{"title":"‘Ultimate optimism’: the twin critical visions of E.H. Carr and Reinhold Niebuhr","authors":"Avi Siegal","doi":"10.1177/00471178231205394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231205394","url":null,"abstract":"This essay elucidates the deep affinity between the political theories of E.H. Carr and Reinhold Niebuhr. Central to this affinity was their shared advocacy of an ongoing dialectic between vision and critique, or (in their words) utopianism and realism. The immediate justification for this essay is the surprising dearth of extended comparisons of Carr and Niebuhr, even though Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis acknowledges a particular debt to Niebuhr and cites Niebuhr seven times in that work. Comparing Carr and Niebuhr also reveals the Marxist roots of their dialectical approach and highlights their adamant refusal to proclaim themselves ‘realists’. The essay thus encourages the discipline of international relations to seek its genealogy in the tradition of radical political thought and to reassess the common assumption that Carr and Niebuhr are founders of the modern realist approach. In the author’s view, the ‘ultimate optimism’ of Carr and Niebuhr, though widely underappreciated, is compelling.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135870392","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}
{"title":"When leaders disappoint: rejection and denial of leadership roles in international politics","authors":"Gordon M. Friedrichs, Áine Fellenz","doi":"10.1177/00471178231205399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231205399","url":null,"abstract":"International leadership failure by states is an underdeveloped concept in International Relations. Existing approaches commonly equate leadership with hegemony, arguing that leadership success and failure are contingent on primacy or shared material interests among states. In this article, we introduce a role theoretical approach, which defines international leadership as a social role that emerges from shared expectations among states pertaining to leadership purpose, group cohesion and time horizon. Accordingly, leadership failure occurs when role expectations between states diverge and states are unable to generate commensurate role-taking via alter-casting. Four leader-follower constellations can be distinguished: leadership enactment, denial, rejection and vacuum. The paper utilizes this theoretical heuristic to understand two cases of leadership failure. The first case involves Brazil’s attempted leadership role in response to the Latin American migration crisis following the political crisis in Venezuela. The second case examines Indonesia’s attempted leadership role in the South China Sea dispute. The empirical findings contribute to existing work on hegemony and leadership in international relations theory by showing that leadership failure comes in different variants and these variants are contingent on shared role expectations and alter-casting capacity of states involved.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135216024","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}
{"title":"Bipartisanship on China in a polarized America","authors":"Christopher Carothers, Taiyi Sun","doi":"10.1177/00471178231201484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231201484","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, the need for the United States to compete with and counter an increasingly assertive China has become a rare point of agreement between Democrats and Republicans, leading to a boom in China-related legislation with bipartisan support. This study asks two questions: first, whether this new China consensus is substantive or, as some analysts argue, superficial; and second, why bipartisan cooperation on China has emerged despite America’s intense political polarization. We address these two questions through a systematic analysis of China-related legislation and U.S. legislators’ messaging about China on social media. We find that the new consensus is substantive, with many bipartisan bills mandating meaningful action on trade, technology, diplomatic and military affairs, and human rights issues. Moreover, we argue that the new consensus emerged largely in 2017–2018, in response to several developments indicating China’s growing threat—geopolitical, economic, and ideological—to U.S. predominance in the international order. This study provides fresh insights on U.S.-China relations and contributes theoretically to the study of when external threats induce bipartisanship and when they do not.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134957873","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}
{"title":"Multilateralism from the middle: stratification and NGOs","authors":"Molly Ruhlman","doi":"10.1177/00471178231196071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231196071","url":null,"abstract":"The universe of civil society organizations is vast and stratified. This article focuses on a particular type of organization: those that utilize high levels of multilateral expertise and expend significant resources on advocacy work within international organizations. Borrowing from middle power state theory, I suggest that considering material and social stratification helps us to understand the conditions that lead to a particular NGO role in global diplomacy. Drawing on meeting records, committee and working group membership, and interviews with organization representatives, this paper offers a plausibility probe investigation of a set of NGOs that are exceptionally engaged in civil society affairs in the New York hub of the United Nations.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135816153","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}
{"title":"The statistical trilemma: built-in limitations of international economic statistics","authors":"Daniel DeRock, Daniel Mügge","doi":"10.1177/00471178231201489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231201489","url":null,"abstract":"Economic statistics are central to global economic governance. They are the informational background to the Sustainable Development Goals, conditional lending by international organizations, and other dimensions of development policy. But there is a growing chasm between aspirations for economic statistics and what they can deliver on the ground. We argue that these shortcomings are rooted in what we call a trilemma of official statistics, a general limitation that goes beyond methodological deficiencies of individual indicators. Data users demand that economic statistics should (a) use harmonized standards to be comparable, (b) be guided by standards prescriptive enough to guarantee reliability and prevent manipulation, and (c) be suited to local socioeconomic contexts. Yet as we show, complex statistics can only satisfy two of these conditions at once. Importantly, we can only increase the suitability of such statistics to local contexts if we make concessions on either prescriptiveness or harmonization. We examine three cases in detail: national accounts statistics, poverty lines, and unemployment statistics. To strengthen external validity, we also briefly consider inflation, trade, and debt statistics as additional cases. The statistical trilemma clarifies the inevitable trade-offs statisticians face when designing measurement standards and thus the role they can – and cannot – play in global governance.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135817077","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}
{"title":"Liberal democracies and asylum: legal transformation and implementation challenges","authors":"Jonathan Kent","doi":"10.1177/00471178231197757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231197757","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last 30 years, liberal democracies of the Global North have increasingly restricted access to their in-country asylum systems shifting many asylum and migration practices extraterritorially and prompting concern about the status of the universal human right to seek asylum. Most observers explain the trend as liberal states exerting national power and self-interest to ‘externalize’ asylum, ‘evading’ but not breaching international law. This piece adopts a different approach blending research on dynamic legal norms with Brunnée and Toope’s use of Lon Fuller’s criteria of legality. In contrast to explanations based on self-interest and power, I describe how the legal norm governing asylum has evolved over time alongside the shifting asylum and migration practices of liberal states through three phases. First, liberal democracies traditionally practiced an exclusively in-country approach to asylum prior to the late 1990s which only tentatively adhered to the criteria of legality. Second, the legal norm governing asylum shifted during the late 1990s and early 2000s creating new doctrine and legal practices at the multilateral level for reasons that resonated with the criteria of legality. Following contestation, however, liberal states have so far failed to implement the new substantive and procedural guidance despite the availability of more appropriate asylum practices. This account provides a significant qualification to the work on externalization and legal norm evasion, allows for the development of a typology containing three modes of asylum, and points to more legalistic asylum practices than what currently prevail among liberal states.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73676573","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}
{"title":"Animal protection as animal welfare and anti-cruelty: a genealogical re-examination of the EU seal products ban","authors":"Judith Renner","doi":"10.1177/00471178231191290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231191290","url":null,"abstract":"This article suggests a way to inquire into animal protection politics as a specific field of international politics which regulates human-animal relations. Based on a genealogical analysis of the emergence of animal protection thinking in 19th and 20th century Great Britain, it argues that animal protection is structured by two specific strategies, anti-cruelty and animal welfare, that constitute our knowledge of what animal protection is and how it can be achieved. Whereas animal welfare suggests that animal protection means the meticulous technical standardisation of animal use along the scientific knowledge about particular species’ stress levels, anti-cruelty takes a moral approach and suggests that animal protection can be achieved by taming the cruel human subject by means of legal prohibition. The article uses these strategies as an interpretative lens for analysing the EU’s behaviour in the seal products case. It argues that the ban of the trade in seal products can be understood as the result of the anti-cruelty strategy gaining dominance in the EU debates on its seal policy. Moreover, in the ensuing WTO struggle the moral undertones of anti-cruelty made it possible for the EU to frame the ban as the protection of public morals under Article XX (a) GATT and thus to establish animal protection as a legitimate ground for trade restrictions. The antagonistic identity construction attached to anti-cruelty moreover made it possible for the EU to constitute itself as a morally superior subject and to re-emerge as a normative power in the context of animal protection. The article concludes by reflecting about further avenues for research on international animal protection politics.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134994705","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}
{"title":"Race, nation, empire? Historicising outward and inward-facing British nationalism","authors":"James Foley","doi":"10.1177/00471178231196073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231196073","url":null,"abstract":"Brexit has continued to capture the attention of International Relations (IR) scholars, where it has been linked to the burgeoning debate on race and postcolonialism. This article adds to this scholarship by historicising the question of imperial nostalgia, which has been central to these intersecting literatures. It re-examines how influential theorists Hall and Gilroy linked the peculiarities of British national consciousness to traumas issuing from the loss of great power status. It emphasises two themes often lacking in recent accounts of Brexit nationalism: namely, the centrality of military mobilisation to national consciousness; and the unevenness between popular and elite sentiment with regards to the imperial dimension. In historicising themes of extroversion and introversion, it reconsiders the significant metamorphoses in post-Thatcherite British nationalism, which had centred on proclaiming a national renaissance founded in foreign policy successes, international moral leadership and a state-led consensus for rolling out globalisation worldwide. The research shows that revisionism about the British Empire played a significant role in foreign policy discourse across this period, as did pro-EU sentiment among the governing and ruling elite. It highlights the mechanisms which allowed UK foreign policy intellectuals to link the military roll-out of ‘postmodern’ social norms with the European project’s end goals. These findings help historically situate Brexit amid a succession of crises for the liberal global order. The research finds that, whereas Brexit appeared initially as a retreat or break from the UK’s post-Thatcherite ‘globalising’ nationalism, subsequent developments highlight significant continuities.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86619128","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}
{"title":"‘Broadening’ and ‘deepening’ collective security in times of health crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond","authors":"Umut Ozguc, Asima Rabbani","doi":"10.1177/00471178231196070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231196070","url":null,"abstract":"Since the end of the Cold War, the UN’s collective security model has been questioned as to whether it has been well equipped to respond to the changing landscape of global security. By using the UN Security Council’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, this paper traces the discursive contestations of the traditional understanding of the UN Charter-based collective security model. It examines what meanings the member states collectively attach to public health crises, how they frame the COVID-19 pandemic, and, finally how they consider the role of the Security Council in responding to non-military emergencies. An analysis of the debates by the Council members suggest that there is a slow normative change in the recognition of health security as an indivisible aspect of peace. We argue that the pandemic has created a normative environment for the Council’s members to rethink ‘broadening’ and ‘deepening’ collective security beyond military conflicts to emphasize the Council’s role in addressing health issues, structural inequalities, and other human security threats.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75946390","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}
{"title":"The deterioration of South America’s security architecture: from cooperation to coexistence?","authors":"Milton Carlos Bragatti, Brigitte Weiffen","doi":"10.1177/00471178231195246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231195246","url":null,"abstract":"While South America made significant strides in regional security cooperation since the 1990s, more recently the region seems to have entered a process of backsliding from its cooperative achievements and towards mere coexistence. This article proposes that an English School approach allows for a nuanced assessment of regional security cooperation. It contributes to the analysis of regional international societies and regional organisations as markers of fundamental institutional change. While scholars have studied how regional organisations shape the fundamental institutions of regional international societies as they emerge and evolve, little research has been done on whether a decline in regional organisations can lead to changes in the fundamental institutions of regional international societies. Using a set of indicators for coexistence and cooperative international societies, we analyse whether there is evidence of backsliding from cooperation to coexistence in South America with regard to three different types of security challenges: interstate conflict and militarisation; inter-mestic repercussions of internal conflict and violence; and extra-regional influences. We argue that a decline in regional organisations exacerbates those challenges, as they are no longer mitigated through institutionalised diplomatic procedures. However, despite the organisational decline, fundamental institutions in South America have so far proven relatively resilient.","PeriodicalId":47031,"journal":{"name":"International Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76912098","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}