International Politics最新文献

The UN reform movement calls for the UN Security Council to be changed. The underlying assumption is that it will create thicker decision-making that will allow more views on the causes of, dynamics of, and solutions to conflicts. This paper adopts a comparative analysis of three cycles of narratives in the UN Security Council and emergency sessions of the UN General Assembly when both bodies debated the same issue of violence in the Gaza Strip. The findings reveal that, unlike its public image, the emergency sessions of the UN General Assembly were used to make the analysis thinner and less descriptive. Another finding is that it was predominantly Arab, Muslim, and revisionist Latin American countries that influenced the majority to adopt the thin narrative.

In this article, Adam Watson’s use of ideal types is revisited in order to distinguish between various kinds of international orders over time and address the different types of war which are logically possible in relation to them. The argument is that war differs between ordered and disordered circumstances, as well as among members, or between members and non-members of a given order. The aim is, first, to analytically distinguish between various types of phenomenon which all happen to include organised violence between political entities, and all be called war; and second, to demonstrate the utility of abstracting far enough from actual history to be able to apply analytical categories, a purpose which Watson would recognise. This contributes to freeing theorising about war from its Westphalian and Eurocentric straightjacket.

Asymmetric relationships are key to international relations with Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine placing asymmetry at the forefront of global politics. This article’s originality arises from its examination of the effects of an international crisis involving the larger partner of an asymmetric relationship and a third-party country for the asymmetric relationship in question. Specifically, Havana–Moscow relations. Havana’s response to the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2022 Ukrainian invasion are examined using a rigorous historical qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources and a qualitative and quantitative analysis of bilateral trade. It is posited that during an international crisis: (1) the dynamics of the asymmetric relationship change triggering a new type of asymmetry: temporal crisis asymmetry; and (2) the bilateral relationship becomes more symmetric. Significant for other asymmetric relationships impacted by an international crisis involving the larger partner and a third-party country.

Contemporaneous theorizing of the Howard School of IR theory on the role of white supremacism in WWI implied a more general relationship between racial imperialism and global war, which we examine in this essay. Taking as its point of departure Rosenau’s (1970) admonition that mainstream IR seemed to ignore issues of racism in world politics even as a ‘surfeit’ of models existed that were applicable to the subject, we attempt to show how the ‘norm against noticing’ racism in IR could’ve been addressed utilizing resources available to Rosenau’s contemporaries more than a half century ago on an issue of major concern to mainstream IR at the time (and today): global war. Our analysis of global wars that were a major focus of mainstream studies of war during the Cold War era (e.g. the War of Jenkins’ Ear, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, WWI and WWII) reveals that racism was attendant to these wars with respect to the impact of racial imperialism in each of them. Nevertheless, the relationship between racism and global war has been largely absent in influential studies in IR; and this absence converges not only with the norm against noticing, but calls into question our ability to adequately, much less accurately, account for these wars, in particular, and to build theory that explains important phenomena in IR, more generally.

Subsistence wars revolve around the use of force exercised by those faced with hunger, deprivation, and other survival crises. This idea has been formulated as an act emerging from the right of self-defense in the ethics of war literature. Alternatively, this study attempts to conceptualize and justify it with the notion of the right of necessity derived from Hugo Grotius. The structural difference between self-defense and necessity highlights strict just war conditions that must be met before, during, and after waging a subsistence war, especially when it emerges from the right of necessity. The idea of waging a war out of necessity seems too permissive; in fact, it has a regulatory aspect as well. Given the significance of the right to subsistence, which is universally shared yet globally threatened, the war of subsistence is to be seen as a real and pressing concern in current and future international society.

The field of international security studies drastically evolved over the last few decades. Critical security studies emerged as one trend, seeking to make explicit statist orientations of traditional security studies, the Paris School being one such branch, highlighting the role of security professionals and the importance of studying repetitive regimes of practices. Other security trends tilted toward the creation of ontological security studies (OSS), placing importance on the concept of autobiographical narratives, routines, and anxiety—bringing importance to the unconscious drivers of actor behavior in IR. Given the shared focus on regimes of practices, it is surprising that these two schools of thought have not paired together to address questions of security. In this article, I will critically interrogate the literature on OSS and the Paris school, drawing out key debates and questions from both schools of thought. I suggest that although these two areas have previously been treated as separate, there is much potential for synthesizing this literature that opens up new spaces for inquiry.