Be The Change

Pre-Class Blog  Remaking the International Environment

Working hard to try to make all of these ideas fit together, I was struck by something that Jackson said early in the soliloquy about women still being constrained from certain kind of jobs like Catholic priest. It seems that women have experienced an expanding state of Agency as the factors that previously limited women have fallen into the dustbin of history.  Is it too much to say that the Structure that framed gender roles was recast as an issue of Agency?

The roles of women in post-tribal societies across much of the globe appear to be remarkably similar throughout much of human history.  However, the stable and limited roles that women could expect to play no matter what the society changed relatively quickly once secular norms were adopted.  Even within the religious world we can see the role of women expanding (if not among Catholics than among Protestant denominations).

So this switch from Structure to Agency made me think of Constructivism again.  Isn't religion a construct in which we apply meaning?  "People make society, and society makes people."(Onuf 4) 

While it seemed clear that women would always be limited by their "Nature" we now see almost any societal imposed limit as anachronistic.  The Catholic Church may continue to deny women the priesthood but it might need to redefine it reasons for doing so if it wants to remain relevant.

But what about International Relations?  Can we better understand the motives of another person or culture/state if we better understand their Constructions?  "Even when we do not know what a rule says, we can often guess what it is about by looking at people's practices" (Onuf 4)

I happen to think that peace is possible in the Arab/Palestinian and Israeli conflict, both sides have agency.  Both could choose to do something different to try to create a stable peace.  However, if the Construction of the Catholic Church has made it impossible for the clergy to act to include women, can we expect the Jews or Muslims (this is not all Jews or Muslims) who see land as sacred as really able to compromise territory?  Are their motivations that difficult to understand?  The more challenging question is how to move people from seeing the world as a consequence of Structure and instead get them to understand that they can act to be the change they want to see?