Journal of International Relations and Development最新文献

Scholars are increasingly turning to machine learning text analysis (MLTA) to make sense of world politics, but the question of how computational power and interpretive expertise should work together remains underexplored. This gap stems from a lack of engagement between those who treat text as data to be computed and those who approach it as language to be interpreted. In this article, we bridge this divide by proposing a methodology that cycles between computational analysis and interpretive moments, placing machine learning within the hermeneutic circle. We argue that by iterating between these dual tasks, researchers can harness the strengths of both approaches, reducing the dimensionality of text while preserving its pragmatic structure of meaning. To illustrate our approach, we apply it to the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC), demonstrating how machine learning can identify coherent rhetorical intervals that are then interpreted using expert knowledge. Our primary objective is pedagogical, but our application also highlights the potential empirical payoffs of combining MLTA and interpretive analysis in the era of big data.

How are global norms translated to school settings across countries? Schools teach global norms, but how exactly these norms are presented in this setting is rarely analysed. In this article, we compare how human trafficking, a global crime defined at the UN level, is depicted in more than a hundred textbooks for secondary schools in the United States, Nigeria and Germany. Human trafficking is linked to a multitude of different criminal activities, ranging from child trafficking to modern slavery, organ trafficking, and forced prostitution, each with varying implications regarding underlying social problems and possible counter-efforts. What textbooks depict concerning global norms on global crime thus differs substantially across countries, underlining arguments of norm research on translation and hybridity. We show how textbooks translate global normative debates to the school context in a way that shows some commonalities but also significant national variations, for example, regarding where exploitation occurs, what exactly constitutes trafficking, and how it relates to slavery. These findings raise questions on common normative understandings regarding crime and current and future threat perceptions.

In February 2017, Syrian-German artist Manaf Halbouni set up three upright bus wrecks at a central square of Dresden, thereby recalling a scene from the war-torn city of Aleppo, from which thousands were fleeing. The work of art, entitled Monument, was one of many controversial occasions on which emotions were mobilised in conflicts over migration. This paper deploys the concept of crafting emotional proximity and distance as a way to shift debates on whether emotions should be mobilised in conflicts over migration towards a closer engagement with how this can be done and what the ethical and political implications are. I suggest a methodological framework which combines a focus on the aesthetic, pragmatic and ethical/political aspects. By applying the approach to Monument, I argue that the material presence and physical proximity of the work of art disrupted the carefully crafted categories of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ which characterise the concept of world order held by sections of the local population and catalysed by far-right activists. So whether or not Monument contributed to crafting stronger emotional proximity with refugees, it claimed public space and exposed world views of exclusivity and inequality which may otherwise have remained below the surface.

In this paper, we analyse the dynamics of interethnic relations in Baljvine, a village in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where local Bosniaks and Serbs did not resort to interethnic violence that otherwise marked most of BiH during the last war. Drawing on structural factors that shed light on the dynamics of relations in post-conflict societies where interethnic violence occurred, the aim is to explain why and how bloodshed was prevented in Baljvine during the last war. To achieve this, we employ a multi-method research approach, combining qualitative observation with participation and interviews with the villagers. The results show that intersubjective motivations and a set of smaller coincidences in Baljvine affected structural factors and resulted in avoidance of interethnic violence. This enabled us to coin the concept of “peace mosaic” to demonstrate how several smaller pieces have to align in a community to allow it to remain peaceful. The key contribution is in advancing the argument that the structural factors that explain interethnic violence can also work in favour of peace.

Since the adoption of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the order founded on the treaty has evolved into an increasingly fragmented regime complex. Fragmentation has resulted from forum-shifting initiated both at the top and at the bottom of the nuclear hierarchy: both the United States, with varying partners, and coalitions of small-and medium-sized non-nuclear states have repeatedly moved rule-making on nuclear issues to fora outside the NPT, adding partly conflicting institutions to the complex. To understand this dynamic, I propose a sociological perspective that highlights states’ positional struggles in a multidimensionally stratified international society. Drawing on Bourdieusian global fields theory, I argue that both dominant and weak states use forum-shifting to manipulate exchange rates between different (material, institutional and social) forms of capital they possess. Thus, they seek to protect their positions in global hierarchies within and beyond the nuclear field when they perceive these hierarchies as being challenged by material or institutional power shifts.

Salient discourses shape the way actors perceive and engage in global politics. How and to what extent terminology becomes salient in international society, however, is not well understood. This article investigates one potential source of discursive change: global conferences convened by the United Nations (UN). Conceptually, we combine insights from scholarship on discursive shifts with an emphasis on how salient terms become in a given venue and points in time, in order to better understand when and to what extent a discursive shift is sustained. Quantitative analysis of all speeches in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) General Debate between 1970 and 2020 robustly illustrates correspondence between UN global conferences and shifts in the salience of core terms by means of two independent indicators and interrupted time series analysis. We identify three significant discursive shifts following UN global conferences with wide and puzzling variation in their trajectories: sustainable development, social development, and gender (equality). To understand this variation, we qualitatively investigate scope conditions of discursive shifts and salience of these and several related terms. Our findings include that differences in terms’ versatility and formal institutionalisation correspond with their rise and fall in salience after global conferences.

Rio de Janeiro’s long-marginalised, majority Afro-descendant old port area, home to the remains of the Americas’ largest slave disembarkation wharf and Brazil’s first favela, has been subjected to recurring elite-led ‘revitalisation’ projects. A contemporary plan, Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port), seeks to address the region’s decline through a culture-led, public-private development scheme that refashions this space as a tourist and residential hub. Based on participant-observation, interviews with protagonists, and discursive analysis of official texts, this article analyses the most spectacular addition to Rio’s previously derelict waterfront—the grandiosely titled Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow)—to demonstrate how efforts to neoliberalise space, within this postcolonial and settler-colonial urban context and beyond, are increasingly given a progressive twist. Drawing from Leslie Sklair’s pathbreaking analysis of the political economy of architectural ‘iconicity’, I interrogate the socio-spatial dimensions of the Museum as a starchitect-designed and utopian site that promotes sustainability and community empowerment, but simultaneously cultivates a market-friendly ethos. Invoking Nancy Fraser, I argue that the Museum represents an emblematic case of ‘progressive neoliberal place-making.’ Through analysing global city-making processes in Rio’s ‘Little Africa’, this article addresses longstanding lacunae in IPE and IR related to the centrality of race and colonialism in global capitalism.

Failures in rebuilding states have generally been studied in terms of localised, sectarian strife, with little comprehension of how external interventions alter state authority. Yet, how do international interventions contribute to authority-making? I argue that authority certifications hold a twofold cure/poisoning potential producing a selective right to rule. By analysing the politics of recognition in the Libyan conflict between 2011 and 2016, this article unpacks mechanisms of legitimacy certification and decertification throughout three stages of international intervention (regime change, democratisation, and mediation). Certifications, I argue, promote a simulacrum of sovereignty by legitimising domestic forces, who then utilise certification to enhance their claim to power. By combining a focus on recognition politics with a process-oriented perspective on the mechanics of authority-making, I advance the notion of certification as a tool for political re-ordering. Theoretically, I define a selective right to rule as an externally filtered entitlement resulting from certification practices that shape complex power struggles. Empirically, I demonstrate how certification systems further divided and split Libya after 2011. While NATO’s involvement dispersed the military strength essential for regime change, UN-led democratisation and mediation efforts fueled an institutional limbo that aided rival military and political powers, bolstering divergent authority claims.

The gap between Russia’s aspirations to become a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to do so has become increasingly more visible, especially following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. I examine the mismatch between the Russian leadership’s AI narrative and the country’s technological capabilities via the lens of Russia’s quest for great power status and ontological security. Connecting literatures on status-seeking, ontological security, and narratives in International Relations, I show the need to scrutinise narratives surrounding technology, especially AI technologies and their associated ambiguities, as part of how states deal with the constant uncertainty about recognition of their self-perceived identity. Based on an analysis of textual and visual documents collected via open-access sources, I find that the Russian official AI narrative embeds three of the elements forming Russia’s conception of a great power, namely the ability to compete, modernise, and attain technological sovereignty. It features a plot where the state is the main protagonist leading Russia towards AI leadership despite the obstacles it is facing. Although the official rhetoric does not match the reality of Russian capabilities, the narrative is used as a cognitive tool in the quest for identity during times of uncertainty.

This article focuses on the supply side of status recognition in the liberal international order (LIO). The order’s liberal milieu breeds hierarchies among states, which in turn generate certain exigencies for recognition. Although states receive ‘thin’ recognition, the order fails to structurally acknowledge their worth, value and uniqueness, or ‘thick’ recognition. This inconsistency lies at the heart of the order’s recognition regime and serves as a source of frustration and revisionism. Since recognition needs are not saturated systemically, an opening emerges for non-systemic grants of recognition, which are mostly conferred by a select core of liberal states. I unpack the said inconsistency in the LIO’s recognition regime and concentrate on the production of non-systemic grants of recognition and their practical implications. I identify the non-systemic grants of recognition as an effective, yet problematic characteristic of the recognition regime because they further exacerbate hierarchies based on a specific understanding of merit. In operationalizing the process of status recognition in the particular milieu of the LIO, the piece introduces a heuristic framework for qualitatively assessing the perceived functional worth of states and provides empirical examples.