Journal of International Relations and Development最新文献

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.

The study of power in IR has produced insightful typologies, but the persisting paradigmatic divisions induce problems that stifle further progress. The fungibility problem concerns the missing links between the categories in the typologies as well as between typologies. The fragmentation problem arises from the difficulties of analysing diffuse agency. This article proposes a closer dialogue with Gramsci’s work and embeds the resulting inputs into a process-centred conceptualisation of power that can accommodate the dialectic analysis of social transformations from the Prison Notebooks. The intellectual exchange engenders an understanding in which different modalities of power can be linked together as mechanisms interfering with each other in an iterative open process. The conundrum of fragmented agency is revisited through the perspective of an integral power process that entangles actor interests and identities. These interventions create opportunities for meaningful interaction between studies into the different faces of power.

Abstract

Can foreign aid foster democracy? This is a foundational question debated in development studies and donor circles. Within this debate, some scholars argue that aid is detrimental to democratic institutions via an aid curse. The foil to this aid curse, namely that taxation fosters representation, inspires much comparative political economy research. We bring these fields together and approach the aid-democratization and taxation-representation questions through a unique lens: how foreign aid given to assist with tax collection (i.e. tax aid) affects representation. Tax aid is a form of technical assistance associated with increased tax capacity that can be leveraged to assess how such a change impacts democracy. Our statistical estimations indicate that countries receiving tax aid see an improvement in democracy. Survey data analyses show tax aid is associated with increased voting, especially among the middle class, but not changes in government satisfaction. A case illustration of Kenya corroborates our results.

This article examines the overlap between European Union migration controls and internal counter-terror measures in the Kurdish populated region at the Turkey-Iran border. It highlights the development of an ‘externalisation creep’ in the context of this overlap. We discuss how the EU’s external measures aimed at people classed as ‘irregular migrants and smugglers’ creep into local internal border security, leading to the prioritisation, on the ground, of measures against people broadly labelled as supporting ‘terrorism’. This development has resulted in the expansion of borderwork, which is associated with unexpected border control outcomes beyond those originally intended by the EU. The article draws upon an ethnographic data collection at the Turkey-Iran border, a geographical area that has seldom featured in EU-supported border controls studies. Our analysis seeks to contribute to the academic literature on externalisation by moving away from an EU-centric perspective, and instead focusing on border governance dynamics that are situated in the local histories and domestic sites of conflict, as understood by diverse border crossing survivors. This approach allows us to foreground how EU migration externalisation co-opts domestic practices in the context of borders with pre-existing forms of insecurity, and targets migrants as well as residents.