we …
Pacifism is dirty: Towards an Ethico-Political Defence
This article argues that pacifism is best understood and defended not as a noble but untenable ideal, nor as a watered down version of just war theory, nor even as a strategic commitment to the use of non-violent means, but rather as an ethico-political practice committed to a world without war and militarism
On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon
Making Sense of Masculinity and War
This article examines modes of theorizing about war in two contemporary literatures: on war and gender and on the changing nature of war. Both these literatures make a connection between masculinity and war. The article argues that, on examination, the link between masculinity and war does not depend on the substantive meanings of either masculinity or war, or on a causal or constitutive relation between the two; rather, masculinity is linked to …
Dialogue between Whom? The Role of the West/ Non-West Distinction in Promoting Global Dialogue in IR
There is a politics to the West/non-West distinction that is bound up with predominant models for dialogue in IR; rethinking these models of dialogue implies a new politics, and therefore also, I will suggest, a move away from the West/non-West binary as a way of characterising the participants in dialogic exchange oriented towards the expansive transformation of disciplinary imaginaries
Decolonizing Global Ethics: Thinking with the Pluriverse
This essay examines the idea of the pluriverse as one response to recent calls for the decolonization of international and global ethics. It argues that taking pluriversality seriously challenges prevailing understandings of global ethics as the acquisition and application of moral expertise. Instead of aiming to know the meaning of global justice and then apply it to particular contexts, a pluriversal ethics addresses the question of how to cult…
Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution
Canons of intellectual “greats” anchor the history and scope of academic disciplines. Within international relations (IR), such a canon emerged in the mid-twentieth century and is almost entirely male. Why are women thinkers absent from IR’s canon? We show that it is not due to a lack of international thought, or that this thought fell outside established IR theories. Rather it is due to the gendered and racialized selection and reception of work…
What is Orientation in Thinking? On the Question of Time and Timeliness in Cosmopolitical Thought
Happy Anniversary! Time and critique in International Relations theory
All critical theories lay claim to some kind of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role of critical theory in the present and future in international politics. This article argues that if critical international theory is to have a future that lives up to its revolutionary ambition, then it needs to listen more carefully to the voices of postcolonial and feminist critics …
Virtuous Violence and the Politics of Statecraft in Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Weber
This article seeks to problematise the dominant understandings of the relationship between politics and violence in political theory. Liberal political theory identifies politics with the pacified arena of the modern state; although violence may sometimes be an instrument for the pursuit of political goals, politics is conceptualised as the ongoing non-violent negotiation of competing rights and interests, and the overall aim of liberalism is to …
Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence
In contrast to liberal, Christian and other pacifist ethics and to just war theory, a range of 20th-century thinkers sought to normalize the role of violence in politics. This article examines the justificatory strategies of Weber, Sorel, Schmitt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. They each engage in justificatory argument, deploying arguments for violence from instrumentality, from necessity and from virtue. All of these arguments raise problem…
Pacifism is dirty: Towards an Ethico-Political Defence
This article argues that pacifism is best understood and defended not as a noble but untenable ideal, nor as a watered down version of just war theory, nor even as a strategic commitment to the use of non-violent means, but rather as an ethico-political practice committed to a world without war and militarism
Feminist Ethics and Political Violence
Feminism and the critique of violence: Negotiating Feminist Political Agency
The acute sensitivity of feminism to violence, in its many different forms and contexts, makes it a particularly interesting case for the examination of the relationship between politics and violence in theory and practice. Our purpose in this paper is not to adjudicate the normative question of whether feminism implies a commitment to pacifism or to the use of non-violence. Rather, we are interested in examining how the relation between feminist…
Time and the Study of World Politics
The articles in this volume, and the many contributions to the Millennium Conference, ‘The Politics of Time in International Relations’ from which these articles were drawn, speak to the ongoing interest in issues of time and temporality in International Relations (IR) and associated disciplines. They also speak to the very broad range of ways in which time and temporality are seen to operate in international politics and the ways in which it (in…
Remnants and Revenants: Politics and Violence in the Work of Agamben and Derrida
Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben both consider the question of whether there can be politics without violence, offering contrasting responses. In the case of Agamben, the remnant (that which remains) is disruptive and destabilising of present institutions; in the case of Derrida the revenant, the spectre, promises a future that is open. This reading of the two theories suggests that Derrida's response to the question of politics and violence i…
And 1998: Contrast and Continuity in Feminist International Relations
This article considers contrasts and continuities in feminist IR scholarship over the past twenty years. It traces various shifts in the substantive and methodological concerns of feminist IR in the decade between 1988 and 1998. It concludes with some reflections on the extent to which the agenda for feminist IR scholars in 2008 remains continuous with the last twenty years and the extent to which it has changed or is likely to change
Doing epistemic justice in International Relations: Women and the History of International Thought
This article examines the meaning and implications of doing epistemic justice in the study of International Relations through the prism of the recovery of the international thought of Fannie Fern Andrews and Amy Ashwood Garvey and in dialogue with feminist epistemology. It argues that doing epistemic justice involves going beyond restorative justice for excluded voices in which the historical record is set straight, inclusionary justice in which …
The feminist politics of naming violence
The naming of violence in feminist political campaigns and in the context of feminist theory has rhetorical and political effects. Feminist contention about the scope and meaning of 'Violence against Women' (VAW) and 'Sex and Gender-Based Violence' (SGBV), and about the concepts of gender and of violence itself, are fundamentally debates about the politics of feminist contestation, and the goals, strategies and tactics of feminist organisation, c…
Anarchist ambivalence: Politics and violence in the thought of Bakunin, Tolstoy and Kropotkin
There appear to be striking contradictions between different strands of anarchist thought with respect to violence – anarchism can justify it, or condemn it, can be associated with both violent action and pacifism. The anarchist thinkers studied here saw themselves as facing up to the realities of violence in politics – the violence of state power, and the destructiveness of instrumental uses of physical power as a revolutionary political weapon.…
Avowing violence: Foucault and Derrida on politics, discourse and meaning
This article enquires into the understanding of violence, and the place of violence in the understanding of politics, in the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. These two engaged in a dispute about the place of violence in their respective philosophical projects. The trajectories of their respective subsequent bodies of thought about power, politics and justice, and the degrees of affirmation or condemnation of the violent nature of real…
Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence
In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed …
Towards a feminist international ethics
The title of this article brings together two terms, the latter, ‘international ethics’, is instantly recognizable as referring to a distinct aspect of the academic study of international relations with its own canonic tradition and debates. The former term, ‘feminist’, is much less familiar, and for many normative theorists in international relations refers to a political movement and set of ideological positions whose relevance to international…
Moral Deliberation and Political Judgement: Reflections on Benhabib's Interactive Universalism
Refusant de choisir entre les deux dangers de la theorie ethique contemporaine que sont l'universalisme et le contextualisme selon Z. Bauman, S. Benhabib developpe une synthese entre l'ethique communicative de J. Habermas et la conception du jugement politique d'H. Arendt, au sein d'une ethique de l'universalisme interactif. Examinant les exigences de la generalisation et du pluralisme dans l'ethique du discours, l'A. montre que la synthese propo…
Introduction to the Special Issue: Women and the History of International Thought
This Special Issue takes forward themes and arguments from previous work on historical women's international thought, but it also points in a range of new research directions for this thriving interdisciplinary field. Notably, through its silences and aporia, as well as through its substantive content, the Special Issue as a whole speaks to the need to genuinely globalize our understanding of women's international thought, its international and t…
Empire and insurgency: The politics of truth in Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology
I argue that the dangers inherent in Wendt's project are not that it radically undermines the project of social science as it currently exists, in positivist or interpretivist forms, but rather that it reinforces the will to knowledge that has powered the development of the social and human sciences since the late 19 th century. The ultimate significance of Wendt's argument is not ontological or epistemic but political
War and moral stupidity
This article uses the example of Wittgenstein’s decision to go to war in 1914 to frame a contrast between two different ways of thinking about moral stupidity and moral intelligence in relation to war, those of Jeff McMahan and Jane Addams. The article clarifies how pathways for thinking about the morality of war are blocked and enabled not only by different accounts of justice but also by different understandings of war. It is argued that if we …
The possibility of judgement: Moralizing and theorizing in international relations
International relations is one of the areas of social science which most clearly brings home the tensions involved in the dual relation of inquirer to object of inquiry, as both scientific observer and moral judge, particularly in times of war. As social scientists, we are required to understand and explain our object, as moral beings, we are required to judge or evaluate it. Received wisdom in international relations premises the possibility of …
Moral Deliberation and Political Judgement: Reflections on Benhabib's Interactive Universalism
Refusant de choisir entre les deux dangers de la theorie ethique contemporaine que sont l'universalisme et le contextualisme selon Z. Bauman, S. Benhabib developpe une synthese entre l'ethique communicative de J. Habermas et la conception du jugement politique d'H. Arendt, au sein d'une ethique de l'universalisme interactif. Examinant les exigences de la generalisation et du pluralisme dans l'ethique du discours, l'A. montre que la synthese propo…
Modelling democracy
Political Theory and Cosmopolitan Citizenship
This book is an example of the kind of theoretical work identified by Heater in the above quotation. It seeks to explore the implications of conceptualising citizenship as something which is not necessarily tied to a bounded political community. The reasons why this has become a focus for political theoretical argument in the recent past are varied. Many of them are referred to in Heater’s own consideration of contemporary cosmopolitan ideas in h…
Cosmopolitan Citizenship
An original discussion and analysis of the meaning and scope of citizenship. The book examines the concept of citizenship in the light of normative ethical and political arguments as to the possible c
Critical Theory and World Politics
This book represents the first attempt to bring together the leading critical theorists of world politics to discuss both the promise and the pitfalls of their work. The authors range broadly across the terrain of world politics, engaging with both theory and emancipatory practice. Critiques by two scholars from other IR traditions are also included. The result is a seminal statement of the critical theory approach to understanding world politics…
New Thinking in International Relations Theory
The question of self‐determination and its implications for normative international theory
Towards a feminist international ethics
The title of this article brings together two terms, the latter, ‘international ethics’, is instantly recognizable as referring to a distinct aspect of the academic study of international relations with its own canonic tradition and debates. The former term, ‘feminist’, is much less familiar, and for many normative theorists in international relations refers to a political movement and set of ideological positions whose relevance to international…
Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics
World Politics and the Question of Progress
From Morality to Politics and Back Again: Feminist International Ethics and the Civil-Society Argument
Feminist ethics is a branch of moral philosophy. Its concerns range across meta-ethics (the question of how feminist moral principles and values may be grounded or legitimated), moral theory (the articulation of substantive feminist moral principles and values), and applied ethics (the application of feminist moral principles and values to specific areas of practice such as health, education, reproduction, war, and so forth). (1) Yet although it …
Making conflict constructive
Speaking and hearing' Habermasian discourse ethics, feminism and IR
It is impossible not to encounter Habermas as an important interlocutor in the fields of critical theory, feminist theory and international relations theory across which I work. He is the outstanding critical theorist of his generation, in the tradition of critique which was carried through the Frankfurt School and traces itself back to Kant, Hegel and Marx. And for feminists and international relations theorists, he represents one of the directi…
Hegel: New Directions
Feminist Ethics and Political Violence
Men in Political Theory
Happy Anniversary! Time and critique in International Relations theory
All critical theories lay claim to some kind of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role of critical theory in the present and future in international politics. This article argues that if critical international theory is to have a future that lives up to its revolutionary ambition, then it needs to listen more carefully to the voices of postcolonial and feminist critics …
Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence
Simone de Beauvoir and the Ambiguous Ethics of Political Violence
In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed …
Happy Anniversary! Time and critique in International Relations theory
All critical theories lay claim to some kind of account not only of the present of international politics and its relation to possible futures, but also of the role of critical theory in the present and future in international politics. This article argues that if critical international theory is to have a future that lives up to its revolutionary ambition, then it needs to listen more carefully to the voices of postcolonial and feminist critics …
Argument and Rhetoric in the Justification of Political Violence
In contrast to liberal, Christian and other pacifist ethics and to just war theory, a range of 20th-century thinkers sought to normalize the role of violence in politics. This article examines the justificatory strategies of Weber, Sorel, Schmitt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. They each engage in justificatory argument, deploying arguments for violence from instrumentality, from necessity and from virtue. All of these arguments raise problem…
Whose History? Whose Justice
Time and World Politics: Thinking the Present
This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global ‘present’ are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, which fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. In so doing, the book puts into question the ways in which social scientists and normative t…
And 1998: Contrast and Continuity in Feminist International Relations
This article considers contrasts and continuities in feminist IR scholarship over the past twenty years. It traces various shifts in the substantive and methodological concerns of feminist IR in the decade between 1988 and 1998. It concludes with some reflections on the extent to which the agenda for feminist IR scholars in 2008 remains continuous with the last twenty years and the extent to which it has changed or is likely to change
Sociology (58 works) · Political science (56 works) · Law (52 works) · Philosophy (48 works) · Epistemology (44 works) · Politics (43 works) · Law (38 works) · Philosophy (36 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (17 works)