Anarchy,hierarchy and order

How does order emerge from anarchy? While scholars generally agree that international politics is anarchic, there is much dispute about how anarchy orders relationships. This paper challenges prevailing views by attacking the problem of anarchy from behind. We examine how hierarchy creates order and argue that two mechanisms are responsible. The first is the direct actions of a leviathan; the second is an indirect effect, which counterintuitively results from insurmountable handicaps to central authority, that we call the threat of incompetent intervention. We then examine how these two mechanisms affect order as power decentralizes and highlight how bottom–up and top–down processes intersect. Our arguments are tested in difficult cases: highly developed states, where central authority is strongest, and international politics, where central authority is weakest. The arguments have broad implications for all the paradigms, trust in world politics and organizational change.     

A survey of research foci and paradigms in media and communication Master's dissertations and doctoral theses in South Africa

This study set out to evaluate the foci and paradigms of research in media and communication at Master's and doctoral levels in South Africa. A sample of 241 dissertations and theses in the communication, journalism and media studies programmes of nine universities, from 2004 to 2013, categorised into historically black, historically white Afrikaans-medium and English-medium, were obtained from the databases of the National Research Foundation and some of the universities. The findings show that the production of PhD theses is far lower than that of Master's dissertations. Qualitative design tended to be the dominant approach adopted, followed by a mixed methods approach, and the quantitative approach. The focus of most of the theses is journalism, followed by general media studies. The findings further show that historically black universities bottom the table in the production of related theses and dissertations, while white English-speaking universities top the list. Also, there is evidence of a relationship between the historical origin/language of the universities and the research designs adopted, as well as the research focus of the theses. The article recommends, among others, the need for a clear-cut statement of research methodologies and designs in such theses and dissertations, greater motivation for enrolment in PhD programmes, a strengthening of historically black universities for better performance in postgraduate research, and the incorporation of the experimental method in media research in South Africa.     

The Highs and Lows of Teaching IR Theory: Using Popular Films for Theoretical Critique

This article introduces an approach to IR that uses popular films to teach students how to critically analyze IR theory. By pairing IR traditions (like Realism) and the slogans that go with them (like "international anarchy is the permissive cause of war") with popular films (like Lord of the Flies ), this approach poses questions not about the truth or falsity of IR theories but about how IR theories appear to be true. This technique works because it draws upon visual analytical skills that students already possess and transfers them to analyses of IR theory and international politics. Overall, it challenges the positioning of IR theory as beyond culture and politics rather than as part and parcel of it, transforms what we think of as doing critical IR theory, and repositions students from passive recipients of IR truths into critically active and engaged analysts of IR theory's commonsense views of the world.     

Sociology and international relations: legacies and prospects

While sociological concepts have often been implicitly used in International Relations (IR), recent years have seen a more explicit engagement between IR and Sociology. As with any such interdisciplinary assignation, there are both possibilities and challenges contained within this move: possibilities in terms of reducing IR's intellectual autism and opening the discipline towards potentially fertile terrain that was never, actually, that distant; challenges in that interdisciplinary raiding parties can often serve as pseudonyms for cannibalism, shallowness and dilettantism. This forum reviews the sociological turn in IR and interrogates it from a novel vantage point—how sociologists themselves approach IR concepts, debates and issues. Three sociological approaches—classical social theory, historical sociology and Foucauldian analysis—are critically deployed to illuminate IR concerns. In this way, the forum offers the possibility of (re)establishing exchanges between the two disciplines premised on a firmer grasp of social theory itself. The result is a potentially more fruitful sociological turn, one with significant benefits for IR as a whole.     

Power,Patterns, and Process in European Union History

Sebastian Rosato's admirably provocative Europe United retells the origins of the European Union (EU) as a realist story of the balance of power. While he deserves praise for a bold attempt to extend offensive realism into history's greatest instance of international cooperation, the book ultimately reads as a cautionary methodological tale about how not to support a realist argument. Realist theory has been influential mainly because it offers strong expectations about major patterns in the world—relatively unitary decision-making within states and specific kinds of foreign policies between them—but Rosato's evidence focuses on a thin version of process. He selectively cites leaders' statements about their policy choices across the story, providing no leverage on how these statements related to patterned interests within or across countries. Interestingly, a similar error weakens work by the most salient IR scholar writing on EU history, Andrew Moravcsik. Their shared problems hint at a pattern of IR scholars overlooking patterns in historical evidence.     

试论日本武士家训形成及其影响——以中日两国家族制度和家训的差异为视角

日本武士家训是日本齐家、治国安邦之训的源泉。由于中日两国家族制度的不同,导致两国在选拔人才以及用人模式上形成显著差异。伴随武士阶层统治地位的巩固和深入,促成了浓缩和凝聚日本民族性格息息相关的武士家训的产生。日本武士家训源于中国并在日本扎根,经与神佛文化相结合,通过家训的创造者对个体在社会生活中的经验总结,制定出具有简洁、通俗、真实可信特点的,能够影响和制约家族成员思想意识和行为规范的家训。经武士家训在不同历史时期的创造和重构以及在其他阶层的广泛延伸,最终成为奴役日本民族性格和精神的工具,作用于近、现代日本民族强国之途的全过程。     

A Revised List of Wars Between and Within Independent States, 1816-2002

This paper merges constructivist theoretical insights into the rival role identity, rival role relationships, and the resulting culture of anarchy that characterizes the interstate system with recent empirical measures of rivalry. This project is carried out through an examination of the Latin American regional subsystem, which has already received some attention from analysts concerned with interstate culture, largely because of the relative lack of interstate conflict in the region. The dyadic relationships of 17 Latin American states and the culture they produce are examined between 1948 and 1992. The paper employs simultaneous equation modeling to capture aspects of the co-constitution of these agents and structures, consistent with constructivist theory. The results indicate that the Lockean culture of anarchy and the adoption of a dyadic rival role relationship are affected by a variety of factors emphasized by realists, liberals, and constructivists in the Latin American context.     

The myth of liberal peace-building

‘Liberal peace-building’ is a subject of intense debate within contemporary IR. This article contends, however, that for all the merits of much of the work on the subject, the overall terms of the debate are rooted in a series of questionable assumptions. Proponents and critics alike hold that peace-building is an essentially liberal project, over which there is a global (or Western) consensus, and which is pursued by a decentralised plurality of institutions irrespective of the particularly of war-endings. This article shows that this is misleading. Focusing on the relations between peace agreements and peace-building, it shows that peace agreements are contextually specific political arrangements, driven above all by strategic considerations of power and legitimacy, in relation to which liberal peace-building doctrines and practices are unevenly applied, instrumentalised or plain ignored—including by international actors. It argues in turn that liberal peace-building discourse overstates both the liberalism of contemporary peace interventions, and the degree of global consensus thereover, and fails to capture the enduring centrality of states, strategy and geopolitics in the making of peace. These arguments are developed with reference to a wide range of cases of post-Cold War peace interventions, though with especial focus on UN peace-building in Cambodia in the early 1990s.     

Independence Day as a Cosmopolitan Moment: Teaching International Relations

This essay expands upon a teaching approach that I used in my introductory international relations (IR) course for three semesters prior to September 11, 2001. The vast majority of the curriculum of the course is read through Independence Day , a 1996 blockbuster Hollywood film. Beginning with the film and the concept of world order it arguably provides through a fictional moment of world peace (or hegemony, depending how one interprets the leading role of the U.S. in the film and the significance of the Fourth of July holiday as the world's Independence Day, hence ID4 ) students are able to understand several key concepts in IR theory, as well as the major paradigms of IR thought that I present to them. ID4 presents the viewer with the IR field's two great mythological narratives, realism and idealism, and preserves the notion of the nation-state as the predominant actor and unit of analysis for understanding world history and key events in that history.     

When States Choose to Die: Reassessing Assumptions About What States Want

In order to explain the creation and maintenance of a number of important international institutions, scholars must reconsider a commonly held assumption about what states want. Structural realists show that the assumption that states desire survival explains a wide range of outcomes. Yet the survival assumption prevents both realists and liberal institutionalists from offering a plausible account of international organizations that are costly to autonomy. The cultures of anarchy argument helps explain when the desire to survive is more or less salient but is burdened with the survival assumption nonetheless. I argue that it is useful to assume that states pursue the national interest and that survival is only a potential means to that end. By employing this assumption within the cultures of anarchy framework, we can begin to formulate an explanation for the willingness of states to cede autonomy to international institutions.     

The single-state alternative in Palestine/Israel

Since the Oslo Accords, the two-state solution has dominated, and frustrated, the official search for peace in Palestine/Israel. In parallel to it, an alternative struggle of resistance—centred upon the single-state idea as a more liberating pathway towards justice to the conflict—has re-emerged against the hegemony of Zionism and the demise of a viable two-state solution in Palestine/Israel. This paper inquires into the nature of this phenomenon as a movement of resistance. To this end, it reconstructs the re-emergence of the single-state solution intellectually and organisationally from within a Gramscian-inspired lens—while specifically focusing upon the centrality of the anti-Oslo writings of Edward Said and the consequent role of the Diaspora within this alternative. This it does from within a de-colonial approach to the politics of resistance which centres the political practices of the oppressed themselves in its analysis. Thus, it analyses the potential of the single-state alternative as a Gramscian ‘philosophical movement’ from within its own self-understandings, strategies and maps to power. In doing so, it aims to shed light upon a largely silenced pathway of resistance to the current peace process, to question its location between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, and to take its possibility as a more just alternative to the status quo seriously.     

Of ‘witch's brews’ and scholarly communities: the dangers and promise of academic parrhesia

In a series of lectures in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault resurrected the Greek word for frankness or truth-telling—‘parrhesia’—to investigate the inter-relationships and tensions that existed between freedom, truth-telling and political power. He concluded that in order for one to ‘tell the truth’ against a powerful superior, one needs the courage to oppose a community of which the parrhesiastes (‘truth teller’) is a member. This paper uses parrhesia to investigate the practice of the international relations (IR) scholar in speaking out against his or her scholarly community. Tony Smith's 2007 book Pact with the devil is used as an example of academic-intellectual parrhesia not only to illustrate the content of a potential form of parrhesia, but to demonstrate the challenges IR scholars who wish to practise academic parrhesia face in criticizing members of their academic community. Smith's critique of democratic peace theory specifically, and liberal IR theory more generally, is particularly noteworthy considering Smith's former position as a leading liberal proponent. The paper reviews, and then supplements and extends, Smith's critique of democratic peace theory.     

Relationality and rationality in Confucian and Western traditions of thought

Abstract

This paper provides a theoretical sketch of relationality within the field of International Relations (IR). It argues, contrary to what many IR scholars hold, that representation is practice: academic representation reflects the background of a community of practice and highlights what is embodied therein. Therefore, different cultural communities have different practices and draw from different background knowledge. Rationality, which serves as the dominant foundation for background knowledge within many Western communities of practice, permeates mainstream IR theory. Relationality performs a similar role in traditionally Confucian communities of practice, where relations enjoy a distinct ontological status over individual rationality. A relational theory assumes (1) that self-existence coincides with other-existence and coexistence, and (2) that self-interest coincides with other-interest. Based on these assumptions, it argues that relations select, meaning that in a social situation actors base their action on relations in the first place and that rationality is and can only be defined in terms of relations. The article uses the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an example to elaborate its theoretical point.     

Creating the Financial Stability Forum: What Role for Existing Institutions?

The Financial Stability Forum (FSF)—now rebranded as the Financial Stability Board (FSB)—has become a focal point for financial regulatory initiatives in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Despite its central status, the body has received little attention from scholars. This is particularly striking both in light of the increasing centrality of the FSF/FSB within the realm of financial regulatory governance and the body's unusual structure and composition. Indeed, the creation and design of the FSF pose an empirical puzzle: what explains the creation of a new, informal and loosely structured institution and the centre of a financial regulatory governance regime? At the time of the Forum's creation, the broader financial architecture was marked by significant institutional density, with a large number of international organisations engaged in governance activities. This paper argues that it is precisely the structure and activities of these existing institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Joint Forum on Financial Conglomerates, which account for the creation and design of the FSF, and points to the need for scholars to take seriously the role of organisations operating within institutionally dense spaces.     

Endogenous knowledge and the development question in Africa*

An apt analogy for speaking to Africa's experience with development is offered by the twinning of colonialism and modernization. While colonialism left behind some forms of hybridity and mimicry, the urge to decolonize—to be free from the colonizer's control in every possible way—was integral to all anti-colonial criticism after the Second World War. The politics of decolonization followed by the new states in the mid twentieth century, however, displayed an uncritical emphasis on modernization, in which development, pursued—with technology and tools of scientific progress—was a catching-up exercise with the West. As an epistemological export from the West, taking the form of science as hegemony and ideology within colonial discourse, this has not delivered material progress for Africa. The widespread concern about the intractability and magnitude of the problems facing the continent has made development a popular theme in the literature on African studies. The disappointment across various academic circles and the popular press over the dwindling prospects of development in Africa—illustrated in its food insecurity, low life expectancy and the familiar litany of its ills—has made revisiting the debates on African development both compelling and timely. Much has consequently been written on what development is or should be about in Africa. This article underlines the centrality of endogenous knowledge as the material precondition for autonomous development for Africa.     

Illusion or Intention? Talking Grand Strategy into Existence

Richard Betts argued that strategy—the idea that a state's political ends could be reliably linked to its coercive means—is a necessary illusion. Without strategy, war is mindless killing; but its rationales cannot guide state choices because there is a yawning gap between the macro level where strategy is articulated and the micro level of day-to-day choices. That gap is particularly insurmountable when beginning, as Betts does, from a rationalist model of action. I propose that grand strategy is best understood as a case of collective intentionality, a concept that amends the rationalist framework in a way that makes it possible to clarify an analytic pathway from grand strategy to state behavior. Crucial to this pathway are legitimation processes found in forums, and I argue that grand strategies can pull state behavior when they are tied to forums. Focusing on the interstate case, I develop a causal mechanism from the forum, to ways of talking, to commitment-consistent behavior. I illustrate the argument with an example from the Concert of Europe. Stacie E. Goddard and Ronald R. Krebs propose that legitimation processes might be particularly successful where institutions are weak. My framework helps flesh out that proposition: even in anarchy, action commitments can affect states’ behavior through the mechanisms of the forum.     

For the Present and the Future: The Well-Conceived,Successful, and Farsighted Statecraft of President Theodore Roosevelt

“It is difficult to escape the conclusion,” this historian has claimed in previous writings, “that in the foreign policy arena [Theodore] Roosevelt was probably the greatest of all US presidents.” Such a laudatory interpretation is built on an assessment of both the record achieved by Rooseveltian diplomacy during the years of Roosevelt's presidency and the long-term significance of TR's statecraft. In its own time Roosevelt's foreign policy success grew out of a sophisticated understanding of a complex international environment, a well-conceived perspective on America's interests within that environment, and a multitude of attributes in the realm of execution that usually enabled Roosevelt, even in the most challenging cases, to attain the results he was seeking. As to its long-range importance, Rooseveltian statecraft was anchored to three precepts that might be labeled the “precept of broadly defined US interests,” the “precept of US power,” and the “precept of Anglo-American leadership.” By conducting a foreign policy grounded on these precepts, Roosevelt – certainly well ahead of the great majority of his contemporaries – anticipated the type of foreign policy approach that would become and has remained the foundation for the practice of statecraft by many Republican and Democratic presidents and their most influential advisers from 1939 to the present day.     

From Friendship to Patronage: France–Israel Relations, 1958–1967

The article has two main theses: first, that from 1958 to 1967—Charles de Gaulle's presidency—there was a typical patron-client relationship between France and Israel that lasted until the Six Day War. It challenges the frequent claim in the literature that relations between Israel and France did not essentially change after de Gaulle's rise to power. Second, it argues that the basis on which this relationship was founded was rocky from the start since as a client, Israel was not ready to accede to French demands that it restrain its security policy to conform to key French interests.