Julia Gallagher
Biographic Data
| ID | 3796898 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julia Gallagher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julia |
| FAMILY NAME | Gallagher |
| SIGNATURE | GALLAGHER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0479-4808 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1962 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The uses and limits of architecture as soft power in Africa’s international relations
Buildings are powerful expressions of political power that describe and project ideas about hierarchy, state authority, solidarity and modernity. On the African continent, some important buildings have been gifted to governments as an outcome of their international relations. However, these ‘gifts’ have subtle undertones of soft power. This special section contains four articles that describe four different cases – schools in Ghana, Obafemi Awolo…
Speaking proper French’
Theories of international recognition posit that states’ identities are formed through dialogical relations with other states. However, they often overlook the ways in which weaker states’ struggles, constrained within the languages of the powerful, produce misrecognition and inhibit identity formation. This is the experience of many post-colonial francophone African states whose search for international recognition has been inhibited by their sp…
Architecture and Politics in Africa
Invented Modernisms
This article examines recent attempts to create specifically African forms of modernist political architecture that draw on ‘traditional’ or ‘pre‐colonial’ aesthetic forms and ideas. Taking examples of three prestigious structures – the presidential palace in Ghana, the parliament in Malawi and the Northern Cape regional parliament in South Africa – the article shows how vernacular ideas have been incorporated into state‐of‐the‐art political arch…
Making sense of the state
Drawing on the example of South Africa, the article explores how the state, an incoherent and opaque set of ideas, discourses and relationships, is made into a ‘thing’ by its citizens. It describes how citizens encounter the state physically when they see, hear, touch and smell its buildings and how these different sensory engagements generate thoughts and impressions that help them make and unmake the state-thing. The argument is made first theo…
The histories buildings tell
In this article, we attempt to understand the persistence of the 'great tradition' in describing what the state means to Ethiopians. We do this by examining stories about history, told by and about Ethiopia's architecture. Within these stories we find two ideas in apparent tension. One is an attachment to state history as exceptional, unified and ordained by God. This is told through architectural continuities reaching back to the pre-Christian A…
State aesthetics and state meanings
There are striking differences between state buildings in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and in how citizens living in each country’s capital city think and talk about them. In this article, we explore the degree to which these buildings illustrate very different ideas of statehood in West Africa. We draw on art theories from West Africa to argue that architectural aesthetics rest on juxtapositions of beauty and the sublime and we suggest ways these hel…
Misrecognition in the making of a state
This article draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel’s theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana’s early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on th…
Negotiating corruption
Laura Routley’s book provides an intimate account of how Nigerian NGOs negotiate the complex and often competing demands of international donors and local political constraints to carry out their objectives of serving their constituencies. The title describes the ways in which they fudge international legal-rational norms within local ‘economies of affection’ to produce ‘grey practices’ that tease and trouble received understandings of corruption…
Zimbabwe's consolidation as a gatekeeper state
Cooper’s gatekeeper state theory provides a powerful way to read recent Zimbabwean politics, but the country also challenges his assumptions about both the elite-led nature of gatekeeping, and deterministic assumptions about its direct emergence from colonialism. Drawing on ordinary Zimbabweans’ perspectives, I make two arguments. First, I show how consolidation of Zimbabwe’s ‘gate’ has been shaped by events and contingent reactions to them since…
Why Mugabe Won
The 2013 general elections in Zimbabwe were widely expected to mark a shift in the nation's political system, and a greater role for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. However, the results, surprisingly, were overwhelmingly in favour of long-time President Robert Mugabe, who swept the presidential, parliamentary and senatorial polls under relatively credible and peaceful conditions. In th…
Zimbabwe's International Relations
Zimbabwe is a state that has undergone significant ruptures in its domestic and international politics in recent years. This book explores how Zimbabwean citizens have, under difficult circumstances, reconstructed ideas of their state by imagining the wider world. Unlike other work on international relations, which tends to focus on the state level, this book is based on the accounts of ordinary people. Drawing on interviews with more than two hu…
Teaching Africa and international studies
Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies (IS), the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency; however, they are limited b…
Creating a state
This article contributes to recent debates about mutual recognition between states, and, more broadly, to discussions of the role of emotion in International Relations. It challenges ‘moral claims’ made in some of the literature that interstate recognition leads to a progressive erosion of difference or a pooling of identity, and underlying assumptions that recognition constitutes a stage in the development of states that have already established…
Images of Africa
Images of Africa
This title challenges the widely-held idea that Africans are powerless in the creation of self-image. It explores the ways in which image creation is a process of negotiation entered into by a wide range of actors within and beyond the continent.
Interviews as Catastrophic Encounters
Journal Article Interviews as Catastrophic Encounters: An Object Relations Methodology for IR Research Get access Julia Gallagher Julia Gallagher Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Perspectives, Volume 17, Issue 4, November 2016, Pages 445–461, https://doi.org/10.1111/insp.12099 Published: 02 February 2016
The battle for Zimbabwe in 2013
On the face of it, the triumph of Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) in the 2013 elections came as a shock, not least to opposition MDC activists. However, after a period of introspection, many have begun to construct a coherent and wide-ranging account of the result which explores opposition shortcomings, and the revived relationship between the electorate and Mugabe's ZANU(PF). This article, based on interviews with political activists conducted three …
Forum
In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key e…
Chopping the world into bits
This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue a…
Ruthless player or development partner? Britain's ambiguous reaction to China in Africa
British reactions to China's increasing engagement with Africa in recent years have been manifested in particularly negative and reductive ways tending to depict China's presence in Africa as destructive and self-serving, in contrast to Britain's more enlightened, supportive approach. However, more recently official discourse has begun to stress the shared outlook between British and Chinese objectives, emphasising Chinese moves towards a more co…
Can Melanie Klein Help Us Understand Morality in IR
This article explores the question of why states attempt to ‘do good’ or behave morally beyond their own borders. It draws on the conceptual model developed by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her work on moral development. Klein suggested that children develop ways of dealing with moral ambiguity and guilt by projecting idealised forms of good and bad into the wider world beyond the family. There, they are separable from each other in ways tha…
Healing The Scar? Idealizing Britain in Africa, 1997-2007
This article examines the British government's commitment to Africa during Tony Blair's time as Prime Minister. Drawing on interviews with politicians from across the political spectrum and with officials involved in Africa policy, it shows how British work and relationships in Africa are described in thin and highly idealized ways, depicting a project seemingly able to transcend ordinary politics. The article suggests that this idealization of A…
The partition of Africa
Since the nineteenth century began, the Europeans had been strengthening their hold over those parts of the world selected during the era of mercantilism. Australasia, India, South-east Asia, above all the Americas—they were either temperate regions peopled with white immigrants or tropical countries already under white rule. Step by step the mode of white expansion had altered: liberalism and industrial growth shifted the emphasis away from colo…
Healing The Scar? Idealizing Britain in Africa, 1997-2007
This article examines the British government's commitment to Africa during Tony Blair's time as Prime Minister. Drawing on interviews with politicians from across the political spectrum and with officials involved in Africa policy, it shows how British work and relationships in Africa are described in thin and highly idealized ways, depicting a project seemingly able to transcend ordinary politics. The article suggests that this idealization of A…
The battle for Zimbabwe in 2013
On the face of it, the triumph of Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) in the 2013 elections came as a shock, not least to opposition MDC activists. However, after a period of introspection, many have begun to construct a coherent and wide-ranging account of the result which explores opposition shortcomings, and the revived relationship between the electorate and Mugabe's ZANU(PF). This article, based on interviews with political activists conducted three …
Misrecognition in the making of a state
This article draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel’s theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana’s early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on th…
Teaching Africa and international studies
Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies (IS), the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency; however, they are limited b…
Chopping the world into bits
This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue a…
State aesthetics and state meanings
There are striking differences between state buildings in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and in how citizens living in each country’s capital city think and talk about them. In this article, we explore the degree to which these buildings illustrate very different ideas of statehood in West Africa. We draw on art theories from West Africa to argue that architectural aesthetics rest on juxtapositions of beauty and the sublime and we suggest ways these hel…
Can Melanie Klein Help Us Understand Morality in IR
This article explores the question of why states attempt to ‘do good’ or behave morally beyond their own borders. It draws on the conceptual model developed by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her work on moral development. Klein suggested that children develop ways of dealing with moral ambiguity and guilt by projecting idealised forms of good and bad into the wider world beyond the family. There, they are separable from each other in ways tha…
Interviews as Catastrophic Encounters
Journal Article Interviews as Catastrophic Encounters: An Object Relations Methodology for IR Research Get access Julia Gallagher Julia Gallagher Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Perspectives, Volume 17, Issue 4, November 2016, Pages 445–461, https://doi.org/10.1111/insp.12099 Published: 02 February 2016
Speaking proper French’
Theories of international recognition posit that states’ identities are formed through dialogical relations with other states. However, they often overlook the ways in which weaker states’ struggles, constrained within the languages of the powerful, produce misrecognition and inhibit identity formation. This is the experience of many post-colonial francophone African states whose search for international recognition has been inhibited by their sp…
Zimbabwe's consolidation as a gatekeeper state
Cooper’s gatekeeper state theory provides a powerful way to read recent Zimbabwean politics, but the country also challenges his assumptions about both the elite-led nature of gatekeeping, and deterministic assumptions about its direct emergence from colonialism. Drawing on ordinary Zimbabweans’ perspectives, I make two arguments. First, I show how consolidation of Zimbabwe’s ‘gate’ has been shaped by events and contingent reactions to them since…
Creating a state
This article contributes to recent debates about mutual recognition between states, and, more broadly, to discussions of the role of emotion in International Relations. It challenges ‘moral claims’ made in some of the literature that interstate recognition leads to a progressive erosion of difference or a pooling of identity, and underlying assumptions that recognition constitutes a stage in the development of states that have already established…
Making sense of the state
Drawing on the example of South Africa, the article explores how the state, an incoherent and opaque set of ideas, discourses and relationships, is made into a ‘thing’ by its citizens. It describes how citizens encounter the state physically when they see, hear, touch and smell its buildings and how these different sensory engagements generate thoughts and impressions that help them make and unmake the state-thing. The argument is made first theo…
The histories buildings tell
In this article, we attempt to understand the persistence of the 'great tradition' in describing what the state means to Ethiopians. We do this by examining stories about history, told by and about Ethiopia's architecture. Within these stories we find two ideas in apparent tension. One is an attachment to state history as exceptional, unified and ordained by God. This is told through architectural continuities reaching back to the pre-Christian A…
Forum
In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key e…
Ruthless player or development partner? Britain's ambiguous reaction to China in Africa
British reactions to China's increasing engagement with Africa in recent years have been manifested in particularly negative and reductive ways tending to depict China's presence in Africa as destructive and self-serving, in contrast to Britain's more enlightened, supportive approach. However, more recently official discourse has begun to stress the shared outlook between British and Chinese objectives, emphasising Chinese moves towards a more co…
The partition of Africa
Since the nineteenth century began, the Europeans had been strengthening their hold over those parts of the world selected during the era of mercantilism. Australasia, India, South-east Asia, above all the Americas—they were either temperate regions peopled with white immigrants or tropical countries already under white rule. Step by step the mode of white expansion had altered: liberalism and industrial growth shifted the emphasis away from colo…
Can Melanie Klein Help Us Understand Morality in IR
This article explores the question of why states attempt to ‘do good’ or behave morally beyond their own borders. It draws on the conceptual model developed by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her work on moral development. Klein suggested that children develop ways of dealing with moral ambiguity and guilt by projecting idealised forms of good and bad into the wider world beyond the family. There, they are separable from each other in ways tha…
Healing The Scar? Idealizing Britain in Africa, 1997-2007
This article examines the British government's commitment to Africa during Tony Blair's time as Prime Minister. Drawing on interviews with politicians from across the political spectrum and with officials involved in Africa policy, it shows how British work and relationships in Africa are described in thin and highly idealized ways, depicting a project seemingly able to transcend ordinary politics. The article suggests that this idealization of A…
Ruthless player or development partner? Britain's ambiguous reaction to China in Africa
British reactions to China's increasing engagement with Africa in recent years have been manifested in particularly negative and reductive ways tending to depict China's presence in Africa as destructive and self-serving, in contrast to Britain's more enlightened, supportive approach. However, more recently official discourse has begun to stress the shared outlook between British and Chinese objectives, emphasising Chinese moves towards a more co…
Forum
In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key e…
Chopping the world into bits
This article explores norms as idealizations, in an attempt to grasp their significance as projects for international organizations. We can think about norms as ‘standards of proper behaviour’. In this sense they are somehow natural, things to be taken for granted, noticed only really when they are absent. We can also think about norms as ‘understandings about what is good and appropriate’. In this sense, norms embody a stronger sense of virtue a…
Images of Africa
Images of Africa
This title challenges the widely-held idea that Africans are powerless in the creation of self-image. It explores the ways in which image creation is a process of negotiation entered into by a wide range of actors within and beyond the continent.
Interviews as Catastrophic Encounters
Journal Article Interviews as Catastrophic Encounters: An Object Relations Methodology for IR Research Get access Julia Gallagher Julia Gallagher Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Perspectives, Volume 17, Issue 4, November 2016, Pages 445–461, https://doi.org/10.1111/insp.12099 Published: 02 February 2016
The battle for Zimbabwe in 2013
On the face of it, the triumph of Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) in the 2013 elections came as a shock, not least to opposition MDC activists. However, after a period of introspection, many have begun to construct a coherent and wide-ranging account of the result which explores opposition shortcomings, and the revived relationship between the electorate and Mugabe's ZANU(PF). This article, based on interviews with political activists conducted three …
Teaching Africa and international studies
Africa has often been defined and represented by outsiders. In International Studies (IS), the continent is frequently viewed as peripheral and uninteresting. This is clearly a problem, and an increasingly apparent one as the number of courses on Africa and IS grow, both in Africa and beyond. Many academics who run these courses are keen to challenge the continent’s traditional marginalisation and perceived dependency; however, they are limited b…
Creating a state
This article contributes to recent debates about mutual recognition between states, and, more broadly, to discussions of the role of emotion in International Relations. It challenges ‘moral claims’ made in some of the literature that interstate recognition leads to a progressive erosion of difference or a pooling of identity, and underlying assumptions that recognition constitutes a stage in the development of states that have already established…
Why Mugabe Won
The 2013 general elections in Zimbabwe were widely expected to mark a shift in the nation's political system, and a greater role for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. However, the results, surprisingly, were overwhelmingly in favour of long-time President Robert Mugabe, who swept the presidential, parliamentary and senatorial polls under relatively credible and peaceful conditions. In th…
Zimbabwe's International Relations
Zimbabwe is a state that has undergone significant ruptures in its domestic and international politics in recent years. This book explores how Zimbabwean citizens have, under difficult circumstances, reconstructed ideas of their state by imagining the wider world. Unlike other work on international relations, which tends to focus on the state level, this book is based on the accounts of ordinary people. Drawing on interviews with more than two hu…
Misrecognition in the making of a state
This article draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel’s theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana’s early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on th…
Negotiating corruption
Laura Routley’s book provides an intimate account of how Nigerian NGOs negotiate the complex and often competing demands of international donors and local political constraints to carry out their objectives of serving their constituencies. The title describes the ways in which they fudge international legal-rational norms within local ‘economies of affection’ to produce ‘grey practices’ that tease and trouble received understandings of corruption…
Zimbabwe's consolidation as a gatekeeper state
Cooper’s gatekeeper state theory provides a powerful way to read recent Zimbabwean politics, but the country also challenges his assumptions about both the elite-led nature of gatekeeping, and deterministic assumptions about its direct emergence from colonialism. Drawing on ordinary Zimbabweans’ perspectives, I make two arguments. First, I show how consolidation of Zimbabwe’s ‘gate’ has been shaped by events and contingent reactions to them since…
State aesthetics and state meanings
There are striking differences between state buildings in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and in how citizens living in each country’s capital city think and talk about them. In this article, we explore the degree to which these buildings illustrate very different ideas of statehood in West Africa. We draw on art theories from West Africa to argue that architectural aesthetics rest on juxtapositions of beauty and the sublime and we suggest ways these hel…
Architecture and Politics in Africa
Invented Modernisms
This article examines recent attempts to create specifically African forms of modernist political architecture that draw on ‘traditional’ or ‘pre‐colonial’ aesthetic forms and ideas. Taking examples of three prestigious structures – the presidential palace in Ghana, the parliament in Malawi and the Northern Cape regional parliament in South Africa – the article shows how vernacular ideas have been incorporated into state‐of‐the‐art political arch…
Making sense of the state
Drawing on the example of South Africa, the article explores how the state, an incoherent and opaque set of ideas, discourses and relationships, is made into a ‘thing’ by its citizens. It describes how citizens encounter the state physically when they see, hear, touch and smell its buildings and how these different sensory engagements generate thoughts and impressions that help them make and unmake the state-thing. The argument is made first theo…
The histories buildings tell
In this article, we attempt to understand the persistence of the 'great tradition' in describing what the state means to Ethiopians. We do this by examining stories about history, told by and about Ethiopia's architecture. Within these stories we find two ideas in apparent tension. One is an attachment to state history as exceptional, unified and ordained by God. This is told through architectural continuities reaching back to the pre-Christian A…
Speaking proper French’
Theories of international recognition posit that states’ identities are formed through dialogical relations with other states. However, they often overlook the ways in which weaker states’ struggles, constrained within the languages of the powerful, produce misrecognition and inhibit identity formation. This is the experience of many post-colonial francophone African states whose search for international recognition has been inhibited by their sp…
The uses and limits of architecture as soft power in Africa’s international relations
Buildings are powerful expressions of political power that describe and project ideas about hierarchy, state authority, solidarity and modernity. On the African continent, some important buildings have been gifted to governments as an outcome of their international relations. However, these ‘gifts’ have subtle undertones of soft power. This special section contains four articles that describe four different cases – schools in Ghana, Obafemi Awolo…
Sociology (20 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (17 works) · African history and culture studies (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (6 works) · Art (6 works)