Cambridge Review of International Affairs最新文献

{"title":"Power vacuums in international politics: a conceptual framework","authors":"Moritz S. Graefrath","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2272272","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2272272","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractPolicymakers and academics alike frequently invoke power vacuums as important phenomena in international politics, referring to them in a diverse array of contexts ranging from civil war to the decline and retrenchment of great powers. However, students of international relations (IR) have largely neglected to seriously engage ‘power vacuum’ as a social scientific concept. This renders it virtually impossible to undergird current policy debates on power vacuums with social scientific analysis, and more generally raises doubts about the concept’s analytic utility. In this piece, I argue that ‘power vacuum’ is not merely a popular buzzword but a concept with considerable theoretical promise. I develop a conceptualisation of power vacuums as spaces that experience authority collapse. Since, in the context of international politics, organisations can claim authority on several political levels, I posit the existence of several types of power vacuums of which two appear particularly relevant to the study of IR: national and international vacuums. My conceptualisation is able to reflect the diverse ways in which the term is currently utilised, paves the way for novel research on a subject of great concern to policymakers, and uncovers the potential for closer collaboration across traditionally rigid thematic boundaries within IR. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplemental data and research materialsSupplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2272272Notes1 On this point, but applied to the concept of ‘grand strategy,’ see Silove Citation2018, 29.2 This is the most adequate, albeit imperfect, translation of the German original, that is, ‘legitime Herrschaft.’ For similar definitions of authority, see, for instance, Deudney Citation1995, 198; Solnick Citation1998, 13; Lake Citation2016, 24; Kustermans and Horemans Citation2022, 206. As will become clear below, what I am talking about here is de facto authority, that is, authority in a descriptive, non-normative sense. On the difference between normative and descriptive conceptualisations of authority and the debate about whether it is a meaningful distinction, see Simmons Citation2016, 16.3 Emphasis removed. ‘Will to comply’ is the closest translation of the original German ‘Gehorchen wollen.’4 I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting this framing and use of the Russian doll analogy to help clarify my argument.5 As Waltz (Citation1979, 81, 88) famously posits, relations of authority are absent between the most powerful states in the system. The main reason for this is that the successful establishment of authority vis-à-vis another entity is essentially impossible without a pronounced advantage in terms of material capability. However, between particularly strong states and other, weaker political entities this precondition for authority is fulfilled, especially if the power different","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"49 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135267692","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":"Sylvia Wynter in the Arctic: early modern expeditionary narratives and the construction of ‘Man’","authors":"Alister Wedderburn","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2273371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2273371","url":null,"abstract":"This article locates Martin Frobisher’s voyages to the North American Arctic in 1576, 1577 and 1578 in relation to the thought of Jamaican critic and theorist Sylvia Wynter. For Wynter, the post-Columbian settlement and colonisation of the Americas functioned as both a crucible and proving ground for a new, racialised understanding of the human, which she calls ‘Man’. Focusing on expeditionary narratives written by sailors on Frobisher’s three voyages to Baffin Island, the article treats these narratives as examples of travel writing, a genre occupying the mobile, labile threshold between history and fiction which has often mediated the comprehension of difference, hierarchy and (international) order. Focusing on these texts’ treatments of race and otherness, the article argues that the Arctic was a key site where the terms of relationality governing English interaction with the so-called ‘New World’ and its people were hesitatingly, clumsily and often violently worked out.","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"40 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135274016","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":"Crisis management in international organisations: the League of Nations’ response to early challenges","authors":"Gisela Hirschmann","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2271984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2271984","url":null,"abstract":"How do international organisations (IOs) respond to existential challenges such as membership withdrawals or budget cuts? Some IOs manage to ignore the challenge or adapt to the demands of the challenging state whereas others build institutional capacities to resist the pressure. Yet, we know little about the internal dynamics that shape IOs’ responses to such challenges. This article investigates to what extent IOs’ threat perception determines the intensity and direction of their responses to crises. Using the League of Nations’ responses to early crises as an explorative historical case study, the analysis shows that a timely and homogenous perception of a crisis leads to a more assertive and substantial response. Two broader conclusions can be drawn from the analysis for IO research. First, the role of international bureaucrats should not be underestimated in shaping an IO’s response to crises. Second, the findings indicate that a more nuanced perspective on the League’s crisis management can help overcome the failure narrative that dominates the current understanding of the League in International Relations research.","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"64 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135316198","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":"A haunting past: British defence, historical narratives, and the politics of presentism","authors":"David Morgan-Owen, Aimée Fox, Huw Bennett","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2273375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2273375","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines historical fictions as social processes by which ideas about conflict and warfare are constructed and narrated within society. Focusing on Britain, it explores ‘truth telling’ about the past in an applied context, examining efforts to construct and sustain narratives about Britain’s military past and their role in upholding forms of political and societal consensus that underpin the development and use of military power. We offer a typology of the ways in which Western liberal states shape and mobilise historical fictions within their distinctive forms of militarism and civil-military relations: ‘Telling Stories’—curating and sustaining social understandings of military power through public displays, museums, and ceremonies; ‘Hiding Pasts’—using state power to shape academic research and to occlude aspects of the military past; and ‘Knowing War’—legitimating the state and armed forces’ claims to a monopoly of authoritative knowledge about war and security.","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135413494","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":"Sources of empire: Negotiating history and fiction in the writing of historical IR","authors":"Julia Costa Lopez","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2271998","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2271998","url":null,"abstract":"In framing themselves as myth-busters, historical IR scholars have inscribed the distinction between history and fiction into how they speak to the discipline. And yet, engagement with what this might mean for the status of historical knowledge has mostly focused on broad metatheoretical distinctions and debates. Against this, I argue that questions about historical knowledge and its status are best understood as contingent settlements in the research practice of writing history, pursuing specific questions and writing specific answers. Through an exploration of the early stages in the creation of the Iberian Empires in the fifteenth century and the chronicles that provide an account of it, the article seeks to make visible the negotiations and settlements involved in writing history along four aspects of the distinction between history and fiction: facticity, emplotment, genre and the situated politics of history.","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"39 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135462789","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":"Letter from the editors","authors":"Elizabeth Paradis, Anni Roth Hjermann","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2248439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2248439","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134949779","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":"Patrick James, Realism and international relations: a graphic turn toward scientific progress","authors":"Nicholas Lees","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2248441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2248441","url":null,"abstract":"Patrick James occupies a somewhat unique position among contemporary realist international relations scholars. First, unlike most realists, James is actively involved in quantitative research on war and conflict, acting as one of the current co-directors of the International Crisis Behavior project. Second, James takes the criticisms of the realist paradigm seriously. A previous theoretical treatise, International Relations and Scientific Progress (James 2002) offered a carefully considered response to the arguments of Vasquez (1997) that the realist research programme on the balance of power is degenerative, unable to account for the failure of balances to form among states without endless ad hoc emendation, producing numerous incompatible variants of realism. Offering a very detailed interrogation of the core axioms of the theory, James argued that structural realism is worth the effort to reconstruct and elaborate. Twenty years later, James continues this project in Realism and International Relations: A Graphic Turn Towards Scientific Progress, restating the argument that it would be unwise for the international relations discipline to jettison realism, due to the power of the core intuitions underpinning the paradigm and the long history of realist theorising. Acknowledging that the international relations discipline is overwhelmed with alternative theories—claims about the death of IR theory notwithstanding—James avers that a detailed, systematic comparison of realist theories is overdue (113, 150). The aim is to clarify the causal mechanisms proposed by alternative realist theories to meet the challenge of critics such as Vasquez. This is accomplished through a careful reconstruction and defense of the realist paradigm, engaging with the past two decades of debates about philosophy of social science in international relations, as well as through a ‘systemist’ method of representing theories graphically. In terms of the philosophy of social science, James draws on analytical eclecticism, which calls for breaking down paradigmatic barriers in building theoretical explanations. His project shares its concern with mechanisms, middle-range explanations and bridge-building across theoretical traditions. Yet although analytical eclecticism can be ‘part of the way forward’ (91), James wishes to retain elements of paradigmatic research, integrating mechanisms into coherent causal explanations. The framework for this integrative project is the philosopher Mario Bunge’s ‘systemism’, which examines social processes in terms of a set of causal connections: macro-macro, macro-micro, micro-macro, micro-micro, from the environment and to the environment. A fully elaborated theory of international relations would specify each of these connections. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2023","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"36 1","pages":"745 - 747"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43002471","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":"Mathias Thaler, No other planet: Utopian visions for a climate-changed world","authors":"C. Death","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2248442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2248442","url":null,"abstract":"James, Patrick. 2002. International Relations and Scientific Progress: Structural Realism Reconsidered. Columbus: Ohio State University. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vasquez, John A. 1997. “The Realist Paradigm and Degenerative versus Progressive Research Programs: An Appraisal of Neotraditional Research on Waltz’s Balancing Proposition.” American Political Science Review 91 (4): 899–912. https://doi.org/10. 2307/2952172","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"36 1","pages":"747 - 749"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45001926","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":"Shyam Saran, How China Sees India and the World: The Authoritative Account of the India-China Relationship","authors":"J. Alam","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2248444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2248444","url":null,"abstract":"Marcelle Trote Martins is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester and a Visiting Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University. She has a PhD from the University of Manchester and master’s and undergraduate degrees in International Relations from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She teaches at the University of Manchester and the University of Liverpool. Areas of interest: International Conflicts, Memory and Trauma, Visual Politics, Body Politics, Emotions Studies and Timor-Leste. Email: mtrotem@gmail.com","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"1 2","pages":"751 - 753"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41298536","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":"Adam B. Lerner, From the ashes of history: collective trauma and the making of international politics","authors":"Marcelle Trote Martins","doi":"10.1080/09557571.2023.2248443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2023.2248443","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51580,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Review of International Affairs","volume":"36 1","pages":"749 - 751"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44555531","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}