International Relations and Politics

This paper tries to explore the employment of quantitative approach in political researches focusing on international relations (IR) or international politics. A debate emerged in the90s on whether IR or the field of international politics should be driven by quantitative(positivistic) approach at the expense of qualitative (interpretivist) approach. The debate then expanded to explicitly argue for an increased use of formal methods that are mathematically-based to study IR phenomena. It triggered then a quick reaction fromhardcore IR specialists who warned against mathematizing IR for fear of turning the field into a mechanical field that crunches numbers. Such a fear is further substantiated by theobservation that many quantitative works in IR have moved farther away from developing theory to testing hypotheses. Some scholars have even suggested that it is epistemologicallyrealism vs. instrumentalism; something that is unsurprising given the dominance of realism inIR for many years. This paper does not suggest that heavy emphasis on qualitative approach leads to a inferior research output. However, it does suggest an transformative incapability among IR scholars to accommodate to contemporary global changes. The big-data analyticshave affected the intellectual community of late with the influx of data. These data are bothqualitative and quantitative. Nonetheless, analyzing them requires one to be familiar with quantitative methods lest one risks not being able to offer a research outcome that is not only sound in its argumentation but also robust in its analytical logic. Furthermore, with so much data on the social media, it is almost unthinkable for meaningful interpretation tobe made without even the simplest descriptive statistical methods. The key findings revealthat in ensuring its relevance, international political researches have to start adapting to the contemporary changes by building new capability apart from upscaling existing capacity.

Dell'orto Giovanna American Journalism and International Relations: Foreign Correspondence from the Early Republic to the Digital Era. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 287 pp.To many journalism students, Edward R. Murrow's universally recognized voice- . . . is London-can always remind us of the heyday of American cor- respondence shining in crucial moments of events. For many scholars of international communication, the UNESCO debate on foreign news flow and New World Information Order in the 1980s still looms large in memory. Nostalgia may dispose one to lament the diminishing role played by foreign correspondents within international relations in the digital era.The decline of international newsgathering by professionals over the past fifteen years, in particular for newspapers, is disheartening. According to American Journalism Review (AJR), the number of foreign correspondents employed by U.S. newspapers has markedly decreased since AJR's first census in 1998. AJR identified 307 full-time foreign correspondents and pending assignments in 2003, which decreased to 234 in 2011. As for broadcasting, networks' airtime for foreign news has been in free fall over the years, with only the exception of National Public Radio.1 The industry has been so pessimistic about foreign correspondence that few find phrases like demise of the foreign correspondent2 and death of the American foreign correspondent3 exaggerating.While scholars and professionals continue debating the role of foreign correspon- dence in news production and broadly, in international affairs, the handover of owner- ship of one of the most prestigious newspapers known for its coverage of international news and foreign affairs and policies-The Washington Post-may evoke more thoughts on the future of foreign correspondence and the importance of international news in international relations, if it is not yet an end of an era.Against this backdrop, Dell'orto Giovanna's newly published book provides a unique and timely investigation of the evolving role of journalism in international rela- tions. Emphasizing discourses in news media tell us about sociocultural mean- ings about the rest of the world (p. 26), this book aims to unravel the complicated interplay between news media and foreign affairs.Taking a constructivist perspective on international relations, communication, and journalism, this book features a careful discourse analysis of more than 2,000 news articles covering twenty crucial global events over 150 years to answer such central questions as, What foreign news has been covered and what discourses of the have emerged in the American press? How do th[e] images [of foreign countries and the world] compare with U.S. foreign policies contemporary to them? And how does the understanding of the shape both media coverage and actual policies? (p. 26).The extensive historical research conducted in this book convincingly supports the author's core argument that the press has always been indispensable in international affairs; it offers a public arena where the American audience and politicians can make sense of foreign nations, the as well as the United States's global role. The per- ceived foreign or international realities shaped by news media consequently serve as the basis for policy and action (p. 1).Four chapters are chronologically organized to report the findings of discourse analysis covering four defining periods of time, from 1848 to 2008, guided by the aforementioned essential research questions. Specifically, Chapter 2 focuses on five consequential events that took place in foreign countries between 1848 and 1900. Media discourses, as the author pinpoints, parallel Washington's growing involve- ment in affairs . . . and the establishment of the United States as a global power (p. 35). Chapter 3 emphasizes five major international events from 1910 through 1937 when the United States took the global central stage. …

A mass consumerist ethos – driven by particular styles of resource use, production techniques, and advertising methods – became one of America’s most important and controversial contributions to the world. Despite the global impact of American-style consumerism – on people and on international politics – accounts of mass consumerism and of U.S. international (or transnational) relations have only recently addressed their overlapping historical themes. This essay examines several different topics that lie at the intersections of histories of mass consumerism and international relations. Within each, it highlights historiographies that bring a global, historical perspective to the spread of U.S.-style consumerism and to the changing relationship between mass consumerism and America’s global power. First, however, a definition is in order. Mass consumerism arises from and propels not only a variety of economic relationships but also complex codes of aspirations and desires. I define mass consumerism as a mass-production and mass-marketing system that imagines an ever-widening abundance of goods within a culture that emphasizes buying and selling, desire, glamour, and flexible, purchase-driven identities .

The concept of anthropogenic climate change is now understood in the discipline of International Relations (IR) as an urgent environmental problem enveloping the globe. It underlies recent claims that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s natural systems is so consequential that a new geologic epoch has begun: The Anthropocene, or the ‘human age’. Yet, IR’s increasing engagement and use of these scientific concepts raises significant questions the discipline has yet to address. For instance, if global climate change appeared in international politics only as recently as the late-1980s, what spurred this sudden emergence? If the Anthropocene appeared only after 2000, then how does this new concept affect the way we now think about global politics, the Earth, and even ourselves? This thesis answers these questions by arguing that the concepts of global climate change and the Anthropocene are neither immutable nor universal scientific truths or natural objects. Rather, they emerged when technological advances in nuclear physics and models tracing bomb radiocarbon intersected with the ways states govern their territories and subjects. The global nature or ‘climatic globality’ of these concepts, therefore, is a manner of conducting and steering human conduct and action by establishing the boundaries of subjectivity when they are thought. This is what Michel Foucault called governmentality. It is demonstrated in this thesis through a genealogical tracing of climate change in IR, focusing on how nuclear sciences, computational modelling technologies, and regimes of international governance, overlapped to form the climatic globality IR now takes for granted. Combining genealogy with the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, a new form of global governmentality becomes evident. Through a technological and metaphysical subjectivism with the carbon atom as its substrate, the human self now asserts itself from atomic to global scales, as the maker, master, and steward, of the Earth.

John Maclean’s 1988 call “Marxism and IR: A Strange Case of Mutual Neglect” has generated a rich bounty of Marxist studies and paradigms in International Relations (IR). This cross-pollination merged in the 1990s with the “historical turn” and shaped the sub-fields of International Historical Sociology and International Political Economy. But has it left its mark on how IR is practised today? We argue that while Marxism has spoken significantly to the discipline, mainstream IR, even Historical IR, has been largely impervious to Marxist arguments, drawing the standard charge of economism and structuralism. Rectifying these critiques, we suggest that conventional historical studies of “the international” remain methodologically and substantively impoverished. We exemplify this by showing how leading Historical IR studies of “systems change” fail to explain the inside/outside and public/private differentiations constitutive of the modern international order and to integrate the “levels of analysis” they presuppose. We further argue that this rejection has been facilitated by influential Marxist IR paradigms, which ultimately privilege structuralism over historicism: While Neo-Gramscians initially mobilised “historicism” to dissolve claims about the “sameness” of international relations across time and space, the approach became identified with the reified master-category of “hegemony”. Uneven and Combined Development, in turn, has gravitated towards matching Neo-realism’s claim to theoretical universality by insisting on transhistorical model-building and nomological “grand theory”. Both approaches remain over-sociologised and fail to address international politics. Drawing on radically historicist Political Marxism, this article shows how its substantive socio-political premises explain the historical formation of the contemporary international order and re-unite the “levels of analysis” theoretically to provide a framework for non-reductionist and non-economistic accounts of historical international relations. This requires an answer to the agentic challenge of Neo-Classical Realism by reincorporating grand strategy, diplomacy, and international politics into a reformulated perspective of Geopolitical Marxism to track the full historicity of the making of international orders.

Women are demonstrably under-represented at senior levels in Australia's international affairs. Empirical evidence shows a continuing gender imbalance in leadership positions, including in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Defence and academia. Two explanations commonly offered are that women are less motivated or lack interest in ‘hard’ international relations. These explanations are found to be unconvincing, given studies showing similar levels of ambition and interest at recruitment. Four alternative explanations are offered to account for the scarcity of female leaders in Australia's international affairs: the legacy of direct discrimination, continued indirect discrimination, inadequate support for women who balance work and family responsibilities, and socially constructed gender norms. Instead of the subject matter of international relations being too ‘hard’, or inherently masculine, it appears that it is the combined impact of these factors that has made it ‘hard’, or difficult, for women to progress to senior levels. In order to show how these barriers can be overcome, three case studies are presented of women who have achieved senior positions: Professor Emeritus Helen Hughes, Her Excellency Ms Penny Wensley and Professor Hilary Charlesworth. These examples suggest strategies that women can use to further their careers and measures that can be implemented in workplaces to improve the representation of senior women in Australia's international affairs.

The concepts of agency and structure are of increasing and defining importance to international relations and politics as fields of enquiry and knowledge. This is the first book to explore the two concepts in depth in that context.The agent-structure problem refers to questions concerning the interrelationship of agency and structure, and to the ways in which explanations of social phenomena integrate and account for them. This is an important contribution to the study of international relations and politics.

This article is driven by the belief that there is great potential benefit in carefully considering the implications of ‘situated knowledge’ in IR scholarship. This can be helpful not just for scholars thinking through meta-theoretical puzzles in International Relations (IR), but also for shaping concrete knowledge practices in international political practice today. Yet, there seems to be something of an unresolved puzzle at the heart of the situated knowledge paradigm: a puzzle relating to what the situatedness of knowledge entails and how we should ‘deal with it’. This piece suggests that philosophical and social theoretical, and by extension also IR theoretical, engagements with situated knowledge can benefit from being considered anew: from the point of view of theoretical physicists and cosmologists. While not always reflexive concerning ‘social’ situatedness, the physicists and cosmologists considered here have reflected on aspects of situatedness that have been under-emphasised in standpoint philosophy. Crucially, physics and cosmology framings of situated knowledge can help to show why dealing with situated knowledge should mean more than attentiveness to various knowers and their positionality, and more than reflexive ‘dialogue’ between knowers; it also seems to require ‘stretching beyond’ the horizons of ‘situated knowers’. It is suggested that science is, and perhaps even ‘scientifically aspirant’ IR then should be, about imaginative conceptual ‘stretching’ rather than merely ‘situating’. This stretching should go hand in hand with opportunistic but critical methodological probing, seeking to push us ‘beyond’ how we understand the world from our situated perspectives. The provocations developed here have three main audiences in IR: scholars engaged in meta-theoretical debates in IR, those studying international politics through the situated knowledge approach, and also critical theorists seeking to understand conditions of critique.

Держави є основними суб’єктами міжнародного права і ключовими акторами міжнародних взаємодій, визначають основні вектори розвитку міжнародного права та здійснюють вплив (прямий та опосередкований) на всі тенденції міжнародного життя. Сьогодні у позитивному міжнародному праві відсутнє універсальне загальноприйняте визначення поняття держави. Метою статті є аналіз підходів до визначення поняття держави як суб’єкта міжнародного публічного права, а також окреслення визначення поняття держави відповідно до чинного міжнародного права та міжнародно-правової практики. У статті аналізуються основні характеристики держави і критерії (елементи) держави як суб’єкта міжнародного публічного права відповідно до чинного міжнародного права, міжнародно-правової практики та сучасних доктринальних вчень. Зроблено висновки, що держава – це суб’єкт міжнародного публічного права, що становить собою політико-правове територіальне утворення, яке відповідає наступним критеріям: має постійне населення, визначену територію, публічні органи державної влади, здатність самостійно вступати у міжнародні публічно-правові відносини. За умови присутності вказаних чотирьох критеріїв (елементів) держави наявність суверенітету держави презюмується. Зроблено також висновки, що держава як суб’єкт міжнародного публічного права має здатність створювати норми міжнародного права; набувати прав та обов’язків за такими нормами, реалізувати вказані норми; може брати участь у міжнародних публічно-правових відносинах; має здатність нести міжнародно-правову відповідальність. Суб’єктом міжнародного права виступає держава в цілому, а не її окремі адміністративно-територіальні одиниці, державні органи чи посадові особи.

Reviewed by: Chinese Perspectives on International Relations: A Framework for Analysis Harvey Nelsen (bio) Gerald Chan . Chinese Perspectives on International Relations: A Framework for Analysis. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. xvii, 193 pp. Hardcover $65.00, ISBN 0-312-21909-1. This is a book in which it is easy to trace the author's intellectual journey. Gerald Chan began with the hope of providing the world's first English-language study of international relations as formulated and practiced in China. But he found that the Chinese are still in the early stages of development and sophistication in that academic field. So he changed the focus of the book to the foundations of Chinese foreign policy, although he does not announce this to his readers. He finds that in China the field of international relations is policy-driven rather than academically [End Page 75] driven as in the West. But Chan fails to take the last step and admit that the perception of international relations therefore becomes only one of several foundations for foreign-policy making. This does not mean that the author has failed, however. His extensive use of Chinese sources—including interviews—provides us with valuable materials on Chinese perceptions. He also analyzes in some depth the differences between Chinese and Western perspectives on international relations. The book is somewhat dated in the sense that globalization receives only three brief mentions. Since Western scholarship is obsessed with the topic, it is hard to believe that the Chinese are not devoting more effort to figuring out how China will fit into such an international system. At the end of the book, Chan comes back to international relations as a field in China, but that is anticlimactic. His description is disheartening: there have been but a handful of conferences and a score of scholars working in the field. And Chan is quick to point out that the heavy hand of the CCP restricts creativity. This is an excellent book for understanding how the Chinese perceive their role in the world. It would be useful as an assigned text in a graduate seminar on Chinese foreign policy, or perhaps for a student to report on in a graduate seminar on international relations. For an undergraduate text, I prefer In the Eyes of the Dragon: China Views the World, edited by Yong Deng and Fei-ling Wang (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). The latter does not try to provide the theoretical perspective emphasized by Chan, but it does cover a broad spectrum of Chinese perceptions and interests. In the Eyes of the Dragon also contains valuable normative perspectives, making explicit proposals about how the United States should view and treat China. [End Page 76] Harvey Nelsen Harvey Nelsen is a professor in the International Studies Program, Department of Government and International Affairs, University of South Florida. He has written on Chinese foreign policy, military affairs, and, more recently, on the Chinese state. Copyright © 2003 University of Hawai'i Press

The articles in this volume, and the many contributions to the Millennium Conference, ‘The Politics of Time in International Relations’ from which these articles were drawn, speak to the ongoing interest in issues of time and temporality in International Relations (IR) and associated disciplines. They also speak to the very broad range of ways in which time and temporality are seen to operate in international politics and the ways in which it (international politics) is studied and judged. I was deeply interested in and stimulated by my participation in the conference, and what follows is an attempt to situate my own specific concerns on issues of time and temporality, when I wrote Time and World Politics and subsequently, in the broader context of the developing literature on time and temporality in IR. Like most of the contributors to this volume, I see the attention paid to issues of time/temporality in IR as productive for research in the field. However, in agreement with at least two of the contributors, I am also aware that like any other production of academic knowledge, including supposedly ‘critical’ academic knowledge, there are always dangers and limitations inherent in that knowledge and its discursive and practical effects.

This article attempts to discuss the delicate relationship between the arts and international politics and the instrumental role the arts may play in international relations. The paper sets the Cold War as the stage and uses the Edinburgh International Festival as the subject of research to trace the interplay between the arts and international relations. Specifically, the article answers the questions of how the festival was impacted by the changing international relations over the Cold War period and how the festival as an arts organization exerted influence on international politics.

This article aims to address why religion has been marginalised in international relations (IR) and discusses its implications. The first section examines the literature on the secular roots of the discipline of IR and how theoretical inputs from the West are shaped by context-specific European events and philosophies that are not ‘universal’ in nature. The second part delves into how the existing theoretical traditions of IR—realism, liberalism and constructivism—can incorporate religion as a variable in evaluating international politics. The final section will explore the problems with the recent spate of literature from the West after 9/11 on religion and IR. The article contends that the Indian conception of secularism, which has been studied in-depth vis-à-vis Indian domestic politics but not international politics, can be further examined to formulate frameworks that understand and deal with religion in IR.

There are two primary reasons why empires are central to our understanding of International Relations (IR). First, the empire has been replaced by juridically equal sovereign territorial states over the past century. Formal empires no longer exist, and only one head of state retains the title of Emperor—Akihito of Japan. The second reason why the study of empire matters to IR is that much of the conventional distinction between hierarchy and anarchy has been subject to various criticisms from a wide array of methodological and political perspectives. In particular, International Political Sociology (IPS) has offered a framework for critical analyses of phenomena such as systemic transformation, international unevenness, and global inequality, or war, violence, and racism in international politics. Since the end of the Cold War, new theorizations of empire have placed empire and imperialism at the center of debates in IR. Contemporary investigations of empire in IR, and IPS in particular, have dwelled on a number of political debates and methodological issues, including the nature of American imperialism, the link between IR and global history, and the relationship between empire and globalization. The category “empire” continues to both illuminate the pertinence of IR to social theory more generally and at the same time highlights the shortcomings of the discipline in addressing the causes and dynamics of global inequality, violence, and uneven development.

This thesis deals with the broad question of how Australian universities and their teachers are meeting the changing market conditions of the 21st century. This examination occurs in the context of changing legislative and regulatory circumstances and strategic efforts to meet the broader goals of 'graduate attributes' and increased accessibility of tertiary learning. The underlying query of this thesis is how technology can assist in transcending traditional models of higher education teaching delivery. Related to this is a focus on collaborative learning, with the question of its desirability and what it might offer in terms of improved outcomes relevant to teaching and learning in higher education. These questions are primarily discussed in the context of how online environments can aid collaboration and result in both discipline specific and generic outcomes. Through a case study of Australian International Relations (IR) and Politics teachers at the undergraduate level, this thesis finds that there has been limited innovation in the online delivery of these subjects and that there is little consistency in any e-learning approaches that have been adopted. In particular, collaborative online learning is infrequently pursued. This is surprising because in a climate of increasingly market-driven higher education, collaborative online tools may offer a solution to many of the pressures teaching academics face. These findings point to a significant gap between the strategic goals expressed by universities and what is actually being delivered to undergraduates. This includes meeting ambitions in 'graduate attributes', satisfying regulatory oversight, contending with financial pressures and the societal drive to make learning more accessible to a wider audience. The thesis also examines some of the barriers teaching staff feel prevent them from utilising online collaborative methods, including perceptions of time poverty, support, skills, institutional factors and peer experience. The findings indicate that teachers of IR/Politics feel little incentive to implement online collaborations, chiefly because of time constraints,but also a prevailing sense that such innovations are not worth their investment in terms of career advancement and institutional support. Unfamiliarity with the technology involved serves to exacerbate these perceptions to the point where investing any effort in the pursuit of online approaches is seen as wasteful. A theoretical Technology-Assisted Teaching Adoption Model is proposed as a means of demonstrating the barriers to innovation uncovered by this research. Finally, this thesis explores online role play as a possible solution to some of these barriers perceived by IR and Politics teachers, as well as how such an approach could address the market factors currently shaping Australian higher education. There is strong and consistent support within the literature for role play as a collaborative learning strategy with identified pedagogical benefits. In the disciplines of IR and Politics, where much of the subject matter being studied concerns the concept of people and entities communicating and co-operating, role plays can help generate deeper and broader understanding. The thesis concludes by making recommendations as to how Australian universities can move towards fostering online innovation amongst teaching staff, both to better meet institutional goals, as well as serve their students better by producing qualities conducive to their future careers.