Delegating divisible sovereignty: Sweeping a conceptual minefield

Delegating sovereignty to international organizations (IOs) is both increasingly common and controversial. I address the sources of current controversies in three claims. First, although alleged otherwise, sovereignty is eminently divisible. From practice, indivisibility should not be a barrier to delegating to IOs. Second, it is intuitive that longer chains of delegation will be more likely to fail. Yet, it is not the length of the chain per se that matters as whether identifiable conditions for successful delegation are satisfied. Third, although “delegation” is often used to refer to both, delegating and pooling sovereignty are distinct activities. Much of the concern with IOs is really about pooling rather than delegating sovereignty.

全球化背景下的国际中突--对全球化的一种反思

冷战结束后,全球化进入了一个崭新的时期,与此同时,全球化带来的国际中突具有了和以往不同的特点,即碎片化、边缘化和国际化.而全球化正是使国际冲突产生这些新特征的根本原因,只有把全球化建立在更加公平合理的国际政治经济新秩序的基础上,国际冲突才会得到根本解决.     

全球化背景下的安全:国家的地位和作用

安全的本质是“谁的安全”的问题,全球化的不断发展,非传统安全威胁的出现,使学术界在安全研究的主体上出现了“国家的安全”和“人的安全”之争。如何看待全球化背景下安全研究中的国家及其地位和作用,不仅关系安全理论解释的合理性和有效性,而且关系到国家安全战略的选择。通过对全球化背景下新安全观与传统安全观的比较,特别是对西方学者有关“人的安全”的分析,本文批判了将两者对立起来,矮化国家作为安全主体作用的倾向。认为:全球化背景下,国家安全视野的范围、安全维护的手段和方式应有相应的扩大和调整。但是国家依旧是安全研究的重要主体和“参照物”,同时也是维护“人的安全”的重要载体和有效手段。     

A tale of a decade: European security governance and Russia

In the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall the governance of European security has undergone a profound transformation. The beginning of this decade witnessed the end of the Cold War and, in parallel, the establishment of relatively inclusive mechanisms for addressing security‐related issues. While these mechanisms have largely endured (and, indeed, have been complemented by other types of interaction) they have not prevented the emergence of forms of exclusion on the continent. This is a condition of particular significance to Russia. Compared with its Soviet predecessor, it now enjoys far less influence in European security. Its exclusion, however, is only relative. Russia has retained a meaningful role and ‐ recent controversies over NATO enlargement and Kosovo notwithstanding ‐ the bases of its accommodation with the West still remain in place.     

Development versus enjoyment of life: a post-development critique of the developmentalist worldview

This article discusses the meaning of development from a post-development perspective, based on a case study of a goat-keeping project involving a small community of farmers from a rural town in north-east Brazil. The development project was fraught with conflicting views of development as it sought to impose an interventionist, ethnocentric, and modernist view of what was best for the community, even stipulating how the farmers should work together. The modernist interpretation has been criticised on various grounds, but nevertheless continues to condition how the ‘development industry’ defines its values and views its mission.     

Realism and the critique of technology

The ‘classical Realist’ thinkers Hans J Morgenthau and John Herz developed a puissant yet typically overlooked critique of technology. Driven by fears of nuclear warfare, they broke with Realism's inappropriately nonchalant view of technological development. Morgenthau focused on the dangers of a naïve faith in technological growth, arguing that it typically generated an apolitical and potentially irresponsible view of international politics. Even more effectively, Herz zeroed in on the problem of what he described as technological acceleration, according to which the rapid pace of recent technological change threatens humanity's future. While Morgenthau's ideas on technology are ultimately tension ridden, Herz still provides a fruitful starting point for any version of international relations theory hoping to take the phenomenon of social speed or acceleration seriously. Many of his reflections anticipated the contemporary debate among social theorists about the high-speed temporality of contemporary society.     

Economic aid to post-conflict countries: a methodological critique of Collier and Hoeffler

In the past five years, research sponsored by the World Bank on the economic aspects of civil war1 ?1. The project was titled the Economics of Political and Criminal Violence. View all notes under the research directorship of Oxford economist Paul Collier has had an extraordinary influence on the subsequent study of violent conflict and civil war and on international policy. The research project has now turned its attention to the problem of countries emerging from civil war and what Collier and his co-author, Anke Hoeffler, call ‘a first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process.’2 ?2. First reported in a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper circulated in October 2002, their article, ‘Aid, Policy, and Growth in Post-Conflict Societies,’ the paper was in 2003 posted on the website of the Centre for the Study of African Economics, Oxford University until it was published in 2004 in the European Economic Review. There are some minor differences between the two versions of their work, but the conclusions are identical. In the present article, the paper version will be referred to as Collier & Hoeffler (2003) and the published version as Collier & Hoeffler (2004). View all notes Building on the influence of their earlier research and the lively interest currently in knowledge about and policy on post-conflict strategies, this work is likely to be equally influential on research, thinking, and policy. It is all the more important, therefore, to subject the research to critical examination before it becomes established as conventional wisdom. This note reports one such attempt to analyze some major methodological problems with the study and argues that the research cannot sustain the conclusions they draw or the resulting policy recommendations.     

The political economy of DDR in Liberia: a gendered critique

This paper examines the reintegration component of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programme in Liberia from a critical gendered perspective. Building on previous arguments pertaining to the securitisation of reintegration in Liberia, the paper considers the highly gendered impetus and impact of both the reintegration project and the securitising act. I argue that Liberian DDR was devised and justified according to assumptions that are default male, thus causing the programme to overlook women except as passive victims of conflict, or as add-ons secondary to the ‘real’ purpose of reintegration. Accordingly, the programme both naturalised specific gendered binaries and favoured moves that would buttress and extend them, for example, by problematising male unemployment and privileging male entry into the formal economy. The paper first explains the securitisation of reintegration in Liberia, before turning to a gendered critique focusing on the political-symbolic and political economic impacts of said reintegration.     

Global climate security governance: a case of institutional and ideational fragmentation

In recent years climate change has become integrated into pre-existing, but fragmented structures of global security governance. In this article I argue that while institutional fragmentation of global climate security governance is not automatically problematic, the phenomenon of ideational fragmentation that often goes with it is highly disadvantageous to achieving climate security for people. This is because the preferences of a diverse group of security organisations/actors (in this article the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the European Union and the United States/Pentagon) are often vastly removed from the global agenda set by the United Nations and its expressed preference for understanding climate security in terms of human security. I suggest that the first step towards overcoming ideational fragmentation would have to be the advancement of a universal definition of climate security by an authoritative source, however, given that security is for many actors a matter of perception the chances of overcoming ideational fragmentation are slim.     

Security governance in Europe: a return to system

The security governance literature has developed in four waves: the first is dedicated to matters of definition; the second to conceptual debate; the third to matters of application in the European setting and the fourth to how well the concept works in extra-European regions and at the global level. For all this effort, security governance as a concept remains problematic: it still has some way to go before it obtains clear definitional precision, conceptual clarity and a secure standing as concept in Security Studies. We address some of the theoretical and methodological difficulties common to the literature and argue that security governance has become overly preoccupied with agency and has thereby neglected structure. It has, in other words, obtained an actor-centered focus and so tended to conflate security governance as an analytical category with the specific actions of security actors. It has thus moved forward little in its ability to determine how and why security actors behave in the aggregate and whether that behavior reflects wider systemic properties. We thus ask in a third section whether it is worth returning to systemic thinking on security governance especially in the European context where the concept has had its most sophisticated application.     

Towards security governance as a critical tool: a conceptual outline

This article argues that security governance can and should be reframed as a critical tool that enables us to understand and reappraise concrete practices of security provision. Security governance needs to move beyond the functional mapping of different governing arrangements and the presumption that security governance leads to effective and legitimate problem-solving in a quasi-automatic manner. In this article, we propose a framework that identifies the essential characteristics of security governance and turns them into critical questions with the aim to reveal persisting frictions and dilemmas. First, we trace the rise of security governance as concept and practice over the past decade and identify its central characteristics with regard to prerequisites, structures and consequences. Second, we reframe the core characteristics of security governance into critical questions and thereby develop an understanding of security governance as a critical tool. Finally, we illustrate the relevance of this approach with examples from EU security governance.     

Strive for a Globalization of Equality, Mutual Benefit and Common Gain -----Speech at the International Symposium on Challenges of Globalization

Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear friends, It is a great honor for my colleague and myself to be invited to attend the international symposium on challenges of globalization by the OSPAAAL. We feel very happy to have the opportunity for a discussion on the issue of economic globalization together with statesmen, economists and scholars from various parts of the world. Now, I would like to present some personal views on the issue of economic globalization and China抯 corresponding measures in res…