Reflection Week 6

Enloe's article was interesting to read and discuss about, because what she was advocating was basically fundamentally modifying the international relations as we know it. The study, as we take it currently, can be summarized as the relationship between nation states and how, why, and what affects these relationships. The central aspect in trying to answer these questions is who holds the power and how it is used, and this is exactly what Enloe is arguing against; she advocates studying the fundamentals of these power; the people and what they do to flip the unequal power distribution.

One fact that I wanted to make clear was the statement I made during the class on Thursday when I tried to bring in economics because I feel like I just stumbled through and nobody understood it. What I meant to say was this: in economics, there is traditional and behavioral economics, where traditional one focuses on the big picture and tries to provide generalizations, while behavioral economics study the behavior of individuals and thus focuses on the more specific small pictures that make up the big picture. Same applies to the issue at hand here; traditional international studies is like traditional economics; it focuses on the general, big picture, and it inevitably bears the cost of not analyzing the small pictures that shifts around. Enloe's argument is more like behavioral economics in that it delves into domestic arena and how it affects the power at the top and how this affects the global arena.

One interesting thing that was brought up during the discussion was the question, isn't horizontal spread of power possible? In other words, is there a need to be the "powerful" and "marginalized"? To this question, I would say yes, unless you envision a perfect, ideal communism. Don't take me wrong here. I am not saying communism as we saw in history was good, but the ideals behind it, is basically horizontal spread of power. What I am saying is that if there is someone or some institution with power, then that power must come at a cost of someone else's capacity to wield that power. This ultimately means that if there is a powerful, then there is a corresponding powerless; if there is a strong, then there is a weak. Thus, unless we can achieve the idealistic communism with a snap of our fingers, then there will be a power struggle and there will always be the marginalized.