North Korea’s perspective on the U.S.-North Korea peace treaty

Kim Byong Hong is deputy director of the Institute for Disarmament and Peace, Pyongyang, DPRK. This paper was presented at a conference in Pyongyang in fall 1994.     

ECOWAS protagonists for peace: An internal perspective on policy and community actors in peacemaking interventions

ABSTRACT

Despite an increasing academic interest, ECOWAS peacemaking interventions have largely been approached from a top-down perspective. This tends to highlight the roles played by high-level mediators who use ECOWAS and its instruments as the basis for their interventions. Deeper analyses of the undercurrent intra-ECOWAS processes and the role played by community actors, in particular the ECOWAS Commission and its cooperation with civil society organisations, are rare. Yet it is both the high-level policy and the community actors that constitute the protagonists of ECOWAS peacemaking. This article examines the roles of both protagonists in the planning and conduct of ECOWAS peacemaking. Based on secondary sources and insider accounts, it argues that, although policy actors have so far been dominant, community actors play a complementary role, which often goes unnoticed. This is illustrated with empirical examples of ECOWAS peacemaking interventions from the Liberian war in 1990 to the recent case of the Gambia.     

Japanese foreign policy: Inaction and reaction

Japan's tendency to simply react to international trends rather than to formulate its own policies is as prevalent today as during the Meiji period when the country was trying to catch up to the West, says Gerald Curtis, professor of political science at Columbia University. When international trends are murky, such as before World War II, this tendency can easily lead to disaster, Curtis says. Japan must break with the past and define its international role in the post‐Cold War era, Curtis argues, but the public debate required to achieve this is unlikely until Japan's domestic politics become more sharply defined.     

Postwar Japan-China Relations: A Consideration from the Perspective of Reconciliation

This article attempts to take a new look at postwar Japan-China relations from the perspective of reconciliation. In contrast to the Murayama and Koizumi statements, one key phrase characterized both the August 14, 2015 Abe Statement and the report of the 21st Century Advisory Panel, which had been submitted earlier to the government: that key phrase is “postwar reconciliation.”     

Partisan-motivated prorogation and the Westminster model: a comparative perspective

Recent cases of partisan-motivated prorogations of parliaments at the federal and provincial levels in Canada have focused attention on this phenomenon. While such prorogations are uncommon in the mature Westminster-style parliaments, the Canadian cases are not unique. Systematic study of partisan-motivated prorogations in the Australian states has illuminated the factors commonly associated with such cases. This paper outlines the results of this literature and then tests whether the Canadian cases fit the pattern. It shows that, on balance, these factors do apply. The paper thus concludes that, while partisan-motivated prorogations may not be predictable, it is possible to identify circumstances in which there is a substantially greater risk of their occurrence.     

Understanding South Africa's foreign policy: the perplexing case of Zimbabwe

Many who have admired the African National Congress are confused and dismayed by post-apartheid South Africa's foreign policy on human rights and good governance, exemplified by its most important policy test to date, viz. Zimbabwe. It is argued below that understanding this policy in terms of the widely-used explanation that it represents ‘a shift from idealism to realism’ is unsatisfactory. This state-centric framework, focused on ‘national’ interests and ideals cannot accommodate the wide range of interests, ideals, and other factors that shape the policy. Instead, this investigation assumes that all foreign policies involve a close interaction between ‘realism’ (interest-driven analysis) and ‘idealism’ (beliefs/values-driven analysis). In addition to exploring this interaction, this paper also touches briefly and tentatively on the following questions: how well has South Africa's foreign policy been calculated and implemented, and what have been its effects and consequences for South Africa, Zimbabwe, and the ‘progressive’ international norms to which both South Africa and many of its critics subscribe. A subsidiary aim is to clarify some misunderstandings between South Africa and the West that frequently lead to their ‘talking past each other’ on this, and other, issues of human rights and good governance.     

Integrating domestic politics and foreign policy making: the cases of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan

Matters of domestic political consideration exerted a major influence on the processes of foreign policy making established and developed by the authoritarian leaderships of post-Soviet Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The preservation of internal authoritarian stability and the political survival of the national regimes have therefore constituted the key foreign policy ends set by decision makers in Ashgabat and Tashkent. This article unveils and discusses the interconnection between domestic politics and foreign policy making in post-Soviet Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan by looking comparatively at the dynamics through which the regimes manipulated foreign policy to consolidate their internal power. In particular, this article will analyse the crucial role played by foreign policy in the regimes' responses to perceived threats to their political stability.     

Determinants of Turkish foreign policy: changing patterns and conjunctures during the Cold War

THE EARLY CORRESPONDENCE OF RICHARD WOOD, 1831–1841. By A. B. Cunningham, M.A., Ph.D., Cam‐den Fourth Series. Edited for the Royal Historical Society. Volume 3, pp. 281, index.

ISLAM IN THE MODERN NATIONAL STATE. By E. I. J. Rosenthal. Pp. xxii, 416, index. Cambridge University Press. 55s.

L'ACADEMIE ARABE DE DAMAS ET LE PROBLÈME DE LA MODERNIZATION DE LA LANGUE ARABE. By Rachad Hamzaoui. Pp. xii, 84. Leiden, E. J. Brill.

SELECTIONS FROM THE SMUTS PAPERS, edited by W. K. Hancock and Jean Van Der Poel. Volume III, June 1910–November 1918. Pp. 687; Volume IV, November 1918–August 1919. Pp. 461, index. Cambridge University Press, 75s. and 55s.     

The foreign policy and intervention behaviour of Nigeria and South Africa in Africa: A structural realist analysis

This article assesses the foreign policy and intervention roles of Nigeria and South Africa in Africa, given their status as regional powers, and the regional complexes within which they operate. Drawing references from a plethora of conflicts in which these two states have intervened, this article argues that structural realism, given its emphasis on the material structure of power and the pursuit of relative gains, is useful as a theoretical framework in this assessment. The article makes a contribution to the literature by illustrating the value of structural realism as an international relations (IR) approach within which the intervention behaviour of these two African states can be analysed. The author acknowledges that while structural realism points to the fact that the pursuit of relative gains may be behind the normatively-clad role conceptions of states, foreign policy cannot be reduced to the pursuit of relative power alone.     

Baltic foreign policy making establishments of the 1990s: Influential institutional and individual actors

Abstract

This article examines, evaluates, and compares the role of political institutions in the foreign policy making process of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in the 1990s. The central claim advanced is that the extent of influence exercised by political institutions in transitional states was largely conditioned by, and depended on, the individuals who headed these institutions. It is argued that the stronger the personality at the top of a political institution, the greater and more influential role it played in the foreign policy making process of the country.