Why (and How) Meaning Matters in International Relations: The anti-whaling discourse
Dr Charlotte Epstein - University of Sydney

In the second half of the 20th century, worldwide attitudes toward whaling shifted from widespread acceptance to moral censure. Why? Whaling, once as important to the global economy as oil is now, had long been uneconomical. Major species were long known to be endangered. Yet nations had continued to support whaling. In her forthcoming book, The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse (2008, MIT Press), Dr Epstein argues the change was brought about not by changing material interests but by a powerful anti-whaling discourse that successfully recast whales as extraordinary mammals that needed to be saved. A key purpose of her book is thus to show both why meaning matters and how to study it in international politics. Whaling is apprehended both as an object of analysis in its own right and as a lens for examining discursive power. In the first part of her talk, Dr Epstein will show how she came to putting together 'discourse', and 'whales'. This serves to address the all too common and misguided rejection so-called post-structuralist approaches that their interest in 'text' leaves then incapable of apprehending material reality. Whales are very material indeed. In the second and third parts of her talk, in order to clarify what exactly is entailed by the discourse approach, she then distinguishes it from other approaches that focus on immaterial factors, namely, the so-called ideology critique on the one hand, and a 'middle-ground' constructivist focus on norms on the other. Her main argument here is that these approaches evacuate either the fundamental contingency underlying the making of meaning or the power relations whereby one set of meanings becomes dominant by evacuating other possible ones.