International Politics最新文献

Abstract

Women’s participation in conflict settings has long intrigued scholars, and for good reason: women play a wide variety of purposeful roles. However, there are numerous challenges associated with clearly defining the impact of their participation. Often, women are seen in a lens of victimhood—of war, terrorism, and repressive societies—overlooking their impacts. This article examines how women’s participation in rebel groups interacts with other strategic measures those groups take to enhance international perceptions. To achieve their goals and govern effectively, rebel groups require both domestic and international legitimacy. This article is based on the premise that aspiring for legitimacy shapes rebel groups’ behaviors. In particular, the strategic inclusion of women interacts with other legitimacy-seeking metrics, often leading to greater support from states, international organizations, and transnational advocacy groups. Using a mixed methods approach, this article demonstrates, through a large N analysis and a case study of the Karen National Union, that the strategies rebel groups deploy in order to gain legitimacy are linked to gender participation. Namely, rebel groups that have foreign affairs departments, official Twitter presence, and have committed to the Geneva Call are also more likely to have women participants in various roles. The results of our analysis indicate that the strategic participation of women is associated with both the chosen institutional arrangements of rebel groups and external legitimacy metrics. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the strategic involvement of women cannot be examined in isolation from other aspects of rebel strategy.

What are the downstream effects of rebel governance on the demand for reform in post-conflict settings and their perceived legitimacy? Through an analysis of Kuwaiti civil society’s engagement in rebel governance during the Iraqi 1990–1991 occupation of Kuwait, the study shows that engaging in rebel governance in contexts of occupation increases civil society groups’ claims on their states, in which they update framing and increase their demands for greater participation after liberation. However, the perceived legitimacy of such demands is predicated by the public’s experience of rebel governance. Namely, those who experienced the alternative governance structure provided by resistance rebels demonstrate greater support of post-war activism and demand for political participation. The paper seeks to contribute to the literature on the impact of rebel governance on post-war democratization by specifically focusing on groups operating within contexts of occupation, in impacting post-war political behavior. Unlike previous studies regarding rebel governance, the organizations on which this study focuses are neither secessionist nor center-seeking. Rather, resistance rebels seek the return of the state—however, on their own terms.

In many liberal democracies today, foreign policy is the subject of increasing political contestation. Recent studies have demonstrated that political parties cluster predictably when voting on military deployments. In the economic left/right dimension, support for military deployments is highest for centrist and centre-right parties, and decreases towards the (far) left and (far) right. This pattern is not as robust in the non-economic GAL/TAN dimension, which pits parties with green, alternative and libertarian (GAL) values against those with traditional, authoritarian and nationalist ones (TAN). This article addresses the dimensionality of foreign and security policy by analysing 57 votes on military deployments in the Dutch parliament between 1998 and 2019. The results show that even in the Netherlands, where the GAL/TAN dimension is most likely to explain party–political contestation, foreign and security policy remains more attuned to the left/right cleavage. These findings contribute to analyses of party–political contestation in other Western European democracies.

This paper argues for cold war as a general concept for IR that is necessary to understanding the twenty-first century world order. It distinguishes between hot and cold wars as types of war. It rejects the view that the term should be reserved for the 1947–89 event, and it argues that we are already in a Second Cold War. Its definition of cold war ties it to weapons of mass destruction, which means that cold wars did not exist before the twentieth century. Cold wars risk escalation into hot ones, but can also be fought to win/lose outcomes as happened with the First Cold War, or to some form of settlement. The Second Cold war will be fought differently from the First, with cyberwar playing a big role. And it will be influenced by the shared-fate threat of climate change in a way that the First Cold War was not. The most likely scenario is that it will be long and have no winner.

This introduction to our special issue on Revisiting Regional Powers examines ways in which the study of regional powers can enhance our ability to understand the dynamic nature of the international system today. The article, first, summarizes and highlights how the study of regional powers remains relevant to the broader discipline of international relations but also indicates that there remains much to improve and investigate, for instance by more systematically including less traditional issue areas for regional power engagement, including the environment or public diplomacy, by integrating disciplines beyond IR, including sociological and linguistic approaches. In today’s shifting global order, researching regional powerhood is needed for a better understanding of the emergence of order(s); by highlighting, for example, less-than-global forms of cooperation and conflict, and their often-complex simultaneities. We highlight the need to investigate forms of power beyond increases in military and economic power, but also to expand the types of actors beyond the state that we consider taking on functions of regional powerhood.

The Council of Europe (CoE) was among the first Western institutions to open its doors to Russia after the end of the Cold War. However, during Russia’s membership (1996–2022) hopes of socializing the country into the CoE’s standards, norms, and principles in the areas of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law never materialized. While the CoE’s norms and principles nowadays need to be secured from Russia, there might be a point in the (distant) future where Russia should be reintegrated into European structures, with the CoE then again being a likely forum to that end. Against this background, this paper analyses the CoE’s interaction with Russia from the mid-1990s until today, focusing on the accession period as well as the organization’s subsequent monitoring activities and (non-)use of sanctions during Russia’s membership. It concludes with lessons that could guide future interactions between the CoE and Russia.

This article argues that privatization of health care since the 1970s has created a paradox whereby a neoliberal discourse of ‘freedom of choice’ masks the fact that it is increasingly difficult to make good choices when it comes to caring for oneself and for one’s loved ones. Part one historicizes this paradox by examining the pioneering international feminist movement Wages for Housework. I argue that Wages for Housework offered a glimpse of a counter-model of state-renumerated care through its revolutionary demand that all houseworkers receive a government wage. At the same time, I call attention to limitations of the movement. Building on the insights of this case study, part two contends that the privatization and commodification of care – especially in the US and the UK in recent years—is fundamentally linked to the ‘responsibilization’ of female-identified subjects. To demonstrate this, I turn to the issue of self-care, arguing that the emergence of self-care as a lucrative twenty-first century market is an important consequence and indicator of this responsibilization. Specifically, I show how individual choice is recast as a societal obligation to assume a consumerist standpoint of ‘self-investment’ that, in itself, becomes a necessary precondition of the ‘right’ choice. I conclude by asserting that it is unjust to frame care—whether for oneself or for others—as a problem of individual responsibility and explore proposals for a ‘universal basic services’ model as the most equitable solution to the current care crisis.

Nowhere can Adam Watson’s contribution to English School literature be observed better than in his seminal work, The Evolution of International Society, in which he argued that Cold War global international society included two separate sub-global international societies led by the USA and the Soviet Union, respectively. Despite his acknowledgement that the newly established states that emerged from colonialism constituted the majority of the members of international society, he nevertheless did not consider the ‘Third World’ as constituting a third, separate sub-global international society, thereby providing an incomplete picture of the social structure of global international society. To address this omission, this essay examines the social structure of Cold War international society by focusing on the role of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). It argues that during the Cold War, the NAM reflected the existence of a sub-global international society in the sense that its member states were conscious of certain common interests, common values, and conceived themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and shared in the working of common institutions, such as sovereignty and non-intervention, diplomacy, human equality, development and trade, anti-hegemonialism and disarmament, and nationalism and self-determination.

This article presents a theoretical argument, defined as tension theory, to explain how the strategies of small powers during eras of great power competition are influenced by (i) the level of tensions between the great powers, and (ii) the availability of a great power ally. The explanatory power of tension theory will be demonstrated through a re-examination of Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish diplomatic history from the early Cold War era. The findings strongly suggest that small powers desire low tensions between the great powers as this provides them with the opportunity to position themselves as neutral bridgebuilders to advance their vital and value interests. During periods marked by high tensions, which turn the relations between the great powers into a zero-sum competition, vital and value interests become of secondary importance to survival interest for small powers and force them to integrate with a protective great power to deter the threatening great power. In the absence of a protective great power during periods marked by high tensions, a small power will instead be forced to accommodate the threatening great power and screen itself from the latter’s adversaries.

Producing a means of conceptualising and analysing international society as an assemblage, this article reflects on Adam Watson’s Evolution of International Society and demonstrates how an assemblage theory approach allows us to undertake Watson’s general aims to engage in broad, comparative analyses of international societies historically and produce a history of contemporary international society, but without the problematic biases and omissions that plague the empirical dimensions of his work. Understanding international society as an assemblage affords an ability to see that the endurance of so much of Western European international society in contemporary, global international society is owing to its particular form of assemblage. As a highly adaptive form of assemblage, what changes there might be in the international domain tend to occur within the assemblage, as the assemblage’s form renders both a substantive change of the assemblage and the establishment of any rival assemblage unlikely.