Despite the fact that conventional International Relations theory has generally dismissed or trivialised the role of gender identity in international politics, gender is present in the structuring of the small, day to-day administration of institutions that are instrumental in the international, and also of the interstate system structure as a whole. A critical feminist perspective in IR can provide an analysis of what gender is and how it is ideological, how our understanding of gender guides military policy (and how military policy in turn reproduces gender), and how the international system structure, the nation, and war are all gendered.

The term “civilisation” conveys both a descriptive/pluralistic concept, where a variety of supracultural units co-exist across the globe, and a normative/unitary concept in the sense of ‘being civilised’, as opposed to being uncivilised or barbaric. There is also the idea of a civilising mission, a belief in the need to propagate one’s own civilisational values and systems to other peoples as if it were a virtuous deed.

The descriptive, pluralistic conception of civilisation is the attempt of many late modern scholars to imagine the citied Afro-Eurasian landmass as composed of distinct historical worlds that can be separately understood (Hodgson, 1993, p.9). Each civilisation was understood by some of these scholars to have an essence or special character that could be unlocked through philology, the pursuit of analysing and comparing the civilisation’s languages and its religious and literary tradition (Lockman, 2009, p.68). The literary tradition could include “Great Books” such as the Bible or Roman and Greek classics for Western or European Civilisation, or the Qur’an for Islamic Civilisation, or the Confucian canon for Chinese Civilisation. The essentialist perspective meant that scholars, such as the orientalist Ernest Renan, could make sweeping statements that reduced populations spread over vast geographic regions and time periods into monolithic units with rigid essences (ibid., p.78). Marshall Hodgson, an American Historian writing on global history suggests that, while supranational societies are important as a framework to understand history, these categories overlap and are situated in continuums of technology or urban/rural relation patterns that do not recognise reified monoliths or insuperable boundaries demarcating various “Civilisations” (1993, p.12).

This essay will argue that there are large differences between the social relations of wars fought before and after the end of the cold war era, which are termed “old wars” and “new wars” respectively. The changing character of organised violence is reflected in the shifting aims of actors from ideologically-driven to identity-driven, the different social organisation of actors and how they finance themselves, who the new targets of violence are, and whether the actors use these acts of violence to ultimately compel their opponent to their will.

In Empires in World History, historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper begin to describe the empire through its contrast with the modern concept of the nation-state (2010, p.8). While the latter aims to represent a single, homogenous group of people proclaiming their commonality, the empire is a political unit that incorporates many peoples while maintaining the distinction and hierarchy between them (ibid.). These distinctions and hierarchies were often not natural, but intentionally worked in order to separate the colonised and coloniser populations (ibid., p.12). This creation of the “we/they” and “self/other” distinctions would resultantly justify empire-building, as the created state would utilise the resources of its possessions among other areas or people to serve a core area or people. Political scientist David B. Abernethy uses this relationship, one between a metropole that has the position of dominance, and a colony that is subordinate, as the defining feature of an empire (2000, p.19).

With reference to the French Revolution

French disciples of the Dublin-born British political thinker, Edmund Burke, were the first to coin the word “conservative” in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Hamilton, 2020). It originally referred to those ideas which Burke had espoused in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and was also associated with general anti-revolutionary sentiment throughout Europe in the 19th century. However, today, the word has taken a much broader meaning that has come to refer to a myriad of political ideologies, many of them which lack the essence of conservatism, such as Thatcherism or neoliberalism, monarchism and even radically theocratic ideas of the Iranian Revolution. While elements of conservatism can be identified within these doctrines and creeds, they are not representative of what the term conservative ought to describe, which cannot be an ideology itself but is rather a disposition which tends to oppose it yet can also lend itself to an ideology if there are common, traditional values.