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This collection of essays seeks to theorize the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic in international relations (IR). The contributions are driven by questions such as: How can theorizing help us understand these unsettled times? What kind of crisis is this? What shapes its politics? What remains the same and what has been unsettled or unsettling? In addressing such questions, each of the participants considers what we may already know about the pandemic as well as what might be ignored or missed. Collectively, the forum pushes at the interdisciplinary boundaries of IR theorizing itself and, in so doing, the participants hope to engender meaningful understandings of a world in crisis and encourage expansive ways of thinking about the times that lie beyond.

Two decades after the “war on terror” was first waged, there is little conceptual clarity about what it means to win a war. Indeed, despite the burgeoning literature on endless war and victory, there is no substantive engagement with how these themes intersect when thinking ethically about the question of war and what passes for peace. This forum seeks to spark a conversation to address this gap. Bringing together theorists and ethicists working on the themes of war and peace, we ask: What might we render visible and redress by thinking critically of the politics of victory in an era of endless war? Further, to the extent that just-war theory has long offered a grammar for the ethics of war, how does it help or hinder this quest?

Objective Parents routinely access young children’s medical records, but medical societies strongly recommend confidential care during adolescence, and most medical centers restrict parental records access during the teen years. We sought to assess public opinion about adolescent medical privacy. Materials and Methods The Cornell National Social Survey (CNSS) is an annual nationwide public opinion survey. We added questions about a) whether parents should be able to see their 16-year-old child’s medical record, and b) whether teens would avoid discussing sensitive issues (sex, alcohol) with doctors if parents could see the record. Hypothesizing that highlighting the rationale for adolescent privacy would change opinions, we conducted an experiment by randomizing question order. Results Most respondents (83.0%) believed that an adolescent would be less likely to discuss sensitive issues with doctors with parental medical record access; responses did not differ by question order (P = .29). Most also believed that parents should have access to teens’ records, but support for parental access fell from 77% to 69% among those asked the teen withholding question first (P = .01). Conclusions Although medical societies recommend confidential care for adolescents, public opinion is largely in favor of parental access. A brief “nudge,” asking whether parental access might harm adolescent–doctor communication, increased acceptance of adolescent confidentiality, and could be part of a strategy to prepare parents for electronic patient portal policies that medical centers impose at the beginning of adolescence.

Objective Medical privacy policies, which are clear-cut for adults and young children, become ambiguous during adolescence. Yet medical organizations must establish unambiguous rules about patient and parental access to electronic patient portals. We conducted a national interview study to characterize the diversity in adolescent portal policies across a range of institutions and determine the factors influencing decisions about these policies. Methods Within a sampling framework that ensured diversity of geography and medical organization type, we used purposive and snowball sampling to identify key informants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed with inductive thematic analysis, followed by a member check. Results We interviewed informants from 25 medical organizations. Policies established different degrees of adolescent access (from none to partial to complete), access ages (from 10 to 18 years), degrees of parental access, and types of information considered sensitive. Federal and state law did not dominate policy decisions. Other factors in the decision process were: technology capabilities; differing patient population needs; resources; community expectations; balance between information access and privacy; balance between promoting autonomy and promoting family shared decision-making; and tension between teen privacy and parental preferences. Some informants believed that clearer standards would simplify policy-making; others worried that standards could restrict high-quality polices. Conclusions In the absence of universally accepted standards, medical organizations typically undergo an arduous decision-making process to develop teen portal policies, weighing legal, economic, social, clinical, and technological factors. As a result, portal access policies are highly inconsistent across the United States and within individual states.

Objective Prior studies of computing applications that support patients’ medication knowledge and self-management offer valuable insights into effective application design, but do not address inpatient settings. This study is the first to explore the design and usefulness of patient-facing tools supporting inpatient medication management and tracking.Materials and Methods We designed myNYP Inpatient, a custom personal health record application, through an iterative, user-centered approach. Medication-tracking tools in myNYP Inpatient include interactive views of home and hospital medication data and features for commenting on these data. In a two-phase pilot study, patients used the tools during cardiothoracic postoperative care at Columbia University Medical Center. In Phase One, we provided 20 patients with the application for 24–48 h and conducted a closing interview after this period. In Phase Two, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 patients and 5 clinical pharmacists who evaluated refinements to the tools based on the feedback received during Phase One.Results Patients reported that the medication-tracking tools were useful. During Phase One, 14 of the 20 participants used the tools actively, to review medication lists and log comments and questions about their medications. Patients’ interview responses and audit logs revealed that they made frequent use of the hospital medications feature and found electronic reporting of questions and comments useful. We also uncovered important considerations for subsequent design of such tools. In Phase Two, the patients and pharmacists participating in the study confirmed the usability and usefulness of the refined tools.Conclusions Inpatient medication-tracking tools, when designed to meet patients’ needs, can play an important role in fostering patient participation in their own care and patient-provider communication during a hospital stay.

Projects of queering IR are not about making IR queer as if it weren't already, but they are about revealing how sexualities, affiliations, and affects are produced and regulated with existing practices of IR and our underlying conceptual frameworks for understanding IR. Queer IR, then, cannot be subsumed within the topic of “sexuality” as if sexuality were another overlooked variable akin to the debate over the “gender variable” (Weber 1998b; on “gender variable” Hooper 1999; Jones 1996; Carver, Cochran, and Squires 1998). While queer theory is rooted in the political struggles for recognition, rights, and the basic survival of “queer” people, “queer” is also not (only) an umbrella term for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexed, and genderqueer people, as the political commitments the term “queer” represents are rooted in a sense of the insufficiency and inherent conservatism of such identity labels per se . Furthermore, queering IR is not necessarily limited to theorizing sexual identities/identifications. Not only does this move exclude sexuality from feminism or “gender studies,” making it the “proper object” of queer studies, but this move also performs an exclusion of the sort that the term “queer” was envisioned to avoid (Sedgwick 1990; Butler 1994). Because of the very instability of the term “queer,” once (and still in some quarters) a slur, the “queer” of queer theory is necessarily an interpellation that is open-ended toward constant self-critique and different political projects (as Weber notes in this forum). As Judith Butler writes in an influential essay, “if the term ‘queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the …

Laura J. Shepherd, ed. (2013). Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 304 pp., $160.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68017-2), $54.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68016-5). Mark B. Salter and Can E. Mutlu, eds. (2013). Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction . Routledge, London and New York, 256 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53539-7), $51.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53540-3). Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit. (2013). Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 208 pp., $145.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-1-415-62046-8), $46.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-62047-5). Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner, eds. (2014). Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis . Routledge, London and New York, 230 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71294-1), $44.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71295-8). “There is a point at which methods devour themselves” (Fanon 1952, 12). Almost 20 years since the publication of Krause and Williams's edited volume Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997), critical security studies (CSS) has reached a moment in which critiques of more traditional or mainstream modes of studying the politics of war, security, and violence are supplemented by a great deal of explicit attention to their methods and methodologies for doing so. The last few years have witnessed a sudden proliferation of textbooks on methods for critical security studies that have attempted to chart the field and provide guidance for students or newcomers on methods for conducting research consistent with its values and goals. The four volumes discussed in this review essay follow on the heels of numerous other textbooks that attempt to map the terrain of security studies, such as Hansen and Buzan (2009), Peoples and Vaughan-Williams’s edited compilation of key and illustrative works (2010), Jarvis and Holland (2014), and the second edition of Karin Fierke’s Critical Approaches to International Security (2015 [2007]). In recent years, the establishment of several journals, including Critical Security Studies and particularly Security Dialogue , as well as Journal of Global Security Studies (an ISA journal) and European Journal of International Security (a BISA journal), that are dedicated to pluralistic studies of security have also suggested the popularity and continued innovation of diverse strands of scholarship that can be grouped as “critical security studies.” Furthermore, the selection of “Methods, Methodologies, and Innovation” to frame the 2014 Millennium conference and subsequent special issue also suggests a great deal of both interest and tension around the question of method and methodology for critical, interpretative, and pluralistic scholars, including the question of whether or not issues of “method” should be … lw487{at}cam.ac.uk

The Political Economy of Violence Against Women. By True Jacqui. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 256 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-199-75591-2). From Lesotho to Pakistan, New Zealand to Thailand, violence against women in the form of domestic violence, trafficking, sexual assault, and gender-based economic marginalization is all too prevalent. Feminist security-studies scholars have argued for decades that traditional (and even more critical) ways of theorizing war and security ignore these threats to women's security (see inter alia Enloe 1989, 1993, 2000; Tickner 1992; Hansen 2000; Shepherd 2008; Sjoberg 2010; Wibben 2011; Sylvester 2012). Jacqui True provides a sympathetic challenge to this literature and argues that scholars and institutions such as the United Nations have largely failed to understand the systemic causes of this violence in their emphasis on conflict and legal remedies to punishing violators and protecting victims. In this broad-ranging book, True challenges scholars of international studies as well as practitioners to shift their focus to include an analysis of both global economic trends and local economic policies in shaping women's vulnerability to violence. In so doing, True provides the blueprint for a revitalization of feminist and critical imaginations that seeks to trace the global and multifaceted roots of women's victimization and marginalization. True argues that gendered social and economic inequalities between men and women make women vulnerable to violence, regardless of the context, and furthermore, these gendered inequalities “are rooted in structures and processes of political economy that are increasingly globalized” (p. 5). Her feminist political-economy approach locates the source of women's vulnerability to violence not in terms of rich or poor countries, but in material gender inequalities with respect to income, property, employment, and land (p. 18). …