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21. Theorising the use of private military and security companies: a synthetic perspective

Author:
Andreas Kruck
Publication Date:
01-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article seeks to systematise and advance the theoretical debate on the causes and conditions for the privatisation of security. Drawing on previous research on private military and security companies (PMSCs) and theories from International Relations and Comparative Politics, it reconstructs functionalist, political-instrumentalist and ideationist explanations for why and under what conditions even 'strong' and democratic Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development states (extensively) use PMSCs. An analysis of inter-temporal and cross-national (United States, British, German and French) patterns of security privatisation indicates that all the three theoretical models point out causes and conditions that are relevant for a comprehensive explanation, but none is sufficient alone. Therefore, the article uses both the models and the empirical evidence to propose a synthetic perspective, which treats different explanatory conditions and logics as complementary, rather than rival. Going beyond the atheoretical conclusion that a multitude of disconnected factors are in some way relevant for a comprehensive explanation of security privatisation, I develop a thin and a thick synthesis that rely on a domain-of-application approach and sequencing, respectively. The thin synthesis spells out how different explanatory factors operate in specific domains, whereas the thick synthesis elaborates how different conditions and mechanisms apply to different phases of security privatisation and how they interrelate.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, Economics, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States and Germany

22. Replies to Chris Brown's '"Human Nature", science and international political theory'

Author:
Stefano Guzzini, Ewelina Sokolowska, Daniel Jacobi, and Stephen J Rosow
Publication Date:
01-2014
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
'Human Nature' is back—and not only in JIRD, which had a special Symposium on the topic several years ago (Freyberg-Inan 2006; Hall 2006; Mercer 2006; Sterling-Folker 2006). Two reasons seem particularly relevant for the discussion here and now. First, and for quite a while now, our normative discussions struggle with or indeed vacillate between a universalism with problematic foundations and a pluralism suspect of relativism. Second, our theories of action smuggle in assumptions about human nature upon which the impetus for a certain behaviour is to be understood, but which are often conveniently left out of the analysis. For instance, with the advent of constructivism in International Relations, the existence and explanatory status of 'rump materialism' is again up for discussion. More fundamentally, the classical dichotomies of 'mind/body' and of 'reason/emotion' have been found wanting. In this context, finding some kind of foundation in a potentially universal Human Nature would be a help welcomed by many.

23. Politics, law, and the sacred: a conceptual analysis

Author:
Friedrich V. Kratochwil
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The 'return' of religion has not only engendered new conflicts in world politics, but also fundamentally challenged the Western political project, which allegedly rests on a strict separation of the public and private sphere. Religion is supposed to play a role only within the confines of the latter, as it is considered a 'privately held belief'. Of course, this project is neither shared by all Westerners, nor is it necessarily persuasive to other cultures. Thus within the emerging global sphere it is by no means clear whether such a strict separation can muster assent.(Barbato and Kratochwil 2009: 1–24) For this reason some thinkers, such as Habermas (2003) or Connolly (1999), among many, have attempted to formulate a new approach in which ways of overcoming the dis- placement of religions to the 'private/personal' realm are explored, in order to harness the semantic potential of religion for the establishment of a discourse on global order, while avoiding at the same time the establishment of a particular orthodoxy or of a millenarian political projects based on the notion of absolute 'truth'.
Topic:
Human Rights and Law

24. Governmentality's (missing) international dimension and the promiscuity of German neoliberalism

Author:
Hans-Martin Jaeger
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
An important insight from the recent publication of Foucault's governmentality lectures for International Relations (IR) is that international manifestations of governmentalities such as police and liberalism, rather than constituting mere domestic analogies, have inherently international dimensions. Police and liberalism are both constituted by and constitutive of the international contexts in which they emerge: historically, the European balance of power and a 'globalisation' of markets, respectively. However, Foucault's account of German and American neoliberalism in the twentieth century omits references to the international context. This article first reconstructs the 'domestic-international nexus' in Foucault's account of police and liberalism, and then recovers aspects of the missing international dimension of his analysis of German neoliberalism with recourse to Wilhelm Röpke's writing on IR. The upshot of this recovery effort is threefold. First, the international remains pivotal to (mid-) twentieth-century neoliberal governmentality. Second, (German) neoliberalism's association with multiple 'international' governmentalities, including liberal and non-liberal ones, exposes neoliberalism as a 'promiscuous' mode of governance. Third, German neoliberalism's promiscuity is underwritten by (though not reducible to) a conservative ethos of moderation. More broadly, this article contributes to efforts to theorise the relationship between domestic and international politics, and to understand neoliberalism as a 'variegated' phenomenon.
Political Geography:
America and Germany

25. Locating the normative within economic science: towards the analysis of hidden discourses of democracy in international politics

Author:
Milja Kurki
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
Economic science has been overwhelmingly perceived as a 'positive' science, both among economists and many scholars in other social sciences. As a result, there has been an estrangement between the 'scientific' study of economics and the study of 'fuzzier' matters of normative nature. Crucially, it is often assumed that economists — whether academics or practitioners — have little to say about democracy, a concept that is famously normative and contested in nature. This article argues that this perception is mistaken and misleading. When several key figures in economic science are examined in detail, we can see that their economic theories are, in fact, deeply intertwined with certain normative visions of democracy, even if implicitly. Recognising the role of hidden normative theories of democracy within economic science perspectives is important theoretically, in re-reading the nature and scope of economic science discourses. It is also, however, important in understanding some key world political trends. It is argued here that we are in a better position to understand the curious 'dabbling' of global financial organisations in matters of 'political nature' when we remain attuned to the role of hidden democratic assumptions. Also, the complex role of these organisations in 'democracy promotion', and the nature of democracy promotion itself, can thus be better appreciated.
Topic:
Politics

26. Caribbean development alternatives and the CARIFORUM–European Union economic partnership agreement

Author:
Anthony Payne, Matthew Louis Bishop, and Tony Heron
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) signed in October 2008 between the Caribbean and the European Union has been the subject of much controversy. There has been a marked split within the Caribbean between the officials and politicians who negotiated — and thus championed — the EPA and the wider academic and civil society community that subjected it to heavy criticism. The paper examines these debates in detail and situates them within the broader intellectual and practical panorama of Caribbean development alternatives. Specifically, it discusses how the terrain upon which development has been both theorised and practised in the region has narrowed significantly since the 1980s, with the EPA being the latest manifestation of this evolving trend. The paper consequently goes beyond an analysis of the short-term politics of the EPA to elucidate the deeper, structural explanations for the divisions over the EPA between the policy and academic communities and the wider implications of the Agreement for contemporary Caribbean development.
Topic:
Development
Political Geography:
Europe and Caribbean

27. The Common Agricultural Policy Health Check: time to check the health of the theory of the reform?

Author:
Marko Lovec and Emil Erjavec
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
In 2008, the ministers of agriculture of European Union member states made a political agreement on the Common Agricultural Policy reform, also known as the Health Check. The reform coincided with three things: the ongoing Doha round of the World Trade Organization negotiations; political pressures to limit the costs of the policy financed from the common budget; and various 'new' policy issues. Rational institutional and constructivist approaches, which are often viewed as theoretical alternatives with each explaining some aspects of the reform, have employed simplified and narrow abstractions in conceptualising the role of these policy contexts. In order to identify the mechanisms facilitating the Health Check, a critical realist approach is proposed here, arguing that the relationship among the trade negotiations, budget bargaining, new issues and the policy reform can be explained by theoretically endorsing the asymmetrical development of the agricultural production factors and of production relations. A qualitative analysis is used to determine which of these three approaches seems to be better able to explain the empirical evidence.
Topic:
Development and Reform
Political Geography:
Europe

28. The feasibility of an expanded regime on the use of force: the case of the responsibility to protect

Author:
Douglas Brommesson and Henrik Friberg Fernros
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This article addresses the question of whether an expanded regime on the use of force, based on the report The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) of 2001, would be feasible. The formula of the R2P has since found its way into the United Nations machinery via the final resolution from the World Summit in 2005 and can be seen as an emerging and more permissive norm on the use of force in cases of humanitarian catastrophes. The question of whether or not the theoretical framework of the norm is feasible is therefore urgent. Our analysis of feasibility is based on three logics of human action: the logic of consequence, logic of appropriateness and logic of arguing. We argue that each of these logics contains aspects that must be observed before a regime can be considered feasible. These logics are coupled with three mechanisms of socialisation of norms: strategic calculation, role-playing and normative suasion. We construct a minimal standard for a feasible regime by deducing requirements from the logics and their mechanisms, and then apply that standard to the content of the ICISS report. The empirical results show that the report must address the fact that it lacks qualities in regard to all three logics, before the expanded regime can be considered feasible.

29. Why metaphor and other tropes? Linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political

Author:
Alan Cienki and Dvora Yanow
Publication Date:
04-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
The articles in this special issue on linguistic approaches to analysing policies and the political share the goal of taking language seriously, achieved through detailed attention to linguistic usage in its respective contexts. They reflect a stance common to both cognitive linguistic and interpretive/constructivist approaches, namely a view of language as integrally constituting the world it presents, reflecting, at least in part, its users' experiences of that world. One key form of language use discussed is that of metaphor. Rather than being seen as merely a poetic device, metaphor is viewed in several of the articles as playing a pivotal role in the framing of policy or political issues, which it does by casting one idea in terms of the imagery of another. For example, talking about a political entity, such as a country, in terms of it being a kind of container can invite certain inferences about how political states function - in this case, reasoning about inclusion of members within the state 'container' vs. exclusion from it. The research shows that metaphors often have important ties with categorisation, the categories used being determined in part by the words we use to name concepts. In addition to metaphor, metonymy also plays a significant role. The articles show the intimate relationship between political language and political acts.
Topic:
Politics

30. Constituting China: the role of metaphor in the discourses of early Sino-American relations

Author:
Eric M Blanchard
Publication Date:
04-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Relations and Development
Institution:
Central and East European International Studies Association
Abstract:
This paper demonstrates the value of political metaphor analysis as a tool for answering constitutive questions in International Relations (IR) theory, questions that attend to how the subjects of international politics are constituted by encounters with other subjects through representational and interactional processes. To this end, I examine the key metaphors within American political discourse that guided and structured early Sino-American interactions, focusing on US Secretary of State John Hay's Open Door notes and the contemporaneous Chinese Exclusion Acts. Viewed from a social constructivist metaphor perspective, this metaphorical protection of free trade and great power privilege hid the assumption that China was unable to act as its own doorkeeper, obscuring debates in the domestic and international spheres as to the meaning of 'Chinese' and the appropriate strategy for managing the encounter. A second approach, the cognitive perspective, builds on the seminal IR applications of cognitive linguistics and cognitive metaphor theory to reveal the deeper conceptual basis, specifically the container schema, upon which this encounter was predicated. Used in tandem, these two approaches to the constitutive role of political metaphor illuminate the processes by which metaphors win out over competing discourses to become durable features of international social relations.
Topic:
International Relations
Political Geography:
United States, China, and America