John Hoffman (1)

This book does a good job of engaging with the existing feminist IR literature. His argument was cogent, but ultimately I felt that it relied to heavily on his somewhat unconventional definitions of terms (e.g. if force is central to the definition of the state, of course it follows that the state is inherently violent...but if you define the state according to the full range of its characteristics, that puts force in a different context and opens the possibility of reconstructing the state without the element of force the same way he does with the notions of government and sovereignty). Furthermore, in order to make a distinction between the state and government, he reconstructs the definition of consent in a way that may be sensible at the macro-organizational level yet is highly problematic at the interpersonal level. His justification of coercive sexual relationships mars the book as a whole because it undermines his credibility as an anti-patriarchal thinker and suggests that it is not always desirable to collapse individual and collective sovereignty into the same definition as he does. It still gets three stars because despite these problems, he did take an interesting approach to the topic and provide food for thought.… (mehr)