International Actors (international + actor)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


Making Sense of Citizen Diplomats: The People of Duluth, Minnesota, as International Actors

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES PERSPECTIVES, Issue 2 2001
Paul Sharp
What is citizen diplomacy and how do we assess its significance? These are important questions because of the recent upsurge in international activity of this kind, and because how we answer them says a great deal about how we "do IR." By examining citizen diplomacy in Duluth, Minnesota, this paper offers a typology of citizen diplomats organized around the ideas of who or what they are representing and to whom. Assessing the significance of citizen diplomacy is a more difficult problem since individuals tend to generate a priori answers to it based on our respective theoretical orientations to IR as a whole. As a solution to this problem, the paper proposes a "diplomatic" approach which focuses on both the representation of differences to one another and the professional commitment which diplomats have to maintaining the practices and institutions which make such relations possible. [source]


International Actors, Democratization and the Rule of Law.

JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 3 2009
Anchoring Democracy?
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


World Bank-directed Development?

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2009
Negotiating Participation in the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project in Laos
ABSTRACT The omnipotence of the World Bank on a global scale means that it is often regarded as the most influential partner in bringing about transformations in developing countries. This article contributes to ongoing discussions of this issue by examining some effects of the Bank's participatory agenda in one of its flagship projects, the Nam Theun 2 (NT2) hydropower scheme in Laos. Critical accounts suggest that the Bank's promotion of participation in donor-dependent countries like Laos is either a guise or an imposition. These propositions are considered in two settings where participation was debated around the time of the Bank's loan appraisal for NT2: first, an international stakeholders' workshop held in Vientiane; and second, some international attempts to identify the concerns of villagers living near the NT2 dam site. In workshops and villages, participation is a negotiated performance whereby competing representations emerge through the interaction between village, state and international actors. More generally, this article shows that a grounded view of development can attend to the practices that constrain the hegemonic tendencies of the World Bank, even while maintaining awareness of the potency of its policies and interventions. [source]


Development, the state, and transnational political connections: state and subject formations in Latin America

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2001
Sarah A. Radcliffe
Focusing on the processes of making and sustaining transnational political ties between actors, international actors and states, this paper reviews recent work from a number of disciplines on globalization and politics, and outlines an agenda for future research. Rather than seeing transnational political linkages merely as forerunners to the loss of local sovereignty, the paper argues for a wider conceptualization of transnational connections, embedded within processes of state formation in Latin America. Using a variety of examples, it is argued that transnational networks are associated with a wide range of meanings and a variety of responses by diverse actors. Drawing on recent work in political science, post-structuralism and anthropology, it is suggested that geographical concepts - related to scale, process and networks - offer a means through which to analyze and ,map out' these transnational political processes. [source]


The Responsibility to Protect and the problem of military intervention

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2008
ALEX J. BELLAMY
The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has come a long way in a relatively short space of time. From inauspicious beginnings, the principle was endorsed by the General Assembly in 2005 and unanimously reaffirmed by the Security Council in 2006 (Resolution 1674). However, the principle remains hotly contested primarily because of its association with humanitarian intervention and the pervasive belief that its principal aim is to create a pathway for the legitimization of unilateral military intervention. This article sets forth the argument that a deepening consensus on R2P is dependent on its dissociation from the politics of humanitarian intervention and suggests that one way of doing this is by abandoning the search for criteria for decision-making about the use of force, one of the centre pieces of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001 report that coined the phrase R2P. Criteria were never likely to win international support, the article maintains, and were less likely to improve decision-making on how best to respond to major humanitarian crises. Nevertheless, R2P can make an important contribution to thinking about the problem of military intervention by mitigating potential ,moral hazards', overcoming the tendency of international actors to focus exclusively on military methods and giving impetus to efforts to operationalize protection in the field. [source]


Migrant visions of development: a gendered approach

POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE (PREVIOUSLY:-INT JOURNAL OF POPULATION GEOGRAPHY), Issue 2 2009
Petra Dannecker
Abstract In this article the current debate on migration and development is critically discussed. It will be shown that development as a multidimensional process is hardly ever conceptualised. The diversity of migration flows and patterns and the gendered structure of these processes are leading to different development visions which are hardly ever addressed or related to development. The analysis of the development visions of temporary male and female labour migrants from Bangladesh will reveal that migration experiences and the new connections and networks give rise to new identifications and development visions. The negotiations of these visions locally may initiate cultural, social and political transformations in the countries of origin, which do not necessarily correspond with the development visions articulated by other national and international actors involved. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


International Actors Leading in Relief Efforts: 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Aid Assessment

ASIAN POLITICS AND POLICY, Issue 3 2009
Courtney M. Page
The Indian Ocean tsunami was one of the most devastating natural disasters the world has seen in the last 50 years. Following the calamities, the world responded and international actors went to work to relieve human suffering and rebuild the infrastructure that lay in ruins. This study examines the collective experiences of 21 organizations according to six disaster management dimensions: disaster preparedness, early recovery/livelihood support, public awareness, capacity-building, accountability and measuring mechanisms, and coordination post-disaster. The findings of this study provide policy recommendations according to the accomplishments, limitations, and progress made since 2004 shared by organizations responding to the largest and most publicized humanitarian crisis in recent times. [source]


Tracing Foreign Policy Decisions: A Study of Citizens' Use of Heuristics

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2009
Robert Johns
Public opinion researchers agree that citizens use simplifying heuristics to reach real, stable preferences. In domestic policy, the focus has been on citizens delegating judgement to opinion leaders, notably political parties. By contrast, citizens have been held to deduce foreign policy opinions from their own values or principles. Yet there is ample scope for delegation in the foreign policy sphere. In this exploratory study I use a ,process-tracing' method to test directly for delegation heuristic processing in university students' judgements on the Iranian nuclear issue. A substantial minority sought guidance on foreign policy decisions, either from parties, international actors or newspapers. This was not always simple delegation; some used such heuristics within more complex decision-making processes. However, others relied on simple delegation, raising questions about the ,effectiveness' of their processing. [source]