SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
Abstract:
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 316 pp., ISBN 9780521875608 (hb), ISBN 9780521698665 (pb).
Deniz Sert, p. 187Insight Turkey, Vol. 11, No.4, 2009, p. 187
When the world met with what was really going on in Iraq through the public disclosure of the Abu Ghraib incident in the mass media, in one of my second year courses, despite the common abhorren ce, most of the students agreed that the torturers were personally not responsible for the violence since they were doing their jobs, acting professionally, obeying the commands of the authorities. In fact, what was going on Iraq had already been apparent and functioning long before the US attack on the country, in alliance with Britain. It had already embraced the world under different masks. But its appearance in the visual media left no room for pretexts and for discursive legitimation of capitalist rationality in terms of “sacrifices” from humanity –in terms of alienation- for the sake of the whole world. In this respect, the comments of the second year students in a country, which has been living under neoliberal capitalist system, sponsored by the IMF and World Bank among other international financial institutions, was telling in terms of the hidden recognition of the extent of self- alienation in the capitalist world. The torturers were assumed to have no responsibility due to their alienation; they were just doing their jobs, abiding by the contracts that they signed. The above argument for personal irresponsibility is cruel and feeds the violence that Iraq an d the Iraqis have been facing since the US invasion of Iraq.
The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory. In this article the nature of structural analysis in each of neorealist and world-system theory are clarified and contrast. The author's primary interest, however, is to critique the conceptions of structural theory found in each of them, and to use this critique to motivate the development of a new approach to structural theorizing about international relations adapted from the work of "structuration theorists" in sociology. In the first section, the author examines the nature of the agent-structure “problem” and briefly identifies the principal kinds of solutions to it. In the second section the author suggests that neorealism and world-system theory embody two of these solutions, the methodological individualist and structuralist ones, respectively. In the third section structurationist approach and its foundations in realist philosophy of science are being defined. In the fourth section, some general epistemological and theoretical implications of structuration theory for the explanation of state action are examined. In the conclusion, the author returns to some implications of scientific realism for social scientific research.
I argue that International Relations Theory has not been able to transcend its parochialism because it continues to negate the agency of the East. By analyzing the articles published in four leading journals of the discipline between 2002-2007, I find that the number of studies that focus on the East have indeed increased, but most of these studies continue to situate the cases derived from the East in the context of West-centric theories. Even critical approaches continue to position the West as the main subject of international relations and dismiss the mutual constitution and interaction between the East and the West, and the local and global. I contend that the generation of non-Western IR theories is not going to pose an adequate challenge to West-centrism; what is necessary is the formulation of specific propositions on East-West relations that directly counter the established assumptions of West-centric theories.
This study aims to evaluate the current position of the interdependence theory which existed in the literature of international relations for over thirty years. The study focuses particularly on the theory of interdependence as formulated by Keohane and Nye and its development. Keohane and Nye's pluralist understanding of international relations got into transformation and drove through several stages with the international system itself. After its early years, the pattern of interdependence has followed up a line of evolution from complex interdependence to globalism The study, after evaluating these stages, discusses the term of interdependence within the context of USA-Japan relations and the linkage of USA with international leadership, and arrives at the conclusion that the terms of interdependence and globalization are not equivalent, but complementary.