Why do some democracies reflect their citizens' foreign policy preferences better than others? What roles do the media, political parties, and the electoral system play in a democracy's decision to ...join or avoid a war?War and Democratic Constraintshows that the key to how a government determines foreign policy rests on the transmission and availability of information. Citizens successfully hold their democratic governments accountable and a distinctive foreign policy emerges when two vital institutions-a diverse and independent political opposition and a robust media-are present to make timely information accessible.
Matthew Baum and Philip Potter demonstrate that there must first be a politically potent opposition that can blow the whistle when a leader missteps. This counteracts leaders' incentives to obscure and misrepresent. Second, healthy media institutions must be in place and widely accessible in order to relay information from whistle-blowers to the public. Baum and Potter explore this communication mechanism during three different phases of international conflicts: when states initiate wars, when they respond to challenges from other states, or when they join preexisting groups of actors engaged in conflicts.
Examining recent wars, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq,War and Democratic Constraintlinks domestic politics and mass media to international relations in a brand-new way.
Why is the French International Relations (IR) discipline different from the transnational-American discipline? By analysing argument structures in research articles across time, this book shows how ...the discipline in France is caught between the American character of the discipline and the French state as regulator of legitimate forms of expression. Concretely, French research arguments are less explicit about what their propositions are and what academic discussions they draw on and add to than their transnational-American counterparts.
Based on a comparative case study of French and American IR research from 1950 to 2011, the book is a major contribution to the meta-IR literature on global, regional and national traditions of IR. The challenge to the French discipline of whether and how to position itself in relation to the evolving American discipline is in many ways exemplary for other non-American national IR disciplines, and the choices as well as the structural conditions underlying the French case are relevant to all non-Western disciplines.
The comparative analysis moreover reveals that the modern American discipline -- what is considered as recognisable social science -- takes shape only during the 1970s. The book thus offers new knowledge about the discipline's international development as such. Both case and methodology are interesting to larger audiences outside IR, in the history and sociology of social science, contrastive rhetoric, as well as French and cultural studies.
John Hobson claims that throughout its history most international theory has been embedded within various forms of Eurocentrism. Rather than producing value-free and universalist theories of ...inter-state relations, international theory instead provides provincial analyses that celebrate and defend Western civilization as the subject of, and ideal normative referent in, world politics. Hobson also provides a sympathetic critique of Edward Said's conceptions of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, revealing how Eurocentrism takes different forms, which can be imperialist or anti-imperialist, and showing how these have played out in international theory since 1760. The book thus speaks to scholars of international relations and also to all those interested in understanding Eurocentrism in the disciplines of political science/political theory, political economy/international political economy, geography, cultural and literary studies, sociology and, not least, anthropology.
A well-established community of American scholars has long dominated the discipline of international relations. Recently, however, certain strands of continental theorizing are being introduced into ...the mainstream.
This is a critical examination of European approaches to international relations theory, suggesting practical ways of challenging manistream thought. Freidrichs presents a detailed sociological analysis of knowledge production in existing European IR communities, namely France, Italy and Scandinavia. He also discusses a selection of European schools and approaches.
The need to control violent and non-violent harm has been central to human existence since societies first emerged. This book analyses the problem of harm in world politics which stems from the fact ...that societies require the power to harm in order to defend themselves from internal and external threats, but must also control the capacity to harm so that people cannot kill, injure, humiliate or exploit others as they please. Andrew Linklater analyses writings in moral and legal philosophy that define and classify forms of harm, and discusses the ways in which different theories of international relations suggest the power to harm can be controlled so that societies can co-exist with the minimum of violent and non-violent harm. Linklater argues for new connections between the English School study of international society and Norbert Elias' analysis of civilizing processes in order to advance the study of harm in world politics.
Given that the world has moved well beyond the period of Western colonialism, and clearly into a durable period in which non-Western cultures have gained their political autonomy, it is long past ...time that non-Western voices had a higher profile in debates about international relations, not just as disciples of Western schools of thought, but as inventors of their own approaches. Western IR theory has had the advantage of being the first in the field, and has developed many valuable insights, but few would defend the position that it captures everything we need to know about world politics.
In this book, Acharya and Buzan introduce non-Western IR traditions to a Western IR audience, and challenge the dominance of Western theory. An international team of experts reinforce existing criticisms that IR theory is Western-focused and therefore misrepresents and misunderstands much of world history by introducing the reader to non-Western traditions, literature and histories relevant to how IR is conceptualised.
Including case studies on Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, Southeast Asian, Indian and Islamic IR this book redresses the imbalance and opens up a cross-cultural comparative perspective on how and why thinking about IR has developed in the way it has. As such, it will be invaluable reading for both Western and Asian audiences interested in international relations theory.
Amitav Acharya is Professor of International Politics at American University, USA.
Barry Buzan is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, UK.
1. Why is there no Non-Western International Relations Theory: An Introduction Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan 2. Why Is There No Chinese International Relations Theory? Yaqing Qin 3. Why Are There No Non-Western Theories of International Relations? The Case of Japan Takashi Inoguchi 4. Why is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory? Reflections on and from Korea Chaesung Chun 5. Re-Imagining IR in India, Navnita Chadha Behera 6. Southeast Asia: Theory between Modernization and Tradition? Alan Chong 7. Perceiving Indonesian Approaches to International Relations Theory Irman G. Lanti and Leonard C. Sebastian 8. International Relations Theory and the Islamic Worldview Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh 9. World History and the Development of Non-Western IR Theory Barry Buzan and Richard Little 10. Conclusion: On the Possibility of a Non-Western International Relations Theory Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan
"This book adds a critically needed voice that specifies areas of deficiency and methods which may allow for alternative and reasonable disciplinary guidance that can finally address the historical inequity within the study of IR. The authors provide key insights to a problematic theme regarding how to overcome “colonization of the mind” by the limiting and framing scopes of inquiry so as to essentially set an agenda with regard to an entire disciplinary field of academia and its requisite effects." - William J. Jones, Mahidol University International College; Journal of International and Global Studies Volume 4, Number 1, (November 2012).
This book rethinks the key concepts of International Relations by drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
The last few years have seen a genuine wave of publications promoting sociology in ...international relations. Scholars have suggested that Bourdieu's vocabulary can be applied to study security, diplomacy, migration and global environmental politics. Yet we still lack a systematic and accessible analysis of what Bourdieu-inspired IR might look like. This book provides the answer. It offers an introduction to Bourdieu's thinking to a wider IR audience, challenges key assumptions, which currently structure IR scholarship - and provides an original, theoretical restatement of some of the core concepts in the field. The book brings together a select group of leading IR scholars who draw on both theoretical and empirical insights from Bourdieu. Each chapter covers one central concept in IR: Methodology, Knowledge, Power, Strategy, Security, Culture, Gender, Norms, Sovereignty and Integration. The chapters demonstrate how these concepts can be reinterpreted and used in new ways when exposed to Bourdieusian logic.
Challenging key pillars of IR scholarship, Bourdieu in International Relations will be of interest to critical theorists, and scholars of IR theory.
While entities as different as armed groups, multinational corporations, political parties, megacities, labour unions, terrorist organisations, or indigenous peoples are mentioned as non-state actors ...in the relevant literature, rural communities are never referred to. This book addresses the role of rural communities as non-state actors, lifting this invisibility veil with arguments coming from three theories of/scholarly approaches to international law: positivism, sociolegal realism (the New Haven School), and constitutionalism. It argues, first, that rural communities are recognised by the community of states as derived subjects of international law since they are made bearers of rights and duties in some major multilateral treaties. Second, rural communities have the ability to affect international lawmaking as they acquire the tools to influence decision-making in international arbitration and court litigation. Finally, the book highlights the need to recognise the status of rural communities when seeking global justice, as these are the communities that benefit the least from globalisation, while paying the highest price in terms of damage to the natural and sociocultural environment. Advocating for the existence of some supreme norms above the will of the states and the recognition of rural communities as non-state actors, this book will be of interest to academics, policy-makers, and non-governmental organisations working in the field of public international law and rural social matters.
International relations scholarship and the popular media tend to portray China as a great power with hegemonic designs for Southeast Asia. Moreover, studies on Chinese influence in Southeast Asia ...predominantly focus on the Chinese state. This paper argues that Chinese non-state actors and their daily encounters with local communities in Southeast Asia deserve equal attention as these interactions evidently produce friction at both the society-to-state and state-to-state levels.The influence of Chinese non-state actors in Southeast Asia can be illustrated with three examples, namely, Chinese tourism operations in Thailand, Chinese market demand and agricultural transformations in Myanmar, and Chinese gangs within the casino economy in Cambodia.Thailand has recently become a top tourist destination for Chinese nationals. This has cultural implications as those involved in the tourism industry need to have Chinese language skills. The economic implications include increased competition and decreased accountability as Chinese tour companies have set up in Thailand using Thai locals as nominees. Bilateral relations also soured after a boat carrying Chinese tourists capsized in Thailand.As global prices of corn rose in 2011 and 2012, areas in Myanmar close to the Chinese border have increased corn cultivation to meet Chinese demands for that crop. This has led to deforestation in these areas. Chinese gangsters fleeing their government's crackdown in China have settled down to operate in the casino economy in Cambodia. Consequentially, there has been a rise in crime rate involving online scams and deteriorating public security. Despite the Chinese government encouraging the Cambodian government to enforce a ban on online gambling, the actions of non-state actors from China continue to be associated with the Chinese state as a whole and there is rising
resentment towards the Chinese in Cambodia.The COVID-19 pandemic has temporarily halted cross-border trade between China and mainland Southeast Asia. This has negatively affected local farmers who are dependent on the Chinese market.
