Journal of International Relations and Development最新文献

One of the latest methods being trialled across the development sector to help advance progress towards achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is 'twinning'. In this equation, twinning is rendered as a broadly replicable methodology for improving development outcomes, with a particular emphasis on building up human resources and technical capacity within governments and national bureaucracies. It is time-bound, target driven and depoliticised. However, the relationship between twinning and development has not always looked this way. Our paper uses a genealogical approach to unpack and illuminate the historical circumstances and politico-economic conditions under which these discourses have previously converged. It documents the gradual historical trajectory of the phenomenon of twinning from an overt political act to a largely apolitical tool of development practitioners. In so doing, it denaturalises the status quo and prompts reflection on alternative pathways, politics and practices of development.

This article argues that the concept of state capture helps to structure our understanding of patterns of grand corruption seen around the world in varied contexts, and increasingly even in countries once regarded as secure democracies. This article seeks to lay the groundwork for future empirical research into state capture in three areas. First, it situates the concept within a wider literature on corruption and describes how it relates to other similar terms, including regulatory capture and kleptocracy. Second, it elaborates on three pillars of activity that are subject to capture, and a variety of mechanisms through which state capture occurs. This provides a structure for the gathering of evidence on how capture plays out in different cases, and raises questions about the interactions among mechanisms and variation in sequencing. Third, the paper considers the impact of state capture on economic and social development, by outlining the ways in which it skews the distribution of power and potential long-term consequences for the allocation of rights and resources.

The Liberal International Order (LIO) is under pressure from various angles. To account for this phenomenon, a recent trend is to focus on endogenous sources of contestation-institutional properties of the order that create negative feedback effects. In this article, we seize on and extend an endogenous explanation centring on the LIO's political structure and institutional design. While existing research stipulates a connection between the rising authority of liberal international organisations (IOs) and their increasing politicisation, we still lack a clear understanding of the reasons behind the growing rejection of the order at the level of mass publics. We argue that the LIO's institutional setup contains a widening 'democracy gap' denoting a disconnect between the participatory legitimation requirements for the exercise of political authority and the technocratic legitimation rationale characterising IOs. By creating a justification deficit, the democracy gap incites growing political dissatisfaction and, by implying a responsiveness deficit, it turns policy contestation into outright polity contestation. We probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument in case studies of the EU and the international regimes on trade and human rights, and subsequently discuss the analytical and normative implications of our argument.

Since 2018, US foreign policy elites have portrayed China as the gravest threat to their country. Why was China predominantly cast as an ideological threat, even though other discursive formulations, such as a geopolitical threat, were plausible and available? Existing major IR theories on threat perpcetions struggle to address these questions. In this article, we draw from rhetoric and public legitimation scholarship to argue that the mobilization of adjacent policy debates was key to mainstream the representation of China as an ideological threat. By mobilizing debates on Russia and the soft power and sharp power concepts, a minority view in US foreign policy with a longstanding ambition to get tough on China established a seemingly natural link between liberal internationalism and an ideologically threatening China. Liberal foreign policy elites who originally opposed a realpolitik view of China could now subsume a geopolitical threat into an ideological one reminiscent of US-Soviet Cold War rivalry. This constituted a necessary catalyst to align most foreign policy elites to understand China as the gravest threat to the United States, at a time when China's capabilities and behaviour, coupled with a deep sense of insecurity regarding America's place in the world, provided the necessary backdrop.

Although international actors operating under the United Nations umbrella put much faith in the possibility of bridging science and policy through various institutional arrangements, research in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition suggests that different civic epistemologies revolve around environmental degradation issues. Civic epistemologies, which imply peculiar understandings of knowledge across cultures, are not easily bridged. This paper contends that conflicting (civic) epistemologies inevitably emerge in epistemic debates at the intergovernmental level, with strong implications for how science and knowledge are dealt with and understood in environmental negotiations. Drawing on the experience of global soil and land governance and building on the idiom of civic epistemologies, the concept of intergovernmental epistemologies is introduced as an analytical tool to capture the diverging ways of appreciating and validating knowledge in intergovernmental settings. Placing state actors and their perspectives center stage, intergovernmental epistemologies account for the tensions, contestations and politicisation processes of international institutional settings dealing with environmental issues. The paper concludes discussing the consequences of intergovernmental epistemologies for the study of global environmental governance: it cautions about overreliance on approaches based on learning and all-encompassing discourses, emphasizing the value of using STS-derived concepts to investigate the complexity of international environmental negotiations.