Journal of International Relations and Development最新文献

Contrary to the common promise of the UN Charter, mass atrocities continue to be committed as the wars in Yemen and South Sudan or the fate of the Rohingya in Myanmar demonstrate. Using Germany as an example, this article examines the thesis that mass atrocity situations are silenced which inhibits their politicisation. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature on silencing and theoretical approaches (agenda-setting, desecuritisation, discourse-bound identity theory) a working definition of silencing in foreign policy is proposed. Silencing appears to be a structural feature of ‘identity mismatch’ characterised by three modes: non-mentioning, trivialisation and framing. A rhetoric-analysis of speech acts by the German chancellor, foreign ministers and leaders of the parliamentary groups on the aforementioned cases shows in which way the German political elite in fact silences mass atrocities.

Besides the increasing scope of transnational activities of civil society actors, international relations of national legislatures have long been expanding, yet without attracting substantial scholarly attention. We can observe that national Members of Parliament meet in various bi-and multilateral organisational forms within and beyond international organisations to fulfil parliamentary functions. We present a conceptual framework differentiating between two forms of international parliamentary relations: multilateral vs. bilateral organisation. We argue that multilateral participation is mostly driven by the supply of such organisations and can mainly be found in Europe and Africa. On the contrary, the capacity of chambers can explain the realisation of bilateral channels. We test our claims with data for the international relations of 144 national parliaments. Our explorative empirical study is the first to jointly analyse bi- and multilateral transnational parliamentary relations and shows that international parliamentary cooperation varies over legislatures and regions, generating genuine clusters of institutionalised communities. Our findings help to embed the existing research on international parliamentary institutions and diplomacy in a larger context of international relations. Furthermore, our global relational account of national parliaments speaks to research on diverse topics of domestic outcomes, such as democratisation, norm and legal diffusion, and governmental control.

Most scholarship on major oil-producing countries (OPCs) focuses on their illiberal characteristics, but scant research explores how these regimes react to periodic oil price collapses, particularly neo-patrimonial OPCs with relatively low state capacity, herein termed gatekeeper OPCs. These OPCs should be extremely vulnerable to regime change during economic crises. However, since the most recent collapse in international oil markets in 2014, almost all neo-patrimonial OPCs have managed to weather the ensuing fallout, thereby begging the question of how these seemingly vulnerable regimes manage to survive extended periods of economic crises. We hypothesise that the likelihood of regime survival in neo-patrimonial OPCs depends on a strategic calibration of domestic neo-patrimonial policies, such as clientelism and executive aggrandisement, and the skilled navigation of global geopolitics. We find evidence that incumbent governments leverage international geopolitical tensions during economic crises to secure valuable foreign aid from key allies, which allows them to maintain the domestic neo-patrimonial strategies required to safeguard their power. We reached the above finding through a nested mixed-methods research design combining quantitative analysis of 35 major OPCs from 2011 to 2018 using Cox proportional hazards models with the qualitative comparison of two gatekeeper OPCs-Chad and Venezuela.