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41. The wars on terror, duelling internationalisms and the clash of purposes in a post-unipolar world

Author:
Andrew Phillips
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article contrasts the parallel \'wars on terror\' that liberal and authoritarian states have prosecuted since 9/11 to determine their broader significance for the pursuit of \'purposes beyond ourselves\' in an increasingly multi-polar world. While acknowledging that states rallied to defend their monopoly on legitimate violence after 9/11, I maintain that the ensuing \'wars on terror\' have simultaneously exacerbated longstanding disagreements between liberal and authoritarian states over the fundamental principles of international society. Under American leadership, liberal states have sought to eradicate jihadism through the transplantation of liberal values and institutions to Muslim-majority societies, countenancing sweeping qualifications of weak states\' sovereignty to advance this goal. Conversely, authoritarian states led by Russia and China have mounted a vigorous counter-offensive against both jihadism and liberal internationalist revisionism, harnessing counter-terrorism concerns to reassert illiberal internationalist conceptions of state sovereignty in response. Reflecting international division more than solidarity, the \'wars on terror\' have illuminated a deeper triangular struggle between revisionist liberal internationalism, jihadist anti-internationalism and illiberal authoritarian internationalism that will significantly complicate Western efforts to promote liberal values in coming decades.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Russia and China

42. Foreign policy internationalism and political possibility

Author:
Matt McDonald
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
While many of the contributions to this special issue focus on the content of internationalism and the dilemmas of ethical (state) action in world politics, this article focuses on the possibilities for internationalism to be meaningfully incorporated into state foreign policy. Here, my concern is with the extent to which a commitment to internationalism might be conceived as legitimate at the domestic level. In international relations, constructivists have come closest to directly addressing the domestic constraints and possibilities associated with foreign policy agenda. Theorists working in this tradition, however, have largely worked with binary logics (structure/agency, material/ideational, continuity/change) that emphasise one set of factors over another. Building on insights from the recent \'practice turn\' in international relations, this article employs the work of Pierre Bourdieu in an attempt to transcend these binaries and develop a more nuanced and sophisticated sociological account of political possibility. I suggest the utility of his conceptions of field, habitus, capital and symbolic power in coming to terms with both possibilities for and limits to internationalism as a foreign policy orientation. I illustrate the utility of this framework with the example of Australia\'s retreat from internationalism under the Rudd Government from 2007 to 2010.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Australia

43. 'With the best will in the world …'?: Humanitarianism, non-state actors and the pursuit of 'purposes beyond ourselves'

Author:
Jacinta O'Hagan
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Debates about liberal internationalism in general and 'purposes beyond ourselves' in particular have focused largely on the role of states. Such a focus risks limiting our potential to achieve solidarist goals by tying us to the ontological and ethical concerns of the state. This article argues that a more expansive conception of agency, which includes non-state actors (NSAs), reflects more accurately the complexity of agency and interests within liberal internationalism. Using the example of humanitarianism, it argues that humanitarian NSAs demonstrate that important additional avenues exist for the pursuit of solidarism within the liberal international order. At the same time, these actors do not totally evade the dilemmas of solidarism faced by states, nor the tensions that permeate liberal internationalism and constrain the pursuit of purposes beyond ourselves. Humanitarian NSAs are embedded in complex relationships with states and are implicated in structures of power and interest within the liberal international order. These present them with their own dilemmas of solidarism and, despite their best intentions, can compromise their pursuit of 'purposes beyond ourselves'.

44. From the good international citizen to the cosmopolitan political community: A constitutional path

Author:
Richard Shapcott
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
While advocates of liberal internationalism have traditionally identified the state as an agent of progressive transformation of the international realm, they have had less to say about the specific domestic mechanisms that might govern the foreign policies of \'good\' states. This article argues that domestic constitutions provide both a legal limit on the actions of governments and other actors, and also the means whereby citizens can pursue legal redress against the state. They therefore play a potentially constraining role that is different from that provided by the embedding of cosmopolitan law in transnational and international legal codes and norms. Transformed in this way, states become powerful agents for achieving cosmopolitan purposes and ultimately transforming world order.
Topic:
International Relations

45. International polarity and America's polarization

Author:
Joseph Bafumi and Joseph M Parent
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
There is a growing consensus that the United States is undergoing a period of political polarization, particularly among elites. The causes of this polarization remain under-researched. We argue that shifts in the international distribution of power influence America's polarization. To demonstrate the argument, this article analyzes changes in power and polarization quantitatively and qualitatively from 1945 to 2005. A key finding is that greater relative power on the world stage substantially increases polarization and some of its correlates, like income inequality. The argument also measures the extent of international influence on domestic polarization and makes novel predictions on when and why polarization will fall.
Political Geography:
United States and America

46. Humanitarian intervention – What's in a name?

Author:
Beate Jahn
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Why has the term humanitarian intervention experienced such a meteoric rise into the core of academic as well as public political discourse? An investigation of classical theory shows that the use of force to help citizens of other states has been regularly contemplated and practiced in the past. The concept of humanitarian intervention therefore does not describe new policies; instead it serves to hide the political nature of these policies today and functions as a 'doctrinal advance guard' for a new international order. It is the political conjuncture that requires a new name for old policies and its radical political content that explains the timing, speed and impact of this term.

47. The domestic politics of international hierarchy: Risk management and the reconstitution of international society

Author:
William Clapton and Shahar Hameiri
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Recent work has identified new hierarchical relationships within international society. However, few scholars have provided a satisfactory account of what informs their formation, reproduction or constitutional effects for international society. We argue that underpinning the emergence of a more hierarchical international society is a new social logic of risk, which constructs illiberal and/or fragile states as potentially dangerous sites of instability and disorder that pose particular security risks for Western states. We proceed to argue that such risk-based hierarchies are transformative of both inter-state and intra-state relations, by stripping equal political agency from 'risky' actors within and without the state. We demonstrate these claims by drawing on examples of international state building in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific.
Topic:
Politics

48. NATO and India: The politics of strategic convergence

Author:
David Scott
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
In this article, I argue that after having experienced a distinctly cool relationship throughout most of the post-war period and for the 10 years following the end of the Cold War, India and North Atlantic Organization (NATO) are now gradually moving towards each other. Indeed, during the past decade, NATO's 'out-of-area' operations have taken it eastwards from the Mediterranean, while India's 'extended neighbourhood' framework has brought it westwards from the Indian subcontinent. This has created a geopolitical overlap between these two actors, most notably in Afghanistan but also elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. Common advocacy of liberal democracy and overt concerns over jihadist destabilization have brought these two actors together. In NATO's post-Cold War search for relevance and India's post-Soviet search for partners, they have found each other. Unstated potential concerns over China are also a feature in this strategic convergence. However, while NATO has adopted a flexible range of 'Partnership' frameworks, India's sensitivity on retaining 'strategic autonomy' will limit their cooperation to informal ad hoc arrangements.
Topic:
NATO and Cold War
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, China, India, and Soviet Union

49. Arbitrating the Israeli–Palestinian territorial dispute

Author:
Asaf Siniver
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article presents the case for arbitrating the territorial dispute over the West Bank between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. After nearly two decades of intense intermediary activity but with still no signs of progress, and against the inability of the parties themselves to move towards reconciliation, the article argues that as a method of conflict resolution, mediation has exhausted its primary objective – namely the establishing of direct channels of communication between the disputants – and it is now time to examine alternative methods to conflict resolution. The article debunks the myths surrounding the success of American mediation in the conflict, and uses the historical case of the Taba arbitration between Israel and Egypt to demonstrate under what terms the arbitration of the West Bank dispute might be presented, while taking into consideration its advantages and drawbacks compared with the more established method of mediation in this conflict.
Political Geography:
America, Israel, Palestine, and Egypt

50. Towards a strong NATO narrative: From a 'practice of talking' to a 'practice of doing'

Author:
Trine Flockhart
Publication Date:
01-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
The article contributes to the growing theoretical scholarship on NATO by developing a theoretical framework that demonstrates the complex relationship between doing and being, identity and action, and knowledge and practice. The article addresses the puzzle that NATO in the past decade has been busier than ever, yet has not managed to construct a strong narrative and maintain ontological security. The article presents a framework, which assumes that ontological security is influenced by identity and narrative construction processes, which are themselves reinforced or undermined by practical action, conceptualized as 'functional action' and 'rhetorical action'. By analyzing NATO's current and past narratives, practices, and action patterns, the article shows that NATO's recent crisis is not just a deeper and more serious crisis because Afghanistan is a difficult mission, but that the depth of the crisis is the result of changes in NATO's established practices and new fundamentally different patterns of action.
Topic:
NATO
Political Geography:
Afghanistan

51. Critical international political economy: Renewing critique and ontologies

Author:
Owen Worth and Claes Belfrage
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This special issue critically assesses the development of 'Critical International Political Economy' (IPE) and seeks to expand upon its theoretical foundations in order to ensure the discipline's openness and diversity. This introduction will set the stage for this endeavour by conceptualising the historical development of critical IPE and by outlining the challenge ahead.

52. Accumulating the critical spirit: Rosa Luxemburg and critical IPE

Author:
Owen Worth
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article introduces Rosa Luxemburg's work on dialectics and the international and argues that its ontological foundations have been neglected within critical International Political Economy (IPE). Whereas other critical Marxists such as Gramsci have played key roles in instigating critical enquiry, Luxemburg's work has largely gone neglected. Although this article acknowledges some serious shortcomings in some of the 'left infantilism' inherent within her work, it nevertheless argues that Luxemburg's dialectical ontology significantly contrasted with the orthodoxy that was emerging from Marxist circles at the time. This article explores some of these and argues that the dialectical method that Luxemburg employed to understanding the international provides us with a new avenue for critical IPE to pursue. In particular, it suggests that Luxemburg's articulation of critique provides us with fresh openings that both compliment and add to neo-Gramscian and neo-Polanyian accounts, and allows us to understand trends and practices within the global political economy in new critical ways.
Topic:
Political Economy

53. For a critical engagement with aesthetics in IPE: Revitalizing economic imagination in times of crisis

Author:
Claes Belfrage
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Advanced capitalism is at a historical conjuncture in which aestheticization and financialization combine to intensify and deepen the 'cult of capitalism' at the expense of economic imagination. International Political Economy (IPE) is, however, not only poorly equipped to understand the implications of these closely linked transformations, it also avoids considering them by shunning aesthetics. To contribute to the rejuvenation of economic imagination, IPE must explicitly aim at both understanding these processes and their confluences, and engaging with them. Rescue cannot come from orthodox IPE because of its embededdness in the reified 'Kantian Desire', which promotes the neglect of recognition in aesthetics and the complexities of human agency under financialization. Critical IPE is more apt at grasping related struggles, which it has shown in for instance research on the financialization of everyday life. Nevertheless, its engagement with aesthetics remains modest and inadequate. Critical IPE concerned with financialization should see it as one of its core tasks to turn to and engage with aesthetics as a means to contribute to critical economic imagination. To this end, the article outlines a critical IPE approach to aesthetics, inspired by Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
Topic:
Political Economy

54. The relevance of Nicos Poulantzas for contemporary debates on 'the international'

Author:
Ian Bruff
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article argues that in many cases the theoretical resources for a revived and enriched 'critical International Political Economy' already exist, and we would do well to revisit earlier works when seeking to intervene in contemporary debates. Through an initial engagement with the recent plethora of contributions on 'the international', I contend that Nicos Poulantzas' later writings deserve a rereading. In particular, his work on the historicity of territory and the internationalisation of capital constitutes a series of rich and suggestive commentaries. The significance of his remarks are later illustrated via a consideration of Germany, where I argue that the changes wrought by the growing imbrication of the German economy with transnational circuits of capital have been taking place through, and not necessarily against, the historicity of German capitalism's emergence and evolution.
Topic:
International Political Economy
Political Geography:
Germany

55. The global and gendered dimensions of citizenship, community and 'cohesion'

Author:
Daniela Tepe and Jill Steans
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
In this article we draw upon both critical and feminist international political economy (IPE) approaches in order to interrogate processes of change effecting specific localities in the context of neoliberal global restructuring. We give a closer focus to our interest in the global/local nexus by concentrating on issues of citizenship, community and discourse and practice on community cohesion. After setting out our framework, we develop a critique of community cohesion policies and practices in contemporary Britain. We then briefly review some of the current literature on gender and citizenship paying particular attention to how issues of material inequality, poverty and exclusion currently figure in academic debates. We conclude that gender inequality must be taken seriously if strong and cohesive communities are to be realised and that there is a need for further research that connects critical and feminist IPE to emerging critical literatures on community and citizenship.
Topic:
International Political Economy
Political Geography:
Britain

56. Where is the study of work in critical IPE?

Author:
Phoebe V Moore
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
The British school of International Political Economy (IPE) has been highly innovative in encouraging inter-disciplinary work, revealing – while allowing for – an eclecticism of research and investigation that stands in clear contrast to its American counterpart. Critical theorists in the British school of IPE in particular have been highly prolific in recent years and have introduced research on a wide range of contemporary issues in the global political economy. However, this school tends to overlook two very important areas of analysis: work and employment. More thus needs to be done. This article argues that researchers from seemingly autonomous fields can teach critical IPE a lesson: inter-disciplinarity is not a fantasy. The analysis suggested here is of how governmental policy idealises a particular subjectivity wherein workers are not employed, but are employable. Not only would a focus on this problem enhance existing research in critical IPE: it is also essential if we are to address the needs of humanity in the increasingly unstable and flexibilised world of work. The British school of critical IPE is the forum within which this conversation could and should be continued.
Topic:
International Political Economy
Political Geography:
Britain

57. Re-thinking scales and culture: Rome and the city in and beyond IPE

Author:
Nana Rodaki
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
The article argues that critical International Political Economy can benefit from a trans-disciplinary approach to the role of cities as socio-economic actors in the global political economy. The constitution and exercise of agency is far from an automatic response to the global restructuring of capitalist social relations, but the product of historically and context-specific economic and extra-economic social processes and social struggles. Cities (re)emerge as subjects and objects of governance and intervention and seek to become (dis)embedded in multi-scalar networks of economic and symbolic power. In this process, they become active co-producers of the global political economy, in ways that cut across spatial scales and narrow geographical imaginations.
Topic:
International Political Economy and Culture
Political Geography:
Rome

58. Christian 'Renewalism' and the production of global free market hegemony

Author:
Kyle Murray
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Charismatic and Pentecostal elements of global Christianity serve key roles in the production of free market hegemony within and between states, societies and markets across the world. While many of the institutions of these Christian social forces are fiercely decentralised, this popular global movement has converged on key elements of a shared conception of the world which links core, semi-peripheral and peripheral societies across national boundaries and class distinctions. These activities highlight the necessity of linking the emergent narratives on 'global religious economy' with the larger narratives of Critical IPE. It is argued here that Gramsci provides us with useful conceptual tools with which we may contextualise specific transnational religious movements and social forces within the framework of globalisation and the production of neoliberal hegemony within and between specific states, societies and markets.

59. The relevance of understanding code to international political economy

Author:
David M Berry
Publication Date:
03-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article argues that international political economy (IPE) needs to engage in a close reading of computer code. This, I argue, will open up IPE to a very important resource for understanding and explaining many of the forces of capitalism operating today and which are instantiated and reflected within computer code. I also suggest a way in which the 'global', particularly in relation to financial markets and systems, might be read from within the new space of flows represented by computer code and software. There is no doubt at all that software is a hugely important global industry, and that software is critical to the functioning of multinational companies, governments and non-governmental institutions. Therefore, it is curious that so little attention is paid to code itself as an empirical object within IPE. In this article, I want to introduce some of the main contours of the debate and introduce some important concepts for why a close reading of code could be useful to IPE scholars.
Topic:
International Political Economy

60. Horsemen of the apocalypse? Jihadist strategy and nuclear instability in South Asia

Author:
Andrew Phillips
Publication Date:
05-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Since 9/11, counter-terrorism officials have fretted over the possibility of jihadist terrorists obtaining and deploying a nuclear weapon. Although acknowledging that such anxieties are well grounded, I offer here a reconceptualisation of the jihadist terrorist nuclear threat that focuses alternatively upon the remote but real possibility that jihadist terrorists may seek to advance their goals by trying to provoke an Indo–Pakistani nuclear confrontation. Such a confrontation would serve jihadist goals by aggravating religious polarisation on the sub-continent while dramatically weakening the Pakistani state. The system-destabilising consequences of such a catastrophe would likely also offer the jihadists their best opportunity to revive their faltering movement, which otherwise appears fated to terminal decline. In the light of this assessment, I argue that a higher priority must be accorded towards strengthening Indo–Pakistani crisis stability and advancing regional reconciliation if the risk of a jihadist-provoked nuclear exchange is to be minimised.
Political Geography:
Pakistan, South Asia, and India