Number of results to display per page
Search Results
32. (Babylonian) Lions, (Asian) Tigers, and (Russian) Bears: a statistical test of three rivalrous paths to conflict
- Author:
- Paul A Kowert and Cameron G Thies
- Publication Date:
- 07-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- Structural theories of international relations anticipate no meaningful differences of kind, as opposed to capabilities, among states. Empirical investigations of enduring and strategic rivalries hint at a distinction, however, between states that see themselves as potential rivals and those that do not. Constructivists go further, suggesting that the roles adopted by states during their interactions are the result of varying underlying images of threat. This paper develops the theoretical claim that three different images of threat may produce distinct kinds of rivalry and thereby three paths to militarised interstate conflict. Each image of threat is rooted in a different normative context: strategic threats are associated with violations of the enforcement of Hobbesian cooperative security arrangements; competitive threats are associated with violations of fairness or reasonableness standards in Lockean exchange relationships; and institutional threats are associated with violations of the basis for commitment to Kantian communities of peace. A logistic regression analysis of Correlates of War data, combined with other data relevant to the three threat images, provide empirical support for each of these rivalrous paths to conflict.
- Political Geography:
- Russia and Asia
33. 'Human nature', science and international political theory
- Author:
- Chris Brown
- Publication Date:
- 10-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- The Post-War rise in importance of the individual in international political theory, as evidenced by the development of the international human rights regime, International Criminal Law and theories of global justice, has, paradoxically, been accompanied by an highly critical approach to the concept of human nature. Criticisms of human nature largely rest on the association of the concept of with social Darwinism, racism, sexism and eugenics, but, understood properly and at the right level of generality, the concept of human nature need not attract such undesirable, pseudo-scientific bedfellows. The modern science of evolutionary psychology is in the process of changing our understanding of the social implications of our genetic inheritance, and social and political theorists ought not to resist this change, and international relations scholars should not leave the field to realist scholars. Premature generalisations based on the findings of evolutionary psychology should certainly be resisted, but so should blanket rejections of the new knowledge. The task for international political theorists is to find a way of integrating the findings of the new human sciences into a humane understanding of the human animal.
- Topic:
- Human Rights
34. International relations in the making of political Islam: interrogating Khomeini's 'Islamic government'
- Author:
- Kamran Matin
- Publication Date:
- 10-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- Eurocentric approaches to political Islam tend to deploy an internalist methodology that theoretically obscures the generative and constitutive role of international relations. This article addresses this problem through a critical application of Leon Trotsky's idea of 'uneven and combined development' to Ayatollah Khomeini's invention of the concept of 'Islamic government'. It argues that this concept was international in its socio-political stimulus and intellectual content, and, crucially, reflected, influenced, and mobilised an emergent liminal sociality that combined Western and Islamic socio-cultural forms. This heterogeneous character of Iran's experience of modernity is, the article argues, theoretically inaccessible to Eurocentric approaches' homogeneous and unilinear conceptions of history, which, as a result, generate exceptionalist modes of explanations.
- Topic:
- International Relations and Government
- Political Geography:
- Iran
35. From fratricide to security community: re-theorising difference in the constitution of Nordic peace
- Author:
- Pertti Joenniemi and Christopher S Browning
- Publication Date:
- 10-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- This article utilises a revisionist account of the emergence of Nordic peace in the 19th century to open up space for rethinking and re-theorising the constitutive dynamics underlying security communities. While the Nordic case is often considered a prime example of a security community the article argues it did not emerge in the way usually claimed. First, security did not figure as a key constitutive argument as assumed by traditional security community theorising; second, togetherness did not emerge because of difference being traded for enhanced similarity. In fact, security was side-lined and difference re-interpreted rather than erased in forging ontologically safe identities.
- Topic:
- Security
36. One state-one nation: the naturalisation of nation-state congruency in IR theory
- Author:
- Moran M Mandelbaum
- Publication Date:
- 10-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- This paper suggests that the notion of nation-state congruency has become a 'leitmotif' in International Relations (IR) theory, especially since the end of the Cold War. Congruent states are often constructed as the precursor of liberal democracy, peace, and modernity, while security in particular is discursively intertwined with nation-state congruency. This paper asks: how has this congruency discourse become so embedded in IR theory and, consequently, what can we learn about the nexus between IR and the states/international system? These questions are of a 'how-possible' and critical nature that engage with the power dynamics and thus the effects that emerge from this 'congruency bias'. To answer these, I deploy the 'discursive practices approach' and show the various practices/strategies through which congruency is constituted and established, naturalised and legitimated. Finally, I conclude by proposing to inquire genealogically into the conditions of emergence of nation-state congruency in IR and modernity.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Security, and Cold War
37. Imagining ourselves then and now: nostalgia and Canadian multiculturalism
- Author:
- Mira Sucharov
- Publication Date:
- 10-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- International relations has begun to take seriously the study of emotions, just as it has long acknowledged the role of collective memory in shaping politics. But the role of nostalgia as a potential driver of progressive political change has been little considered. This article engages the possibility of an ironic nostalgia for shoring up the multicultural project. Through examining the ironic potential in two contemporary popular Canadian cultural artefacts - Molson Canadian's 'I am Canadian' commercial and Douglas Coupland's Souvenir of Canada - the article suggests that assimilationist and separationist impulses may actually bolster the integrationist goals of multiculturalism. Contra nostalgia's critics, the article suggests that dominant groups in society may need emotional space to mourn a cognitively simpler past in order to embrace a more complex present.
- Topic:
- International Relations, Politics, and Multiculturalism
- Political Geography:
- Canada
38. Politics, law, and the sacred: a conceptual analysis
- Author:
- Friedrich V. Kratochwil
- Publication Date:
- 01-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- The 'return' of religion has not only engendered new conflicts in world politics, but also fundamentally challenged the Western political project, which allegedly rests on a strict separation of the public and private sphere. Religion is supposed to play a role only within the confines of the latter, as it is considered a 'privately held belief'. Of course, this project is neither shared by all Westerners, nor is it necessarily persuasive to other cultures. Thus within the emerging global sphere it is by no means clear whether such a strict separation can muster assent.(Barbato and Kratochwil 2009: 1–24) For this reason some thinkers, such as Habermas (2003) or Connolly (1999), among many, have attempted to formulate a new approach in which ways of overcoming the dis- placement of religions to the 'private/personal' realm are explored, in order to harness the semantic potential of religion for the establishment of a discourse on global order, while avoiding at the same time the establishment of a particular orthodoxy or of a millenarian political projects based on the notion of absolute 'truth'.
- Topic:
- Human Rights and Law
39. Governmentality's (missing) international dimension and the promiscuity of German neoliberalism
- Author:
- Hans-Martin Jaeger
- Publication Date:
- 01-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- An important insight from the recent publication of Foucault's governmentality lectures for International Relations (IR) is that international manifestations of governmentalities such as police and liberalism, rather than constituting mere domestic analogies, have inherently international dimensions. Police and liberalism are both constituted by and constitutive of the international contexts in which they emerge: historically, the European balance of power and a 'globalisation' of markets, respectively. However, Foucault's account of German and American neoliberalism in the twentieth century omits references to the international context. This article first reconstructs the 'domestic-international nexus' in Foucault's account of police and liberalism, and then recovers aspects of the missing international dimension of his analysis of German neoliberalism with recourse to Wilhelm Röpke's writing on IR. The upshot of this recovery effort is threefold. First, the international remains pivotal to (mid-) twentieth-century neoliberal governmentality. Second, (German) neoliberalism's association with multiple 'international' governmentalities, including liberal and non-liberal ones, exposes neoliberalism as a 'promiscuous' mode of governance. Third, German neoliberalism's promiscuity is underwritten by (though not reducible to) a conservative ethos of moderation. More broadly, this article contributes to efforts to theorise the relationship between domestic and international politics, and to understand neoliberalism as a 'variegated' phenomenon.
- Political Geography:
- America and Germany
40. Locating the normative within economic science: towards the analysis of hidden discourses of democracy in international politics
- Author:
- Milja Kurki
- Publication Date:
- 01-2013
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Relations and Development
- Institution:
- Central and East European International Studies Association
- Abstract:
- Economic science has been overwhelmingly perceived as a 'positive' science, both among economists and many scholars in other social sciences. As a result, there has been an estrangement between the 'scientific' study of economics and the study of 'fuzzier' matters of normative nature. Crucially, it is often assumed that economists — whether academics or practitioners — have little to say about democracy, a concept that is famously normative and contested in nature. This article argues that this perception is mistaken and misleading. When several key figures in economic science are examined in detail, we can see that their economic theories are, in fact, deeply intertwined with certain normative visions of democracy, even if implicitly. Recognising the role of hidden normative theories of democracy within economic science perspectives is important theoretically, in re-reading the nature and scope of economic science discourses. It is also, however, important in understanding some key world political trends. It is argued here that we are in a better position to understand the curious 'dabbling' of global financial organisations in matters of 'political nature' when we remain attuned to the role of hidden democratic assumptions. Also, the complex role of these organisations in 'democracy promotion', and the nature of democracy promotion itself, can thus be better appreciated.
- Topic:
- Politics