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3701. Kenneth Waltz, Adam Smith and the Limits of Science: Hard choices for neoclassical realism

Author:
Adam Quinn
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article argues that neoclassical realism (NCR), though it presents one of the most intuitively attractive frameworks for understanding states' actions, continues to struggle with a central conceptual tension. Some have argued that NCR is compatible with a structural realist approach, even that it is a 'logical extension' of it. Yet in seeking to identify law-like patterns of state behaviour arising from the varied features of states themselves, NCR appears to breach the outer limits of what Kenneth Waltz, the founding father of structural International Relations theory, thought tolerable in a theory of international politics. Thus, NCR arguably faces a fork in the road as to its future agenda and theoretical identity: should it limit itself essentially to chronicling anomalous occurrences within a fundamentally Waltzian paradigm, or try to map new rules of state behaviour on a scale that ultimately calls the primacy of Waltz's 'systemic imperatives' into question?
Topic:
International Relations

3702. Kenneth Waltz and Leon Trotsky: Anarchy in the mirror of uneven and combined development

Author:
Justin Rosenberg
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Waltz's neorealist theory has been charged with falsely separating geopolitical from social and economic processes. Yet Waltz's critics themselves have failed to show how sociological and geopolitical phenomena can be explained in a unified international theory. Such a theory, says Waltz, would have to pass three tests. It must delimit a field of specifically international phenomena. It must identify structured (and hence theorizable) effects within this field. And it must furnish 'a brilliant intuition', which reveals the causal relations that explain these effects. This article argues that the idea of 'uneven and combined development' (U) can pass these tests. The article delimits 'the international' as those phenomena arising from the interactive multiplicity of societies. Next, it uses Gerschenkron's theory of backwardness to identify internationally structured effects arising from societal multiplicity. And finally, by considering the debate on the First World War, it explores how the causal mechanisms identified by U can be used to construct a unified sociological and geopolitical explanation.
Topic:
Economics

3703. The 'knowledge politics' of democratic peace theory

Author:
Inderjeet Parmar
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
How do academic ideas influence US foreign policy, under what conditions and with what consequences? This article traces the rise, 'securitisation' and political consequences of democratic peace theory (DPT) in the United States by exploring the work of Doyle, Diamond and Fukuyama. Ideas influence US foreign policy under different circumstances, but are most likely to do either during and after crises when the policy environment permits 'new thinking', or when these ideas have been developed through state-connected elite knowledge networks, or when they are (or appear paradigmatically congenial to) foreign policymakers' mindsets, or, finally, when they become institutionally-embedded. The appropriation of DPT by foreign policymakers has categorised the world into antagonistic blocs – democratic/non-democratic zones of peace/turmoil – as the corollary to a renewed American mission to make the world 'safer' through 'democracy' promotion. The roles of networked organic intellectuals – in universities and think tanks, for instance – were particularly important in elevating DPT from the academy to national security managers.
Topic:
Economics
Political Geography:
United States

3704. The 'Concert of Democracies': Why some states are more equal than others

Author:
Anna Geis
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article engages with a discourse emerging from international political theory, international law and political science on awarding privileges to democracies in crucial issues of global governance. Proposals that a 'Concert of Democracies' should be legally entitled to take decisions in case the United Nations Security Council is unable or unwilling to act are amongst the most prominent expression of this vision of the stratification of the international society into first-class and second-class regimes. The article reconstructs central tenets of this discourse on the inclusion and exclusion of regime types and shows that this kind of differentiation of states has been very much inspired by readings and appropriations of 'democratic peace' scholarship in International Relations. The article critiques the underlying problematic theoretical assumptions and the practical implications of democratic peace theory and policy proposals inferred from it.
Topic:
International Law and United Nations

3705. Explaining US unilateral military intervention in civil conflicts: A review of the literature

Author:
Amber Aubone
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Recent third-party use of force in hastening the exit of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi illustrates that third-party military intervention is one foreign policy tool among many that leaders may use to achieve desired ends. Numerous works from international relations and foreign policy scholars explain third-party intervention using a variety of approaches and methods, and examining multiple levels of analysis. The survey of the literature provided here contributes to our understanding of US unilateral intervention by examining this phenomenon using both general theories of third-party intervention, as well as more refined foreign policy theories explaining US intervention in particular. As such, the survey includes works employing various approaches and levels of analysis, and thus serves two purposes: (a) to assist in the cumulation of knowledge pertaining to US unilateral intervention through consolidation of theory and empirical findings; (b) to serve as a source from which scholars can identify contradictions and future avenues of research pertaining to third-party intervention.
Topic:
International Law
Political Geography:
United States and Libya

3706. On getting hit by traffic coming in both directions: A response to Dr Karen Devine's 'epistemology matters'

Author:
David Houghton
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This reply to Dr Karen Devine restates my claim, originally published in International Politics, that our epistemological assumptions do not affect our substantive (or ontological) claims about international relations (IR) as much as we commonly think. Even if we restrict ourselves purely to deconstructing the arguments others have made, and to analyzing the discourses of IR, it is very difficult in practice to be genuinely postmodernist in a way that makes a real difference to empirical research. We always end up saying that reality is the way it is, no matter how hard we try to hedge it around with disclaimers of various sorts.
Topic:
International Political Economy

3707. The politics of liberal internationalism

Author:
Tim Dunne and Matt McDonald
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
How is it that internationalism has become the dominant form of statecraft pursued by liberal states and by international organisations, and yet it has received relatively scant attention in International Relations (IR) both historically and conceptually? It is time that the field addressed the paucity of writings on an institutionalised idea that has shaped order-building for more than two centuries. The article opens with a consideration of internationalism and its status in political theory and IR, arguing that a variety of different configurations have taken hold in different historical moments. We then consider the coexistence of internationalism and imperialism as an illustration of how the ambiguities and tensions in liberal statecraft can be manifested. The article closes with a consideration of the international normative order-building that has taken place after 1945 and the critical issue of the resilience of liberal internationalism given the 'crisis' identified with it. For all its dangers and dilemmas, we make the case for engaging the politics of liberal internationalism as a site in which normative and practical concerns of global politics meet, and in which the calls to protect the interests of national communities are mediated by the imperative of 'purposes beyond ourselves'.
Topic:
International Political Economy

3708. The 'Good State' debate in international relations

Author:
Peter Lawler
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
The idea of the State as embodying moral virtue has a long, mostly inwardly focussed history. In international relations thought, sporadic Liberal explorations of the state as a 'good international citizen' have been vulnerable to Realist scepticism or dismissal. The Cold War's end saw a revival of Liberal enthusiasm for the Good State, but the translation of this into the foreign policies of key Western states generated new lines of critique focussing on the underlying universalism. Drawing upon aspects of much less-discussed Scandinavian internationalist discourse, the possibility of a more modest, open and thus sustainable understanding of the Good State is explored.
Topic:
International Relations

3709. Liberal internationalism, the practice of special responsibilities and evolving politics of the security council

Author:
Christian Reus-Smit and Ian Clark
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
Liberal internationalism represents a package of evolving and contending commitments, and this article traces the development within it of one practice with a longer history, namely the allocation of special responsibilities. Responsibilities are those things for which actors are held accountable and, internationally, these have negotiated between sovereign equality and material inequality, in search of a means of more effectively dealing with global problems. The definition of these responsibilities generates an intense politics and these are reviewed through the remit of the Security Council. The article considers the basis for the allocation of traditional special responsibilities for security to the Council and then tracks their extension in recent years to the issue of humanitarian protection. The vehicle for this has been the transformation of a practice about the use of the veto, towards one that calls for its non-use in humanitarian cases. This analysis of special responsibilities unsettles the separation between order and justice, and points to the challenges currently facing liberal internationalism.
Topic:
International Relations

3710. The good state, from a cosmic point of view

Author:
Anthony Burke
Publication Date:
01-2013
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Politics
Institution:
Palgrave Macmillan
Abstract:
This article considers the question of the good state - and its normative model of foreign policy, internationalism - from a cosmopolitan perspective. This cosmopolitan worldview pushes beyond anthropocentrism to anchor its account in the vulnerability of humanity both to the political dangers it poses to itself and to the cosmic arrangement of chance that enables complex life on earth. The essay first critiques both academic and policy defences of internationalism as a 'middle-ground' between realism and cosmopolitanism by putting its statist ontology into question - that is, its fundamental account of human existence as bounded and determined by the nation-state. The perseverance of this underlying statist ontology creates tensions within academic defences of good international citizenship, which profess strongly cosmopolitan norms but whose moral philosophy, in accepting some practices of Realpolitik, is ethically insufficient. It then asserts an alternative ontology of (interdependent) human existence across borders and ecosystems, one that incorporates an ethically transformed state as a legal principle and an important means of cosmopolitan world order.