This chapter explores feminist International Relations (IR) theory and its application to the Middle East, demonstrating how gendered power dynamics shape the region's international politics. Feminist IR challenges traditional IR theories by foregrounding gender as a fundamental category of analysis, revealing how hierarchical constructions of masculinity and femininity underpin state behaviour, security policies, and other global processes. The chapter examines key strands of feminist IR, including liberal, critical, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer feminist theories, emphasising their respective contributions to understanding the significance of gender, as well as race and sexuality, in global politics. Through a case study of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, still ongoing at the time of writing despite an announced ceasefire in October 2025, the chapter highlights the gendered dimensions of settler colonialism, militarism, and genocide. It interrogates how gendered and racialised discourses normalise violence and explores the war’s devastating impacts on women, social reproduction, and human security. The chapter critiques the complicity of colonial feminism in perpetuating oppression and underscores Palestinian women’s resistance. The chapter concludes by highlighting the role of feminist IR in offering pathways towards more just and inclusive international relations.

In recent years, scholars of International Relations and the Middle East have increasingly argued that the region’s enduring colonial legacies render postcolonial theory not merely relevant but essential. This chapter contends that the relationship also works in the opposite direction: the Middle East has been central to the emergence and evolution of postcolonial thought. It traces the disciplinary and historical foundations of postcolonialism, outlines its key claims and limitations, and concludes with an analysis of Syria as an illustrative case of postcolonial inquiry in the Middle Eastern context.

This chapter traces how the issue of mass emigration in the nineteenth century served as a catalyst for Germany’s colonial movement. Advocates of overseas colonies argued that emigrants should be redirected into German settlements abroad, where they could preserve their national identity rather than swell the ranks of rival nations. Settler colonialism was thus imagined not only as a way to relieve social pressures at home but also as a means of extending the nation’s boundaries beyond its ancestral territories. This programme of imperial nationalism, however, clashed with Bismarck’s Europe-centred priorities, which undermined the prospect of timely implementation. While the colonial movement pressed for the acquisition of an overseas empire, the Reich leadership focused instead on consolidating Germany’s national empire, created under Prussian leadership during an earlier phase of empire building.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, assertions of Indigenous sovereignty in the late twentieth century propelled a nation-wide reform known as ‘biculturalism’. This chapter contributes to the task of historicizing ‘biculturalism’ by examining its emergence in anticolonial and anti-racist activism of the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the interplay between ideas of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ in activist discourse and theories of settler colonialism. Opposing statist assimilation, a radicalised, younger generation of activists found common cause in political Blackness. Yet, without the means to implement anti-colonial revolution, Māori activist intellectuals pursued another idea: that Pākehā (white settlers) who could not be forced out, might instead become ‘bicultural’ in the way that Māori already had to be in a white majority country. However, this activist biculturalism was predicated in the recognition of Māori, not settler, sovereignty as the basis for authority. The chapter highlights the contradictions and equivocations in emergent threads of a discourse of biculturalism, staying close to the distinctive dilemmas of anticolonial Indigenous politics in majority settler states.

Race has been one of the most consequential ideas in modern history, and the aims of this book are to better understand its intellectual genesis and proliferation. The introduction sets out the key themes of the volume and serves as a prelude to the geographical and temporal spread of the following chapters. Although the idea of ‘race’ emerged in European vernaculars in the late middle ages, we trace lines of continuity in its understanding and usage from the eighteenth century to the present. By juxtaposing discrete case studies of how race was conceptualised in different places over this period we hope to shed light on how the intellectual category of race that we have inherited was constructed, while showing connections between ideas and experience.

This chapter takes Mahmoud Darwish’s 1992 poem “The Penultimate Speech of the ‘Red Indian’ to the White Man” as a starting point to reflect on three canonical texts in modern Arabic poetics: the Egyptian critic Louis ʿAwad’s introduction to his 1947 volume Blutuland (Plutoland); the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika’s introduction to her 1949 volume Shazaya wa-Ramad (Shrapnel and Ashes); and the Syrian-Lebanese poet and critic Adonis’s 1971 volume Muqaddima li-l-Shiʿr al-ʿArabi (Introduction to Arabic Poetry). Reading these three texts alongside one another, this chapter argues that in them a privilege of a listening subject, defined by interiorizing self-reflection, historical self-understanding, and aesthetic subjectivity, is generalized in language. The global terms for linguistic life are transmuted through these critical writings, while in Darwish a wholly other sense of language is given, without a desire for the terms privileged in the three texts in Arabic poetics this chapter also outlines.

This chapter explores the rise of US imperial militarism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the settler colonial American West and overseas colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. Beyond sketching a general account of this period, the chapter argues that US military colonization was both a set of distinct encounters and a larger project connected by shared repertoires of violence; transfers of expert knowledge; and ideologies of racialized dominance. It also understands US imperial militarism in infrastructural terms. Military actors and organizations served not only as the sharp edge of colonization, but also initial – and sometimes primary – agents of colonial state-building. Longer term, American imperialism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era created the conditions of possibility, both ideologically and materially, for global elaborations of US empire that persist today.

Americans have struggled to reconcile capitalism and war. Over three centuries of history, they have grappled with fundamental tensions between capitalism and security. The combination of war and capitalism often created disruptions and deep inequities that ordinary Americans and their leaders decided must be moderated for the sake of a more successful and politically sustainable war effort. For much of the nation’s history, capitalism was understood to be an insufficient provider of security; the U.S. military economy was semi-socialized, in both peacetime and wartime. But as the record of recent decades has highlighted, Americans have not experienced an ever-higher ratcheting of regulation and socialism, with each new war, over the long run. Rather, the historical record suggests that many postwar demobilizations served to reinforce capitalism. For the nation’s entire history, struggles over the economics of war and national security have been important parts of U.S. political development. This will continue to be the case in the current century, as Americans battle over economic policy and fight new wars, domestically and abroad.

The European invasions of the Americas generated an extended period of world-historic significance. Through individual and societal interactions and accompanying exchanges—friendly, exploitative, and warlike—imperial collisions wrought profound societal, cultural, economic, and political changes. War influenced tactics, strategies, weaponry, gender norms and relations, racial interactions, and settlement patterns. It affected the development of colonial, Indigenous, and enslaved peoples. The more that war demanded of societies, the more they in turn demanded of war and politics. Recentering the focus from traditional military history to the broader and more complex panorama of war and society places at center stage the observation that armies and navies fight battles, but societies fight wars. War’s imprint on European and Indigenous societies presaged future patterns of contact, conflict, warfare, and societal development. The broad patterns established during this moment of imperial collisions portended that which followed, from the era of the American Revolution through the United States’ most recent conflicts, and forward into the country’s unknowable future.

Liberalism and interest convergence influence all aspects of our socio-political world, and, in turn, social work practice, including social welfare policy, practice, and pedagogy. This chapter first defines the critical race tenets critique of liberalism and interest convergence, then examines how the entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism are mutually constructed with racism and intersectional oppression. A global system of white supremacy created a racial hierarchy through notions of inferiority in order to maintain the dominant power structure, such that when white interests do not align with the interests of non-whites, it is nearly impossible for systems change to occur. Turning specifically to social work, the author outlines how social welfare policies and belief systems allow racism to flourish despite ideas of equality, freedom, and rights, and uncovers how social work conceptions of social welfare and social justice have aligned with the interests of the dominant group, rather than liberation and communal support, by supporting incrementalist reform rather than transformative change. Finally, the chapter envisions social worker roles that dismantle liberal notions of justice and create practices that support expansive views of merit, communal values over individual success, and equitable outcomes over equal rights.

This chapter takes a postcolonial-ecocritical perspective on a particular mode of empire referred to as ecological-agrarian imperialism. It examines aesthetic articulations of colonial agrarianism with a special view to James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage trilogy and The Crater, which are read in the context of Indian Removal and the Anti-Rent conflict in the Hudson River area. It argues that Cooper registers a remarkable critical awareness of the historical origins of the sociocultural conjunctions of soil depletion, food scarcity, biodiversity reduction, and colonial capitalism. Cooper’s works can help us think through the interrelated ecological challenges of our own time such as climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, and to reflect on utopian possibilities and roads not taken when the social and economic foundations of the United States were laid out.

The story of American literature and empire is vast and complex, its boundaries as hard to draw and as continuously disputed as the historical borders of the US nation-state itself. Historians of US empire tend to periodize their field into three broad eras of imperial formation: (1) continental expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century; (2) the emergence of overseas empire with the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first acquired formal territories abroad; and (3) and the rise to globalism after World War II, when US military policing in the interests of global capitalism created an empire of military bases around the world while rebranding US imperialism and neocolonialism as embodiments of democracy and freedom, in part through a series of “endless” wars spanning the Cold War through the post-9/11 War on Terror. But for literary scholars, this broad historical periodization of empire loses coherence in the face of literature’s persistent ability to reimagine history, to make counterfactual claims, to invent new worlds, to change the experience of time, and to speculate and counter-speculate about the grounds of reality.