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Relations Theory (relations + theory)
Kinds of Relations Theory Selected AbstractsUncertain about Uncertainty: Understanding the Multiple Meanings of a Crucial Concept in International Relations TheoryINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2007Brian C. Rathbun The force of uncertainty is central to every major research tradition in the study of international relations. Yet uncertainty has multiple meanings, and each paradigm has a somewhat unique understanding of it. More often than not, these meanings are implicit. I argue that realists define uncertainty as fear induced by anarchy and the possibility of predation; rationalists as ignorance (in a nonpejorative sense) endemic to bargaining games of incomplete information and enforcement; cognitivists as the confusion (again nonpejoratively) of decision making in a complex international environment; and constructivists as the indeterminacy of a largely socially constructed world that lacks meaning without norms and identities. I demonstrate how these different understandings are what provide the necessary microfoundations for the paradigms' definitions of learning, their contrasting expectations about signaling, and the functions provided by international organizations. This has conceptual, methodological, and theoretical payoffs. Understanding uncertainty is necessary for grasping the logic of each paradigm, for distinguishing them from each other, and promoting interparadigmatic communication. [source] Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2004February 2, Portland, Presidential Address to the International Studies Association This paper focuses on the relationship between International Relations theory and ethics. It poses the question of the complicity of the discipline in the events of September 11, 2001. The paper begins with a discussion of Weber's notion of science as a vocation, and links this to the commitment in the discipline to a value-free conception of social science, one that sharply separates facts from values. The paper then examines the role of ten core assumptions in International Relations theory in helping to construct a discipline that has a culturally and historically very specific notion of violence, one resting on distinctions between economics and politics, between the outside and the inside of states, and between the public and the private realms. Using the United Nations Human Development report, the paper summarizes a number of forms of violence in world politics, and questions why the discipline of International Relations only focuses on a small subset of these. The paper then refers to the art of Magritte, and specifically Velazquez's painting Las Meninas, to argue for a notion of representation relevant to the social world that stresses negotiation, perspective, and understanding rather than notions of an underlying Archimedean foundation to truth claims. In concluding, the paper asserts that the discipline helped to sing into existence the world of September 11 by reflecting the interests of the dominant in what were presented as being neutral, and universal theories. [source] International Relations Theory and the Second Korean WarINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2003David C. Kang Ever since the first Korean war in 1950, scholars and policymakers have been predicting a second one, started by an invasion from the North. Whether seen as arising from preventive, preemptive, desperation, or simple aggressive motivations, the predominant perspective in the west sees North Korea as likely to instigate conflict. Yet for fifty years North Korea has not come close to starting a war. Why were so many scholars so consistently wrong about North Korea's intentions? Social scientists can learn as much from events that did not happen as from those that did. The case of North Korea provides a window with which to examine these theories of conflict initiation, and reveals how the assumptions underlying these theories can become mis-specified. Either scholars misunderstood the initial conditions, or they misunderstood the theory, and I show that scholars have made mistakes in both areas. Social science moves forward from clear statement of a theory, its causal logic, and its predictions. However, just as important is the rigorous assessment of a theory, especially if the predictions fail to materialize. North Korea never had the material capabilities to be a serious contender to the U.S.,ROK alliance, and it quickly fell further behind. The real question has not been whether North Korea would preempt as South Korea caught up, but instead why North Korea might fight as it fell further and further behind. The explanation for a half-century of stability and peace on the Korean peninsula is actually quite simple: deterrence works. [source] Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations TheoryINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2010Turan Kayaoglu In the past 10,15 years, an increasing number of revisionist scholars have rejected the most significant elements of the argument about the centrality of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the evolution and structure of international society. At the same time, the prominence of this argument has grown in the English School and constructivist international relations scholarship. I deconstruct the function of the Westphalian narrative to explain its pervasiveness and persistence. I argue that it was first developed by nineteenth century imperial international jurists and that the Westphalian narrative perpetuates a Eurocentric bias in international relations theory. This bias maintains that Westphalia created an international society, consolidating a normative divergence between European international relations and the rest of the international system. This dualism is predicated on the assumption that with Westphalia European states had solved the anarchy problem either through cultural or contractual evolution. Non-European states, lacking this European culture and social contract, remained in anarchy until the European states allowed them to join the international society,upon their achievement of the "standards of civilization." This Westphalian narrative distorts the emergence of the modern international system and leads to misdiagnoses of major problems of contemporary international relations. Furthermore, their commitment to the Westphalian narrative prevents international relations scholars from adequately theorizing about international interdependencies and accommodating global pluralism. [source] Systemic Leadership, Evolutionary Processes, and International Relations Theory: The Unipolarity Question,INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2006WILLIAM R. THOMPSON Scholars disagree about the nature of the current international distribution of power and its implications for world politics. Is the current system unipolar, and, if so, is unipolarity likely to persist for very long? Fifteen generalizations about the structure of the international system are culled from the literature and addressed critically from a leadership long cycle point of view. Although the current system is militarily unipolar, it is not buttressed by a new wave of radical technological innovation that is critical to the operation of systemic leadership. Until or unless US military predominance is based on economic predominance, the effects of unipolarity are likely to be relatively weak and probably also short-lived. [source] International Relations Theory and European IntegrationJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2001Mark A. Pollack The explicit effort to theorize about the process of European integration began within the field of international relations (IR), where neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism long remained the dominant schools of thought. With the relaunching of the integration process in the 1980s and 1990s, however, IR scholars have begun to approach the study of the European Union using more general, and generalizable, theoretical approaches. This article examines the recent debate among realists, liberals, rational-choice institutionalists, and constructivists regarding the nature of the integration process and the EU as an international organization. Although originally posed as competing theories, I argue, realist, liberal and institutionalist approaches show signs of convergence around a single rationalist model, with constructivism remaining as the primary rival, but less developed, approach to the study of European integration. [source] Singing Our World into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11INTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2004February 2, Portland, Presidential Address to the International Studies Association This paper focuses on the relationship between International Relations theory and ethics. It poses the question of the complicity of the discipline in the events of September 11, 2001. The paper begins with a discussion of Weber's notion of science as a vocation, and links this to the commitment in the discipline to a value-free conception of social science, one that sharply separates facts from values. The paper then examines the role of ten core assumptions in International Relations theory in helping to construct a discipline that has a culturally and historically very specific notion of violence, one resting on distinctions between economics and politics, between the outside and the inside of states, and between the public and the private realms. Using the United Nations Human Development report, the paper summarizes a number of forms of violence in world politics, and questions why the discipline of International Relations only focuses on a small subset of these. The paper then refers to the art of Magritte, and specifically Velazquez's painting Las Meninas, to argue for a notion of representation relevant to the social world that stresses negotiation, perspective, and understanding rather than notions of an underlying Archimedean foundation to truth claims. In concluding, the paper asserts that the discipline helped to sing into existence the world of September 11 by reflecting the interests of the dominant in what were presented as being neutral, and universal theories. [source] Regionalism: Old and NewINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2003Raimo Väyrynen This review of recent literature on political, economic, and cultural regionalism shows that this area of inquiry has become increasingly fragmented not only as a result of debates between the protagonists of methodological approaches but also because of underlying changes in international relations. Traditional views concerning the state-centric regional system are being challenged by the concentration of political and military power at the top as well as by transnational networks built around economic ties and cultural identities. Early post-Cold War expectations that regions and regional concerts would form the foundation for a new international order have proven untenable. Instead, regions appear to arise either through the dissemination of various transactions and externalities or as protection against the hegemony of capitalist globalization and great-power politics. Older conceptions of regionalism need to be redefined and reintegrated into current international relations theories. [source] Subnational Foreign Policy Actors: How and Why Governors Participate in U.S. Foreign PolicyFOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 3 2008Samuel Lucas McMillan U.S. governors lead overseas missions seeking investment and promoting trade, establish international offices, meet with heads of government, receive ambassadors, and take positions on foreign policy. This paper describes how governors are involved in participating in U.S. foreign policy, explains why governors seek to voice their views and play an active role in working with leaders and issues beyond their state's borders, and argues that U.S. states and governors need to be better conceptualized and considered in both international relations theory and foreign policy analysis. This study reveals that governors with greater institutional powers,such as appointment and budgetary control,as well as personal powers,derived from their electoral mandate, ambition, and public approval,are more likely to have higher degrees of foreign policy activity. These actions are more likely to take place during wartime and also from governors representing U.S. states bordering Canada or Mexico. [source] Scientific Realism as a Meta-Theory of International PoliticsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2002Fred Chernoff The recent increase in interest in scientific realist foundations for international relations theory, spearheaded by Wendt in various works, most fully articulated in his Social Theory of International Politics, and supported by a number of other authors, has brought to the fore a set of related issues in the philosophy of the social sciences. The advocacy of scientific realism in the international relations literature has largely taken the form of attacks on various nonscientific realist foundational theories. Consequently, the success of the arguments for scientific realism depends in large measure on the accuracy of the characterizations of the competing views. This paper argues that Wendt and others have misrepresented the challengers and have thus overstated the superiority of scientific realism. The paper further considers the aims and purposes of providing meta-theoretical foundations for IR theories, and argues that when the alternative accounts are properly described, the purposes are better satisfied by the latter and, in particular, by a version of Duhemian conventionalism. [source] Mapping Internationalization: Domestic and Regional ImpactsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2001Etel Solingen This article introduces a conceptual design for mapping the domestic impact of internationalization. It proposes that internationalization leads to a trimodal domestic coalitional profile and advances a set of expectations about the regional effects of each profile. Aggregate data from ninety-eight coalitions in nineteen states over five regions suggests that between 1948 and 1993 the three coalitional types differed in their international behavior. Internationalizing coalitions deepened trade openness, expanded exports, attracted foreign investments, restrained military-industrial complexes, initiated fewer international crises, eschewed weapons of mass destruction, deferred to international economic and security regimes, and strove for regional cooperative orders that reinforced those objectives. Backlash coalitions restricted or reduced trade openness and reliance on exports, curbed foreign investment, built expansive military complexes, developed weapons of mass destruction, challenged international regimes, exacerbated civic-nationalist, religious, or ethnic differentiation within their region, and were prone to initiate international crises. Hybrids straddled the grand strategies of their purer types, intermittently striving for economic openness, contracting the military complex, initiating international crises, and cooperating regionally and internationally, but neither forcefully nor coherently. These findings have significant implications for international relations theory and our incipient understanding of internationalization. Further extensions of the conceptual framework can help capture international effects that are yet to be fully integrated into the study of the domestic politics of coalition formation. [source] Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations TheoryINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2010Turan Kayaoglu In the past 10,15 years, an increasing number of revisionist scholars have rejected the most significant elements of the argument about the centrality of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the evolution and structure of international society. At the same time, the prominence of this argument has grown in the English School and constructivist international relations scholarship. I deconstruct the function of the Westphalian narrative to explain its pervasiveness and persistence. I argue that it was first developed by nineteenth century imperial international jurists and that the Westphalian narrative perpetuates a Eurocentric bias in international relations theory. This bias maintains that Westphalia created an international society, consolidating a normative divergence between European international relations and the rest of the international system. This dualism is predicated on the assumption that with Westphalia European states had solved the anarchy problem either through cultural or contractual evolution. Non-European states, lacking this European culture and social contract, remained in anarchy until the European states allowed them to join the international society,upon their achievement of the "standards of civilization." This Westphalian narrative distorts the emergence of the modern international system and leads to misdiagnoses of major problems of contemporary international relations. Furthermore, their commitment to the Westphalian narrative prevents international relations scholars from adequately theorizing about international interdependencies and accommodating global pluralism. [source] The Promise of Historical Sociology in International Relations,INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2006GEORGE LAWSON This essay draws on historical sociology, in particular on historical institutionalism, to critique the micro-, macro-, and meso-level explanations of contemporary international relations theory. Focusing on institutional development, change, and disintegration, it proposes a conjectural, mid-range approach to capturing the processes of large-scale change that are occurring in the international realm. This essay seeks to broaden the field's scope by outlining the possibilities that historical sociology offers to international relations theory and practice. [source] Setting Boundaries: Can International Society Exclude "Rogue States"?,INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 1 2006ELIZABETH N. SAUNDERS This essay addresses a prominent post-Cold War issue to which political scientists have paid relatively little attention: the status of so-called rogue states in international politics. The war in Iraq crystallized transatlantic disagreement over whether "rogue states" exist and how they should be treated, but the debate raged throughout the 1990s. This essay brings international relations theory to bear on the issue of "rogue states," but it does so with a theoretical twist. It argues that we must first identify the entity from which these states are allegedly excluded as well as who gets to set the membership criteria. If we stipulate that the international system includes all states, then international society can be defined according to various shared ideas and many realizations of international society are possible. Powerful states may try to act as "norm entrepreneurs," promoting their ideas as the basis of international society. But states, including great powers, may genuinely disagree over the basis and boundaries of this society. It is thus vital not only to take both power and shared ideas seriously, but also to describe the origins and limits of shared ideas. The limits to shared ideas can be termed"bounded intersubjectivity." This essay uses the debate over "rogue states" and the transatlantic crisis over confronting Iraq to underscore these theoretical issues. [source] Questioning Cognitivism and Constructivism in IR Theory: Reflections on the Material Structure of IdeasPOLITICS, Issue 2 2001Andreas Bieler In recent years, it has been highlighted in international relations theory that mainstream approaches neglect the role of ideas in relation to the formation of interests and international co-operation. This article critically discusses the renewed emphasis on ideas. ,Cognitive' and ,constructivist' approaches are outlined as the two main strands in the debate and a neo-Gramscian position within it is sketched. Importantly, a neo-Gramscian position is able to conceptualise the material structure of ideas, thereby overcoming the separation between ideas and material structure from the very beginning. [source] The origins of the global city: ethics and morality in contemporary cosmopolitanismBRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 1 2003Deiniol Jones This article makes the case for a strong delineation of ethical and moral categories in contemporary international relations theory,specifically, within the theory of cosmopolitanism. The argument draws on the history of ideas, particularly observations about the nature of Stoicism in classical political thought, and a range of contemporary ,ethical' texts to make the case that there is a missing ethical category in contemporary approaches. Contemporary reflections on world citizenship and the global city, such as those contained in Linklater and Held, adopt a specifically moral notion of normativity and neglect an ethical component which is both distinct and theoretically practicable. The article offers a specific policy area,the area of international drug control,as a potential area of policy application. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||