ABSTRACT
Snapshots of violence-all have political implications; all attest to the ubiquitous human capacity for cruelty. How we think and speak about these events matters. Do we think or speak of them as hate crimes? Discrimination, prejudice, or bigotry? Ethnic conflict? Genocide? What distinguishes these terms and acts from one another? Language structures our thinking, our cognitive life. Naming-this is ethnic conflict but that is a hate crime, this is war but that is genocide-reveals how we think or instructs us as to how we ought to (or think we ought to) think about something, about an event, a policy, a behavior, a person. It is not the differences (what they are, whether they are) between men and women, or between male and female that matter, feminists tell us, it is the social meaning associated with gendered difference that matters, because it has social and political consequences.10 Indeed, “ethnic” is not a category of meaning that constructs itself, any more than is “gender.” We “identify” ourselves in an ethnic sense, we create and sustain the idea of a self identified with and by its membership in or association with the idea of a group believed to share common characteristics regarded by its members as self-evidence of sameness and solidarity, only because we agree that the term “ethnic” has a certain meaning. Social, political, economic, and legal power is then distributed and socially structured of the basis on the social meaning associated with gendered (and other kinds of) difference. Over the past two decades, language and meaning have become central concerns to a growing number of scholars in and around international relations. They are identified with a variety of perspectives-feminist, postmodern, postcolonial, poststructural, constructivist, and critical-maybe more. This development is sometimes referred to as the “rhetorical” or “linguistic” turn in International Relations (IR).
