International Relations and Politics

This book explores how the U.S. military branches have deployed gender and, in particular, ideas about masculinity to sell military service to potential recruits. Military service has strong historical ties to masculinity, but conscription ended during a period when masculinity was widely perceived to be in crisis and women’s roles were expanding. The central question the book asks is whether, in the era of the all-volunteer force, masculinity is the underlying basis of military recruiting appeals and if so, in what forms It also asks how women fit into the gendering of service. Based on an analysis of more than 300 print advertisements published between the early 1970s and 2007, as well as television commercials and recruiting Websites, the book argues that masculinity is still a foundation of the appeals, but each branch deploys various constructions of masculinity that serve its particular personnel needs and culture, with conventional martial masculinity being only one among them. While the Marines rely almost exclusively on a traditional, warrior form of masculinity, the Army, Navy, and Air Force draw on various strands of masculinity that are in circulation in the wider culture, including economic independence and breadwinner status, dominance and mastery through technology, and hybrid masculinity which combines egalitarianism and compassion with strength and power. The inclusion of a few token military women in recruiting advertisements has become routine, but the representations of service make it clear that men are the primary audience and combat their exclusive domain.

Since entering into force in July 2002, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has emerged as one of the most intriguing models of global governance. This book investigates the challenges facing the ICC, including the dynamics of politicized justice, US opposition, an evolving and flexible institutional design, the juridification of political evil, negative and positive global responsibility, the apparent conflict between peace and justice, and the cosmopolitanization of law. It argues that realpolitik has tested the ICC's capacity in a mostly positive manner, and that the ambivalence between realpolitik and justice constitutes a novel predicament for extending global governance. The arguments of each chapter are framed by an approach designed to assess the nuanced relationship between realpolitik and global justice. The approach — which interweaves four International Relations approaches, rationalism, constructivism, communicative action theory, and moral cosmopolitanism — is guided by the metaphor of the switch levers of train tracks, in which the Prosecutor and Judges serve as the pivotal agents switching the (crisscrossing) tracks of realpolitik and cosmopolitanism. With this visual aid, this book shows just how the ICC has become one of the most fascinating points of intersection between law, politics, and ethics.