Debate Reflections

After the debate this past week, I still find myself skeptical that we will see the international environment fundamentally change, though I do not think it is impossible. Both sides brought up a lot of great points and each side focused on different aspects, which brought about an interesting discussion. As we talked about in this week’s live session, I think we focused a lot of the structure of the sovereign and the role of international organizations played in the international environment. I believe both groups operated under the assumption that a fundamental change in the international environment would look like a change in sovereign territory. This idea was brought about both in Professor Jackson’s lecture and other people have noted this is their blog posts. I think it is important to address the underlying assumptions of each group’s arguments before discussing other points that were relevant to the discussion.

I would like to focus on some topics that I do not think were talked about in as much detail in the debate as they could have been – obviously neither side had enough time to fully talk about every important aspect involved in this debate. Specifically, how gender and technology play a role in a changing environment. These two variables were discussed in Jackson’s lecture about contributing to change but I do not think either group put too much weight in them. The pro group did bring up the example of the baboons and how a change in their environment was reflected with the role of female and male baboons, but I do not think this example was meant to discuss how gender roles can affect change. They also discussed human rights, which gender roles do fall under that category, however, I think that was a topic that could have been expanded upon. The human rights example used in the debate focused on marriage equality in particular.

It would have been interesting to bring up how gender roles have changed throughout the world, but also how they have stagnated. This could both be an example of how the sociality of the international environment changes as well as given examples to what has stayed the same. Things such as the rate of females in leadership roles of government across nations as well as governments that still openly discriminate against a person’s gender would point the change and things that haven’t changed in the environment. These subtler aspects sound to me like an Onuf constructivist argument that rules change (gender rules and norms that evolve and ones that don’t) and how those changes affect the sovereign states. Would those changes demonstrate that there can be a fundamental change in the international environment?

Along those same lines, how does technology facilitate change in sovereign states that are autonomous vs. not? What about hard v. soft boundaries? Are these even necessary to discuss based on everything else we have talked about? 

Reflecting on these points may bring about other interesting discussion points from this debate. Again, I still find myself somewhere in the middle, but thinking through other aspects may help me find a firmer stance on this debate.