Exploring the relationship between women’s empowerment and the internet in China: potentials and constraints

This thesis reports on an exploratory study of the relationship between the Internet and women’s empowerment in China. The theoretical framework of the study combines feminist theorisations of power – the core concept of empowerment – with insights from sociological perspectives on power and gender, as well as collective action theory. This allows for the conceptualisation of women’s empowerment as a dynamic process that is shaped by a set of communicative practices. Focusing on female Chinese bloggers and women’s groups of different organisational types, this study aims to explore the respective ways in which these two types of women actors use the Internet with a view to examining whether, and the extent to which it enables them to generate a sense of empowerment. The empirical data mainly derives from interviews with female bloggers and with staff members from different women’s groups, as well as from a features analysis and social network analysis of the sampled blogs and official websites of studied groups. Overall, the findings suggest that the opportunities offered by the Internet for women’s empowerment through awareness-raising, social interactions, and the organising of collective action, are limited. For female bloggers, their activities do not translate the new communicative practices afforded by the Internet into concrete action to bring about changes in their everyday life. On the contrary, blogs become an alternative platform to discipline their behaviours and to reinforce patriarchal gendered norms. Moreover, the research finds that the promise of empowerment is further undermined by the pervasive commercialisation of the Internet and state control. For women’s groups, contextual factors prevent them from fully realising the potential of the Internet for increasing their organisational visibility, promoting public awareness about gender issues, building a sense of the collective, campaigning, or networking. The major barriers in these processes are state control, a lack of resources, online censorship, and at times, competition from commercial sites. In this respect, the Internet does not play a significant role in forming a collective to challenge existing unjust power relations.

The R2P is Dead, Long Live the R2P: The Successful Separation of Military Intervention from the Responsibility to Protect’

Roland Paris is one of those authors whose work is always enjoyable, as he exploits so well the gap between the policy world and academia. His best work reveals a high level of policy insight often before many of his colleagues in academia have caught up. His secret is an ability to analyse the shifting understandings at policy level and to then articulate them in academic terms as if critiquing current policies. This enables his work to be both popular with policy-makers and with their erstwhile critics in academia. His 2004 monograph, At War’s End, captured the shift from peacekeeping intervention and ‘early exit’ to the extended remits of international statebuilding (‘Institutionalization before Liberalization’). It provided a wonderful rationalisation of policy shifts that had already occurred in the late 1990s, starting with the extension of international mandates in Bosnia, from 1996 onwards, and further developed with the Kosovo protectorate in 1999. However, this shift was skilfully reposed as a critique of existing policy-understandings.