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61. 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

62. Missing the target: NGOs, global civil society and the arms trade

Author:
Anna Stavrianakis
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Non-governmental organisation (NGO) activism on the arms trade is emblematic of the significant and emancipatory role attributed to civil society in post-Cold War international politics. Discussions of NGOs' efforts are marked by a distinctively liberal understanding of civil society as an increasingly global sphere separate from the state and market, promoting progressive and non-violent social relations. However, there are significant conceptual and empirical problems with these claims, which I illustrate using examples from contemporary NGO activism on the international production of and trade in conventional weaponry. First, liberal accounts underplay the mutual dependence between the state, market and civil society. NGO agency is both constrained and enabled by its historical, structural grounding. Second, I argue for a more ambivalent understanding of NGOs' progressive political value. While some NGOs may play a role in counter-hegemonic struggle, overall they are more likely to contribute to hegemonic social formations. Third, liberal accounts of a global civil society inadequately capture the reproduction of hierarchy in international relations, downplaying ongoing, systematic patterns of North-South asymmetry. Fourth, the emphasis on the non-violent nature of global civil society sidelines the violence of capitalism and the state system, and serves as a means of disciplining dissent and activism.
Topic:
Cold War and Non-Governmental Organization

63. 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

64. 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

65. Liberal fundamentals: invisible, invasive, artful, and bloody hands

Author:
Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney
Publication Date:
04-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Returning to liberalism's Scottish Enlightenment precursors suggests that the liberal order might best be described by the tension between its assertions about the smoothing natural harmonies within the social order and its doubts about whether those harmonies can appear spontaneously and therefore require aggressive projects of reform and correction. Although committed to the inevitability and inexorability of progress, such doubts led Scottish Enlightenment figures to strategies that even today continue to mark liberalism's effort to purify modern progress of tragedy's taint. We continue to justify apparent social failings as necessary to the natural order, regarding them instead as advantages in a Providentialist manner (Smith and Hume). We preserve our faith in commercial society by aggressively reforming and correcting those inside and outside others who resist the inevitabilities we have embraced (Millar). We accept the disorders and instabilities inherent in modern market society, but replace our hope in the automaticity of adjustment with a belief in the capacity of the state or some form of international governance to resolve tensions in some higher-order liberalism (Steuart). We call for a moral revival to restore values that our contemporary liberal institutions cannot possibly sustain (Ferguson). In sum, maintaining liberalism's idealised vision of itself in the face of these necessary limits and ill consequences calls forth the purificatory zeal of the fundamentalist. If we wish to move past a response that offers us more liberalism and more zeal as a solution to the problems of liberalism, we need something that is both within and beyond liberal fundamentals: a liberalism that accepts truths beyond itself; that looks to multiple ontologies for political and ethical resources; and that accepts plural and multiple versions of virtue and progress negotiated between liberalism's fundamentals and varying local ideals and conditions.
Topic:
Governance
Political Geography:
Scotland

66. Hierarchy in World Politics

Author:
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and George Lawson
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
With this Special Issue the editorial team fulfils a campaign promise, so to speak. In our original proposal to assume the editorship of the Journal of International Relations and Development, we proposed three special features: a Forum on IR in Eastern and Central Europe (published in issue 12:2), a Forum on post-Communist and post-Socialist transitions (published in issue 12:4), and a Special Issue on hierarchy in world politics. The four papers collected here represent the end result of a process of soliciting proposals for manuscripts, putting those manuscripts through the regular peer-review process, and selecting papers that would allow a multi-faceted exploration of a complex topic that has made its way back into IR after the long interregnum of theories and models that focused on presumptively equivalent states operating under conditions of anarchy. But this is more than simply 'bringing hierarchy back in'; the new focus on unequal relations of power in world politics is a good deal more sophisticated than the sometimes blunt assertions of dependency theory and early world-systems accounts. The papers that we have assembled for this Special Issue represent some, but by no means all, of the rich analytical diversity in contemporary accounts of hierarchy in world politics.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
Europe

67. Empire, imperialism and conceptual history

Author:
Helge Jordheim and Iver B Neumann
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Hierarchy in world politics has to be discussed by means of specific concepts. Concepts come with specific historical and social baggage. They are defined by their meanings and uses and become powerful in battle with other concepts. The concepts discussed in this article, 'empire' and 'imperialism', have lately made their return to the grand stage of world politics, most significantly as descriptions, and indeed, self-descriptions of the role and position of the United States. How is this return possible? What does it mean? To answer these questions we draw on the long-standing scientific discipline and method of conceptual history, or Begriffsgeschichte, in the way it has been theorised and practised by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck. In a second step, we discuss how this way of writing the history of social and political concepts has been challenged by other approaches, most importantly by the Cambridge intellectual historian Quentin Skinner. At the hands of Koselleck and Skinner conceptual history contributes to opening our eyes to the historical specificity of the uses and meanings of concepts in particular contexts, in a long historical perspective ranging from the Ancient Romans to the Bush administration.
Topic:
History
Political Geography:
United States

68. 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

69. The Middle East in the world hierarchy: imperialism and resistance

Author:
Raymond Hinnebusch
Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This study deploys a structuralist framework of analysis, modified by elements from other theories, to examine the place of the Middle East in the world hierarchy. It surveys the origins of the regional system in imperialism's peripheralisation and fragmentation of the region, the core-periphery clientalist hierarchy thereby established, regional agency within the system, including the foreign policies of dependent and rebellious states, and the on-going struggle over the hierarchical order between revisionist forces in the Middle East and the global hegemons.
Topic:
Foreign Policy
Political Geography:
Middle East

70. Hegemony, not empire

Publication Date:
04-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
After a period of terminological indecision, 'empire' has staged a startling academic comeback since the beginning of this century. Like the notion of hegemony, which dominated earlier debates on the United States and world order, the term 'empire' has never been uncontested. Furthermore, no clear delineation between the two concepts emerged, and under-conceptualisation resulted in a lasting confusion about their analytical value. Analysing the pitfalls of the central debates on empire and hegemonic stability, the article contends that the choice of terminology has frequently been motivated politically rather than by scientific standards. We find that proponents of 'empire' have largely misinterpreted the policy strategy of empire — as applied by the George W. Bush administration — for the real thing, an existing empire. In this article, instead, using Gary Goertz' (2006) approach to conceptual analysis, we suggest a reformulation of the concept of hegemony to capture the current international system in which the US still enjoys an undisputed preponderance of power. With a focus on how power is used, hegemony is understood as a specific form of leadership that is dependent on the perception of its legitimacy and is differentiated with regard to its regional and global reach.
Political Geography:
United States