Search

Begin New Search Topic Politics Publishing Institution Central and East European International Studies Association

11. The importance of the Eurasian steppe to the study of international relations

Author:
Einar Wigen and Iver B Neumann
Publication Date:
07-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article is a call for making the Eurasian steppe an object of study within International Relations. The first section argues that the neglect of the steppe is due to 19th-century prejudice against non-sedentary polities as being barbarian. This is hardly a scholarly reason to neglect them. The second section is a nutshell overview of literature on the steppe from other fields. On the strength of these literatures, we postulate the existence of what we call an almost three thousand year long steppe tradition of ordering politics. The third section of the article suggests that the steppe tradition has hybridised sundry polity-building projects, from early polity-building in the European the Middle Ages via the Ottoman and Russian empires to contemporary Central Asian state-building. We conclude this exploratory piece by speculating whether a focus on the steppe tradition may have the potential to change our accounts of the emergence of European international relations at large.
Topic:
International Relations and Politics
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Central Asia, and Eurasia

12. 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

13. Parliamentary peace or partisan politics? Democracies' participation in the Iraq War

Author:
Patrick A. Mello
Publication Date:
07-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This paper seeks to explain democracies' military participation in the Iraq War. Prior studies have identified institutional and partisan differences as potential explanatory factors for the observed variance. The interaction of institutions and partisanship, however, has gone largely unobserved. I argue that these factors must be analysed in conjunction: institutional constraints presume actors that fulfil their role as veto players to the executive. Likewise, partisan politics is embedded in institutional frames that enable or constrain decision-making. Hence I suggest a comparative approach that combines these factors to explain why some democracies joined the ad hoc coalition against Iraq and others did not. To investigate the interaction between institutions, partisanship and war participation I apply fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The analysis reveals that the conjunction of right-of-centre governments with an absence of both parliamentary veto rights and constitutional restrictions was sufficient for participation in the Iraq War. In turn, for countries where the constitution requires parliamentary approval of military deployments, the distribution of preferences within the legislature proved to be decisive for military participation or non-participation.
Topic:
Politics and War
Political Geography:
Iraq

14. Critique in a time of liberal world order

Author:
Beate Jahn
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The dominance of liberalism in world politics today is widely interpreted as attesting to its universal validity. This claim provides the basis for a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate criticism — the former operating within a broadly liberal framework and the latter questioning the universal validity of that framework. This special issue brings together critiques of liberalism in the second register. The introduction sets out the two competing notions of critical analysis and argues that, far from being 'illegitimate', it is this second concept of critique that ensures that liberalism does not betray its core promise of replacing might with right in a time of liberal world order.
Topic:
Politics

15. Liberal internationalism and the law vs liberty paradox

Author:
Linda Bishai
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article examines and critiques the engagement of liberal international law with liberal internationalism in international relations (IR), demonstrating that the results are not to the credit of either discipline. In particular, two key assumptions of the legal liberal international order are flawed. First, the attempt to establish a two-tiered international liberal order based on law and democracy results in intervention (both forceful and performative) that counterproductively embroils liberal states, generating resentment and counter-democratic movements. Second, the assumption that security in a globalising world can only be created by the total globalisation of the liberal order and the removal of 'outlaw' states creates a new version of the security dilemma in which the actions taken to secure the liberal world order create the very conditions of its insecurity. The article concludes with recommendations for a critical post-structuralist engagement with a post-liberal politics of virtù that paradoxically allows for the liberal identity to be better secured in its international relations with the other.
Topic:
Security, Politics, and Law

16. Eternal peace, perpetual war? A critical investigation into Kant's conceptualisations of war

Author:
Andreas Behnke
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Most discussions of Immanuel Kant's political theory of international politics focus on his work on Eternal Peace and its normative and empirical relevance for contemporary international relations and international law. Yet for all his concern with peace, Kant's work is characterised by a fascinating preoccupation with the concept of war and its role in human history. The purpose of this essay is to investigate critically Kant's different conceptualisations of war and to evaluate his writing as a critique against contemporary versions of Liberal war and peace, as well as recent attempts to reduce war to an immanent logic of biopolitics.
Topic:
Politics

17. Islam, nihilism and liberal secularity

Author:
Mustapha Pasha
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The theme of nihilism offers fertile avenues for exploring the antinomies of classical liberalism. In its instantiation as violence, nihilism challenges classical liberalism and its recognised political settlement, notably received arrangements harnessed to cultivate uncontrolled passions or religious fervour. In its affinity to Islam, nihilism defies the secular settlement through its appeals to transcendence. By seeking legitimacy in the sacred, nihilism disrupts established boundaries between the religious and the secular. Nihilism exposes the difficulty of forging worlds of transcendence on the modern register of immanence. Transcendence affords the possibility of escape, immanence closure. The two can be reversed in politics, as the experience in several Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) suggests. Appeals to transcendence seek to reorganise the social world in the name of escaping it. Immanence, on the other hand, can rework notions of redemption and salvation into secular stories of progress. This paper explores how the presumed nihilistic tendency appearing in the ICZs destabilises the liberal settlement, not in the conventional sense of presenting a religious counterpoint, but in reworking religious themes into secularity. Nihilism illustrates both the contradictory character of modernity and modernity's potential to generate varied societal projects, including those informed by the sacred. The recognition that modernity can spawn discordant impulses in reconciling religion and politics helps rethink post-secular lives under the long shadow of disenchantment.
Topic:
Islam and Politics

18. Eco-imperialism: governance, resistance, hierarchy

Author:
Hugh Dyer
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The global environmental agenda, alongside the broad neoliberal agenda, may be viewed by developing states and societies as a neo-imperialist adventure to be resisted. This paper argues that while the idea of 'eco-imperialism' reflects the uncertain location of politics, the ambivalent role of states, and unchallenged state-centred assumptions about world politics, it also introduces conceptual confusion. It is an unusual case of imperialism, in so far as it involves diverse actors who may not be pursuing the same objectives. It appears that eco-imperialism may be both hegemonic force and anti-capitalist movement. In order to explain this apparent contradiction, we must note the contradictions in globalisation, but also how the mix of underlying political orientations create strange bed-fellows of, for example, developing country activists and oil company executives. In doing so, a nuanced view of the dynamics of global environmental policy and the prospects for matching these to particular political contexts may be discerned. While the exploitative and dominating aspects of global environmental policy deserve to be challenged and studied, these may have less bearing on global governance per se than on the globalised world in which it occurs. In recognising the intent of the critique, one must also note the mutual constitution of governance and resistance, local-global reverberations, and the prospects for bottom-up support identified by 'environmentality'. Hence, any signs of eco-imperialism imply 'participatory empire' at worst, which should inform rather than obstruct global environmental governance.
Topic:
Globalization and Politics

19. Corporate social responsibility: an oversocialised view of multinational corporations in Africa?

Author:
John Agbonifo
Publication Date:
01-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a buzzword in business schools, politics, NGO circles and the business community. Violent companies of yesterday, employing mistrust and malfeasance in their dealings with host communities, have become the vanguard of CSR.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
Africa

20. Oedipal authority and capitalist sovereignty: a Deleuzoguattarian reading of IR theory

Author:
Earl Gammon
Publication Date:
12-2010
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Despite advancements in the theorisation of political sovereignty brought about by the engagements of critical international relations theory, there remain significant lacunae in our understanding of the reproduction of this peculiar configuration of social life. This article, drawing on the collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari, seeks to provide a more robust theorisation of the subjectivities underpinning modern political sovereignty — here understood as capitalist sovereignty. It looks to their programme of 'schizoanalysis', which interrogates the unconscious libidinal investments of capitalist reproduction. Specifically, Deleuze and Guattari argue that a factitious Oedipal configuration of desire allows the sovereign flow of capital. This article gathers insights from schizoanalysis in elucidating a dynamic affective relationship between sovereignty and the territorial state. It also suggests the potential of schizoanalysis for reconceptualising world politics and contributing to emancipatory IR scholarship.
Topic:
Politics and Sovereignty