Pub Date : 2024-08-09DOI: 10.1177/00471178241269708
Peter Newell
Rather than dealing in death, if IR is to retain relevance among the social sciences in seeking to both account for and change a world in the midst of a deepening ‘polycrisis’, it needs to recognise and take its place in the web of life. In this article, I firstly argue for the need to ‘choose life’ by de-centring three key (interrelated) pillars of the discipline: the normalisation of militarism as a means and end of foreign policy; economic growth as the means and end of industrial economies and anthropocentrism and its unstated ideology of human supremacy in world affairs. Secondly, I propose a series of conceptual and methodological innovations by which a more ecological view of IR might take hold in the discipline, as well as concrete political strategies for embedding it in the conduct of IR. I suggest that these moves form the basis of both an improved account of the underlying sources of key threats in world politics such as war, poverty and ecological crises and an alternative source of solutions focussed on transcending dominant features of the discipline through a more than human account of IR and a more global and pluriversal account of world politics and the relations which matter most within it.
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Pub Date : 2024-08-09DOI: 10.1177/00471178241268340
Erzsébet Strausz
Drawing out resonances across art-based practice and critical imaginations in the discipline, this paper maps out conceptual, creative and experiential resources for re-rooting International Relations for the climate and the needs of the more-than-human world. I trace what I describe as ecologically attuned ways of knowing along two main inspirations: L. H. M. Ling’s Imagining World Politics and the 7000 HUMANS participatory initiative designed by Shelley Sacks. Writing with a rhizomatic sensibility and foregrounding ways of knowing that may emerge in and through encounters with trees, I explore imaginative possibilities for transforming epistemological disconnection from vegetal life into embodied, integrative, life-enhancing modes of relating to both ourselves and the more-than-human world.
本文通过艺术实践与学科批判性想象之间的共鸣，勾勒出国际关系在概念、创造性和体验性方面的资源，从而为气候和超人类世界的需求重新建立国际关系。我所描述的生态适应性认知方式有两个主要灵感来源：L. H. M. Ling 的《想象世界政治》（Imagining World Politics）和 Shelley Sacks 设计的 "7000 人类"（7000 HUMANS）参与式倡议。我以根瘤学的敏感性写作，强调在与树木的接触中以及通过与树木的接触而产生的认识方式，探索将认识论上与植物生命的脱节转化为与我们自身和超人类世界相关的体现性、整合性和生命提升模式的想象可能性。
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This exploratory research investigates how Indigenous Peoples (IPs) reshape International Relations (IR) and challenge established boundaries through an analysis of two Indigenous Climate Funds: the “Shandia Alliance for People, Nature and Climate” and the “Podáali Fund,” both autonomously managed by indigenous communities. By examining their engagements at COP-26 and conducting interviews, this study demonstrates how IPs act as pivotal agents shaping IR through their distinct ontologies and epistemologies. The findings underscore these funds’ role in broadening international perspectives, particularly in navigating tensions and fostering dialogues that redefine climate justice as an ongoing process of resistance. Ultimately, this paper contributes to re-rooting IR frameworks by centering indigenous perspectives and practices, thus exemplifying a “worlding” exercise that enriches our understanding of climate justice in motion.
本探索性研究通过对两个土著气候基金（"香迪亚人、自然与气候联盟 "和 "波达利基金"）的分析，探讨土著人民（IPs）如何重塑国际关系（IR）并挑战既定边界，这两个基金均由土著社区自主管理。通过考察他们在 COP-26 会议上的参与情况并进行访谈，本研究展示了土著人民如何通过其独特的本体论和认识论作为塑造 IR 的关键力量。研究结果强调了这些基金在拓宽国际视野方面的作用，尤其是在驾驭紧张局势和促进对话方面的作用，这些对话将气候正义重新定义为一个持续的抵抗过程。最终，本文以本土视角和实践为中心，为重新确立国际关系框架做出了贡献，从而体现了 "世界化 "实践，丰富了我们对动态气候正义的理解。
{"title":"Indigenous climate finance and the worlding of International Relations: climate justice in motion","authors":"Veronica Kober Gonçalves, Thais Lemos Ribeiro, Cristina Yumie Aoki Inoue, Juliana Lins","doi":"10.1177/00471178241269764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178241269764","url":null,"abstract":"This exploratory research investigates how Indigenous Peoples (IPs) reshape International Relations (IR) and challenge established boundaries through an analysis of two Indigenous Climate Funds: the “Shandia Alliance for People, Nature and Climate” and the “Podáali Fund,” both autonomously managed by indigenous communities. By examining their engagements at COP-26 and conducting interviews, this study demonstrates how IPs act as pivotal agents shaping IR through their distinct ontologies and epistemologies. The findings underscore these funds’ role in broadening international perspectives, particularly in navigating tensions and fostering dialogues that redefine climate justice as an ongoing process of resistance. Ultimately, this paper contributes to re-rooting IR frameworks by centering indigenous perspectives and practices, thus exemplifying a “worlding” exercise that enriches our understanding of climate justice in motion.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141925919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-28DOI: 10.1177/00471178241268270
Matt McDonald
As the contributions to this special issue suggest, IR has had a problematic relationship with environmental issues. Indeed it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that IR has treated environmental change almost as a distraction from important concerns of global politics, and gives us few significant resources for understanding these challenges or addressing them effectively. This is perhaps most starkly evident in the subfield of security studies, despite increasing recognition that environmental change warrants consideration as a security issue. This paper examines this engagement with a particular focus on climate change. Ultimately, the paper advances two arguments. First, examinations of the climate change–security relationship located in traditional security studies struggle to come to terms with the nature of the Anthropocene challenge and more specifically with the questions of who needs securing; what the nature of the threat posed is; and who is capable of or responsible for addressing this threat. Second, however, we can see progressive potential in engagement with the security implications of climate change in IR where such scholarship parts ways with traditional accounts of security; does not allow existing configurations of power to define the conditions for thinking about agency and sites of politics; and reflexively and self-consciously draws on insights from beyond the IR discipline. The increasing volume of work consistent with this more critical engagement is grounds for hope for this field of study in engaging productively even with a challenge as complex and significant as climate change.
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Pub Date : 2024-07-28DOI: 10.1177/00471178241268418
Madison Cartwright
Whilst the United States’ (US) economic hegemony has existed continuously since the end of World War II, it has not been realised in the same way. In the early post-war period, the US’s hegemony rested on its dominance over gross world product and manufacturing output and exports. However, by the 1970s it began to transition to high-technology industries, services and foreign investment. Using a structural power analysis, this article argues that this transition in the economic foundations of US hegemony was not a reaction to an exogenous shift in the international division of labour, but was rather the result of the endogenous policies, decisions and priorities of the US. Moreover, the article illustrates how the interaction between the four aspects of structural power (security, production, finance and information) determined how these new hegemonic interests were embedded in international institutions and norms to better project US power globally. Through a historical analysis, the article demonstrates that the four aspects of structural power went from mutually reinforcing each other in the early post-war period to detracting from each other from the mid-1960s. This spurred a managed transition by the US from one embedded hegemonic order to another. The result was the construction of contemporary US embedded hegemonic order based on dollar hegemony (financial structural power) and the internationalisation of US corporate dominance (productive structural power), supported by the private ownership of knowledge by US corporations (informational structural power). The article also considers the implications of this analysis for current challenges to the contemporary hegemonic order.
{"title":"Embedded hegemony and the evolution of the United States’ structural power","authors":"Madison Cartwright","doi":"10.1177/00471178241268418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178241268418","url":null,"abstract":"Whilst the United States’ (US) economic hegemony has existed continuously since the end of World War II, it has not been realised in the same way. In the early post-war period, the US’s hegemony rested on its dominance over gross world product and manufacturing output and exports. However, by the 1970s it began to transition to high-technology industries, services and foreign investment. Using a structural power analysis, this article argues that this transition in the economic foundations of US hegemony was not a reaction to an exogenous shift in the international division of labour, but was rather the result of the endogenous policies, decisions and priorities of the US. Moreover, the article illustrates how the interaction between the four aspects of structural power (security, production, finance and information) determined how these new hegemonic interests were embedded in international institutions and norms to better project US power globally. Through a historical analysis, the article demonstrates that the four aspects of structural power went from mutually reinforcing each other in the early post-war period to detracting from each other from the mid-1960s. This spurred a managed transition by the US from one embedded hegemonic order to another. The result was the construction of contemporary US embedded hegemonic order based on dollar hegemony (financial structural power) and the internationalisation of US corporate dominance (productive structural power), supported by the private ownership of knowledge by US corporations (informational structural power). The article also considers the implications of this analysis for current challenges to the contemporary hegemonic order.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141796585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-26DOI: 10.1177/00471178241265615
Jens Heibach, Hakkı Taş
This article translates Michael Mann’s notion of infrastructural power into the foreign policy realm and develops a conceptual framework that allows for the systematic treatment of states’ strategic efforts at mobilising domestic non-state actors. Despite the common rationales underlying such efforts across regime types, the article argues that states’ systemic features matter greatly. It generates two ideal types of infrastructural power in foreign policy – bureaucratic and authoritarian – to capture the distinct mobilisational modes and trajectories of each. Using a typical case study design, it scrutinises Turkey’s shifting Africa policies under AKP rule. The empirical discussion supports two initial assumptions: first, the concept, partly by dint of its underlying organisational approach, introduces a novel take on power in IR, yet one complementary to the relational understanding prevailing in the discipline; second, it provides an original tool with which to systematically analyse crucial components in the foreign policies of democracies and autocracies.
{"title":"Infrastructural power in foreign policy: conceptualising states’ efforts to mobilise non-state actors","authors":"Jens Heibach, Hakkı Taş","doi":"10.1177/00471178241265615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178241265615","url":null,"abstract":"This article translates Michael Mann’s notion of infrastructural power into the foreign policy realm and develops a conceptual framework that allows for the systematic treatment of states’ strategic efforts at mobilising domestic non-state actors. Despite the common rationales underlying such efforts across regime types, the article argues that states’ systemic features matter greatly. It generates two ideal types of infrastructural power in foreign policy – bureaucratic and authoritarian – to capture the distinct mobilisational modes and trajectories of each. Using a typical case study design, it scrutinises Turkey’s shifting Africa policies under AKP rule. The empirical discussion supports two initial assumptions: first, the concept, partly by dint of its underlying organisational approach, introduces a novel take on power in IR, yet one complementary to the relational understanding prevailing in the discipline; second, it provides an original tool with which to systematically analyse crucial components in the foreign policies of democracies and autocracies.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141799626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-25DOI: 10.1177/00471178241265635
Michael PA Murphy
The concept of science has long played an important role in defining the field of international relations, both in its broader epistemological debates and in the formation of distinct research traditions. I argue that the emerging quantum approaches to international relations theory destabilize the conventional bifurcations of scientific and humanistic approaches to international relations, and that paying attention to this uncertainty can help build a broader understanding of not only quantum international relations but the field as a whole. Through a close reading of Hans Morgenthau’s commentaries on science in Scientific Man Versus Power Politics and Science: Servant or Master, this article argues that the ‘ethics objection’ that Morgenthau leveled against scientism is in fact overcome by quantum international relations.
{"title":"Rediscovering the ‘Meaning of Science’? Hans Morgenthau and the ethics debate in quantum IR","authors":"Michael PA Murphy","doi":"10.1177/00471178241265635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178241265635","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of science has long played an important role in defining the field of international relations, both in its broader epistemological debates and in the formation of distinct research traditions. I argue that the emerging quantum approaches to international relations theory destabilize the conventional bifurcations of scientific and humanistic approaches to international relations, and that paying attention to this uncertainty can help build a broader understanding of not only quantum international relations but the field as a whole. Through a close reading of Hans Morgenthau’s commentaries on science in Scientific Man Versus Power Politics and Science: Servant or Master, this article argues that the ‘ethics objection’ that Morgenthau leveled against scientism is in fact overcome by quantum international relations.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141803349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-24DOI: 10.1177/00471178241265642
Daniela Huber
Within Global IR a constructivist-postcolonial literature is emerging which inquires into how postcolonial states intervene into the normative structure of world politics. This research programme has less covered the question how postcolonial states relate to the international norm of democracy, how and in which ways do they contest this norm, and to which effects? This question is important both to study how the ‘postcolonial condition’ can be overcome, as well as to understand which contours and shapes the norm of democracy might be taking in a multiplex world. To study this multifaceted question from a perspective which acknowledges the shadow of the past, as well as the agency of postcolonial states, Wiener’s concept of norm contestation is applied and further developed in three respects: firstly, by staking out various forms of contestation, that is rejection, strategic contestation and the construction of alternative meaning; secondly, by bringing in identity as a mediating device which impacts the forms of contestation; and thirdly, by studying various sites of contestation where actors beyond the state are also taken into account. This framework is then applied to heuristically study the case of Iran which is of particular interest as it intervenes in the global contestation of the norm of democracy on a dual level of external resistance and internal dissent. Studying Iranian contestation at the UN, within Iran and in Iranian-EU engagement, it becomes evident that during times of geopolitical confrontation with the US, the spectre of the past is produced as present and the form of contestation features dialectics of hypocrisy which harm the norm of democracy. At the same time, we also see a strengthening of the norm of democracy through hybridity both in Iranian encounters with the EU, as well as in the contestation of meanings of democracy within Iran itself.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-16DOI: 10.1177/00471178241248554
Murat Ülgül
The field of international relations is recently witnessing an inflation of attention toward political leaders and personalities. Yet, while political leaders mattered to understand foreign policy behaviors, the question is how much they do and under what conditions. This article argues that how leaders and personalities affect foreign policy is up to the variables that can be analyzed at the state and international levels. To illustrate this argument, I use the example of two strong, influential, and revisionist Turkish leaders: Turgut Özal and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The results point out that the main determinative on Turkish foreign policy on these leaders’ period is not their personality as argued. Instead, the main variables we should analyze are the presence domestic and international constraints such as dominant foreign policy actors, economic capacity, political polarization, and international conjunctures.
{"title":"Do leaders really matter? The failure of ambitions in Turkish foreign policy","authors":"Murat Ülgül","doi":"10.1177/00471178241248554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178241248554","url":null,"abstract":"The field of international relations is recently witnessing an inflation of attention toward political leaders and personalities. Yet, while political leaders mattered to understand foreign policy behaviors, the question is how much they do and under what conditions. This article argues that how leaders and personalities affect foreign policy is up to the variables that can be analyzed at the state and international levels. To illustrate this argument, I use the example of two strong, influential, and revisionist Turkish leaders: Turgut Özal and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The results point out that the main determinative on Turkish foreign policy on these leaders’ period is not their personality as argued. Instead, the main variables we should analyze are the presence domestic and international constraints such as dominant foreign policy actors, economic capacity, political polarization, and international conjunctures.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140967375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-24DOI: 10.1177/00471178241248548
Sara E. Davies, Sophie Harman
Specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) emphasize the importance of impartiality and independence to ensure state compliance and buy-in to their institutional mandate. For functionalists, the boundary distinction between scientific expertise and politics is useful for interest-minded states and institutions that want to promote knowledge over politics. In extreme crisis states revert to national interests. The question for specialized agencies is whether to double-down on the boundary between science and politics during a crisis in an attempt to maintain authority. The COVID-19 pandemic tested this functional arrangement in international relations where scientific validity can facilitate the pursuit of global governance. This article explores why, in a time of crisis, WHO leadership maintained that the boundary between science and politics could be upheld, even when others identified politics as affecting impartiality and independence. It does so by exploring the role of governance processes and technical expertise led by the WHO in investigating the origins of COVID-19 pandemic. Doubling down on science as a solution ignored the politics that permeated, especially, the origins investigation in China. We argue that while the temptation to enforce boundary work may be more acute in periods of crisis, attempts to maintain boundaries between politics and science during a crisis undermines the function and reputation of specialized technical agencies. It is more functional to expose the political conditions as compromising scientific independence and impartiality.
{"title":"WHO and COVID-19: stress testing the boundary of science and politics","authors":"Sara E. Davies, Sophie Harman","doi":"10.1177/00471178241248548","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178241248548","url":null,"abstract":"Specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) emphasize the importance of impartiality and independence to ensure state compliance and buy-in to their institutional mandate. For functionalists, the boundary distinction between scientific expertise and politics is useful for interest-minded states and institutions that want to promote knowledge over politics. In extreme crisis states revert to national interests. The question for specialized agencies is whether to double-down on the boundary between science and politics during a crisis in an attempt to maintain authority. The COVID-19 pandemic tested this functional arrangement in international relations where scientific validity can facilitate the pursuit of global governance. This article explores why, in a time of crisis, WHO leadership maintained that the boundary between science and politics could be upheld, even when others identified politics as affecting impartiality and independence. It does so by exploring the role of governance processes and technical expertise led by the WHO in investigating the origins of COVID-19 pandemic. Doubling down on science as a solution ignored the politics that permeated, especially, the origins investigation in China. We argue that while the temptation to enforce boundary work may be more acute in periods of crisis, attempts to maintain boundaries between politics and science during a crisis undermines the function and reputation of specialized technical agencies. It is more functional to expose the political conditions as compromising scientific independence and impartiality.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140659614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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