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Intelligence services are important sites of contestation, often the foci of reform and calls for greater transparency. Yet, while growing attention has been paid to intersectionality, gender equality reform, and progress in other areas of international affairs, little of this same transparency and attention has been paid to diversity in the intelligence sector. This paper seeks to bridge the gap, comprising a systematic review of the literature on diversity in the intelligence sector to improve our understanding of what is known and what can be known about the history and current make-up of the intelligence sector—and those who "do intelligence work". By identifying strengths and gaps in the literature and setting an agenda for future research within these "secret institutions", this paper argues that the lack of transparency, data, and knowledge on the interplay of gender, race, and sexuality, among other aspects of diversity in intelligence, is deeply troubling. It hampers our knowledge of how the sector may be "gendered" or otherwise experienced, as well as how this particular area of the security sector may or may not be integrating gender and other perspectives into their work. This paper finds that diversity in the intelligence and national security sectors is both an asset and a liability to be managed. Diversity is seen as a source of intelligence gathering and analysis strength, as well as a potential threat to hegemonic masculinity in intelligence practice. Further, language and processes for promoting diversity in intelligence can reinforce stereotyped knowledge of marginalized groups that ultimately hamper calls for greater representation, diversity, inclusion, access, and opportunities in the intelligence sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multilateral conferences are the bread-and-butter of international politics. In such settings, countries may pursue their interests individually, but most of the time they prefer to act through coalitions. Such coalitions are overlapping, creating a network structure. States build and utilize networks to get agenda items pushed through or to block unfavorable ones. While sometimes they are formed on the basis of formal institutions (such as the NAM or the EU), frequently their membership is based on either ad hoc cooperation or existing informal bodies (such as the NSG, New Agenda Coalition, or Zangger Committee). The attention to such networks is, however, still in its infancy. This paper looks at how state networks within one of the most important recurring diplomatic conferences—the quinquennial NPT Review Conference—develop and transform over time. By doing so, the paper maps the existing networks and explains their transformation as an instrument of global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the question of what drives proxy alignment in war and argues that current proxy war scholarship needs further thinking to go beyond focusing on the principal–agent theory and individual actors' motivation analysis. Rather, there is a need to look at the generative mechanisms of proxy alignment as a process that constitutes patterns of friend–enemy relations. The paper argues securitization patterns from domestic to regional and international levels drive actors to re-evaluate their positions and define their enemies and friends. This is a process of securitization alignment and confluence, which serves as a generative mechanism for proxy alignment in a conflict. Securitization alignment is based on a convergence of securitizations by different actors that create a friend–enemy dynamic and convergence of security interests between actors. The confluence of securitizations from the domestic level to regional and beyond also connects actors across different levels to be in alignment and impact the conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the pedagogical implications of the "Global International Relations (GIR)" and "Worlding Beyond the West" agendas. These two programs have criticized IR's Western-centrism and offered systematic ways to expand beyond IR's Euro-Atlantic roots. Their development coincides with other high-profile theoretical and historiographic developments, not to mention societal imperatives, to expand the substantive remit of the discipline. However, the diversification agenda has been mostly concerned with the research output of IR and has treated the pedagogical side of IR's intellectual life as a secondary consideration. Proponents of the GIR and Worlding agendas have yet to convert these programs into a classroom pedagogy. This paper fills that gap. It critiques the practical and intellectual limits of GIR and Worlding pedagogies. More importantly, it provides theoretically informed ways to transpose their diversification projects into the undergraduate classroom. In doing so, this paper bridges disciplinary analysis, IR theory, and IR pedagogy in an integrated analysis of IR's much-needed attempts at diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper criticizes the epistemic foundations of democratic state-building, which are derived from a model of political transitions according to which liberal democratic institutions will transform a hitherto authoritarian and troubled country into a more prosperous and stable society and, therefore, foreign interventions to establish these institutions are realistic and worthy investments, provided they are properly planned based on knowledge of what has worked elsewhere. This expectation is based upon two epistemological premises. The first premise, linearity , is that social and institutional change exhibits identifiable input–output relations connecting socioeconomic conditions and outcomes. The second premise, ergodicity , is that these relations, inferred from past samples, provide reliable probabilistic projections about future outcomes, which can guide the focus of policy interventions. Drawing from the study of complex systems, the paper indicates why these two premises offer a flawed conception of political transitions and why radical and large-scale interventions, such as state-building, will tend to generate unintended consequences rather than the planned effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security scholars have traditionally viewed emergency as a state of exception that triggers a struggle for survival, justifying the breaking of rules and excesses of state power. While there have been attempts to decouple security from its survivalist logic, emergency has remained an analytical blind spot in security studies. The dominance of an elite-centric, exceptionalist paradigm in the study of emergency has foreclosed the possibility of alternative conceptions of emergency and neglected the voices of structurally disempowered agents. This paper advances a vernacular contextual research agenda that is sensitive to the empirical diversity of emergency meanings and practices while foregrounding emergency claims made by non-elite actors. Challenging the idea of emergency as a form of "anti-politics," the paper contends that emergency should be understood as an intrinsic part of politics. It then recovers an alternative, "emancipatory" conception of emergency as an extraordinary moment of spontaneous beginnings that can activate the collective agency of marginalized actors. The final section establishes conceptual foundations for actor-centered, grounded empirical research into emergency politics and suggests avenues for future research. Contextualizing emergency and attuning to the voices and experiences of everyday actors are crucial to remove the key variable that ties security to the logic of survival and exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of refugee humanitarianism is commonly studied in terms of critical junctures. One such historical moment is the creation of a 'safe zone' for Iraqi Kurdish refugees above the 36th parallel of Northern Iraq through the 1991 United Nations (UN) mission known as 'Operation Provide Comfort.' The UN intervention is widely accepted as a critical juncture because it marked the beginning of international humanitarianism's extra-territorial phase. 'Operation Provide Comfort' brought a paradigm shift in the management of displaced populations by means of introducing "preventive protection" as a novel approach combining protection with control as the idea is to keep refugees in their own countries and offer them help without the need to cross an international border. The standard narrative underlines Western historical priority by attributing the preventive protection to a single source of ideas and processes stemming from the West. Drawing on postcolonial research, this paper argues for recognizing the agency of the non-West in the formulation and execution of the safe haven concept as a historical milestone. More specifically, it demonstrates the pioneering role that Turkey played through international debates and diplomatic action, which culminated into the new episode of refugee humanitarianism. The findings also invite us to revisit current explanations of the evolution of international humanitarian norms by showing the entanglement of refugee protection on the one hand, and domestic and regional questions of ethnicity and counter-insurgency on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations (IR) scholars are increasingly interested in the role of memory in world politics. In this paper, we examine a key tension in the uptake of memory in IR between its status as a topic studied within IR and its use as an optic through which the basic categories of IR might be rethought. Focusing on the problem of scales of analysis, central within memory studies more broadly, we suggest that while memory poses a challenge to typical scalar arrangements in IR, such as "levels" of analysis, memory is often studied within these very arrangements. We argue that this is significant because questions of scale are at times the central political problem at stake in international memory. We track this tension between topic and optic in studies of memory, national identity, and foreign policy; studies of collective trauma and sovereignty; and studies of conflict and cooperation over memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Studies Review is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Why does a state change its foreign policy objectives and who is responsible for instigating such change? According to Hermann, four primary change agents are central to this process: leaders, bureaucracies, changes in domestic constituencies, and external shocks. This paper argues that the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) is a complementary policy process framework that can explain foreign policy change (FPC) and that accounts for all four of these primary change agents. Additionally, it is a broader framework of the policy process that facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the factors influencing FPC than traditional FPC research. The ACF has the potential to broaden our understanding of FPC by emphasizing the intersection of the international system with domestic politics and focusing on a myriad of policy actors coordinating their advocacy efforts to influence FPC. To support this argument, the paper discusses how FPC can benefit from the ACF and reviews past applications. It proposes a research agenda using the ACF to study FPC and draws conclusions about future challenges and directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions regarding the political significance of international relations (IR) and how scholarly practice relates to/constitutes a political practice appear newly resonant, but are longstanding concerns. This article utilizes the growing literature on temporality within international politics to analyze the political potential of these intellectual interventions and generate new ways of framing scholarly practice. We observe two trends within the field. First, IR as a discipline remains largely—although not exclusively—imagined as an English-language discipline generated by scholars in the Global North. Each area's political discourse is currently dominated by fears surrounding foundational political and institutional change due to the rise of racialized authoritarianism within these self-imagined democratic societies. Despite these purportedly dramatic developments, there has not been a similarly dramatic shift in the scholarly relationship with politics. Scholars continue to successfully intervene in their collective presents, but scholarship itself remains oriented toward enduring claims that accumulate knowledge and resist the possibility of "failure." This paper theorizes the temporality of critical intervention to better relate positively to the bodies that co-constitute our political present. Ultimately, this paper concludes by arguing for a reconsideration of contradiction and failure as frames for thinking scholarly practice in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consistently low credit-taking rates, 16 percent in 2016 (Global Terrorism Database), continue to challenge the understanding of terrorism as "propaganda of the deed" twenty years after researchers initially pointed out the conundrum. While providing an overview and evaluation of the limited existing literature on credit-taking, this paper draws attention to three core problems in the current literature on terrorist credit-taking, which may have led the low credit-taking rates to appear more puzzling than is due. First, the available explanations struggle to find corroboration when empirically tested and many also show theoretical shortcomings with strong unspoken assumptions and unclear predictions of credit-taking behavior. Second, data structure and data availability unnecessarily narrow our academic understanding of credit-taking. Finally, theories focused on group characteristics such as religious motivation or state sponsorship suffer from severe issues of sample bias due to unintended selection on the dependent variable. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research less prone to the problematic issues identified in the article. A re-orientation toward a less restrictive and more fine-grained understanding of credit-taking is advised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connection between the everyday and the international has received increasing attention in critical IR in recent years. As many contributions aim to rethink the international in terms of the everyday, the mundane and the ordinary become a site of geopolitical analysis. The paper's central idea is that we, as academics and human beings, constantly face what can be called an international political sociology of the everyday in world politics: How is life in "distant" places? Who lives in these places? And, what are the people doing "over there"? By reflecting on how we obtain an idea of the everyday of certain places, this paper shifts its focus on representations or, more precisely, imaginations of home and the everyday for particular audiences. Precisely because the mundane can simultaneously be anything, everything, and nothing, it is important to turn to the practices and, in this vein, to the (geo)politics of mediating the everyday to us. In this regard, the paper provides an interpretive reading of two aesthetic texts--a film and a photographic essay--with the purpose of addressing imaginaries of home, the special senses, and venues of belonging wherein the everyday takes place, as particular sites of the international. In this way, the paper contributes to current efforts to decentralize current conceptions of the international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the prospects and likely future direction of European integration? Will it be marked by resilience and perhaps even deepening integration among European Union (EU) member states, or will it encounter further instability that could lead to fragmentation and disintegration? The answers to these questions are currently unknown but are important not just for the citizens and countries of the EU but for world politics more broadly. Scholars and other observers have advanced a range of arguments to answer these questions, many of which are derived from the three mainstream theoretical paradigms of contemporary International Relations (IR): realism, liberalism, and constructivism. These arguments reveal disagreement both within and across paradigms over the question of the EU's future. While it is commonly thought that realists are generally pessimistic and liberals and constructivists broadly optimistic regarding the EU's future prospects, it is possible to identify arguments derived from liberal IR theory that the EU faces possibly fatal challenges and realists who see powerful reasons for the EU to stick together, while there are constructivists who think it can go either way. There are thus six basic positions on the future of the EU derived from IR theory. This paper identifies and evaluates a broad range of causal forces that will affect the future of European integration. The paper concludes by discussing the enduring role and value of theory in the study of international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some near crises tip over into full-blown crisis and others do not? This paper considers existing scholarship and identifies four key barriers to using quantitative analysis for tipping-point analyses: strategic indeterminacy; the incentives for conflict parties to avoid inefficiencies; the paucity of cases; and the availability of quality data. Due to these challenges, many do not perform well as immediate causes for crisis escalation. We also argue and demonstrate through two quantitative models of crisis escalation that some variables, particularly related to domestic politics, can do well in explaining why some disputes tip into crisis and others do not. As we illustrate with reference to the 1995–1996 Third Taiwan Straits Crisis, qualitative approaches that analyze the processes by which leaders and foreign policy institutions make decisions add needed explanatory power to purely quantitative models of the potential for near crises to tip into crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are widespread worries about the impending fragmentation of the internet. Reviewing the IR literature on cyberspace and internet governance, this paper demonstrates that these debates rest on very traditional understandings of territory and the state, focusing on ways that hard-shelled "power containers" are recreated in cyberspace. Using a practice-oriented conceptual framework drawing on insights from critical geography, the paper highlights how state, corporate, and private actors deterritorialize and reterritorialize cyberspace. Results indicate that there are multiple ways to territorialize cyberspace beyond the reconstruction of the "national territory" and that a multitude of actors engage in territorializing practices. This allows for a more nuanced reevaluation of the "internet fragmentation" discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is Christendom in international relations? We argue that Christendom does not equate to a long-lost historical empire but an enduring imaginary of a political order where government secures the church and the church ministers to government. Such imaginaries have taken a diverse range of historical and geographical forms, which have barely been explored in International Relations (IR). They may be state-centric or decentered. As intellectual historians of the discipline have demonstrated, international relations was founded on a Christendom ontology and theology, and then rapidly forgot that fact. One major feature of this forgetting is a narrow historical conception of Christendom—its equation with Latin Christendom—in contrast with the wealth of scholarship in the humanities, which has revealed various conceptual forms and discursive practices of Christendom from at least the fourth century CE to the present. The effect of this narrowness has been to confirm IR's historical Eurocentrism and prevent it from exploring the international politics of Eurasian, Eastern Orthodox forms of Christendom, and signs of new imaginaries of Christendom emerging in the Global South. But such neo-Christendoms—which imagine government as re-centered on the church—raise the possibility of the emergence of modern variations of the legitimized violence associated with Latin Christendom. Alternative theologies of post-Christendom—imagining the church as politically active but decentered from government—indicate that such an imaginary is contested not just beyond but within Christian theology. The paper provides a new definition of Christendom and re-evaluation of its afterlives for the study of religion and theology in international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations scholarship has posited multiple pathways through which democracies accrue advantages in world politics. These range from enhanced warfighting capabilities to sovereign borrowing capacity to more constructive cooperation with like-minded regimes. A series of crises over the past generation, however, have called these advantages into question. This paper re-examines the key conceptual pillars underlying the democratic advantage in world politics. Scholars have posited that democracies possess inherent advantages in credible commitment mechanisms and public goods provision. The rise of populism has eroded these underlying advantages. Furthermore, the rise of China threatens to hamper the network effects that enhance democratic flourishing at the global level. Whether the democratic advantage is real and sustainable should be one of the defining political science research programs of this century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Studies Review is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

By championing certain actors over others, International Relations (IR) theory conventionally avoids questions of agency and does not, at least in theoretical terms, discuss which entities can develop capacities needed to act in world politics. Whether it is states, institutions, or individuals, we simply "locate" agency in particular entities, which then exist and act as global governors qua definition. In other words, agency is determined by a priori claims and we rarely reflect the dispositions needed to be(come) an actor in the first place. Even global governance, despite its impetus to consider agency beyond the state, has not engaged in such a discussion, at least not in theoretical terms. In order to initiate such a discussion, the paper draws on the distinction between substantialism and relationalism. After reviewing how agency has been framed in IR, the paper outlines three general dispositions of agency and relates those to the two ontological perspectives. Based on this theorization, the paper contents that IR's lack of reflection and its substantialized notions of agency, whether in rationalist or constructivist appearance, remain problematic. As such, there is potential to conceptualize agency in world politics not as an inherent disposition of entities but rather as emerging from social relations between them. Such a framework compels researchers to not just assume discrete actors but to focus on relational processes through which their agency emerges in the first place and sustains over time. Reconstructing these processes reveals their political nature and allows us to consider who should govern the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and with what effects do institutions diffuse between international organizations (IOs)? An emerging literature extends a key insight of the study of diffusion processes among states to the international level, establishing that the adoption of institutions in IOs is regularly conditioned by the choices of other IOs. Yet, this literature neglects a key contextual difference between the two settings: unlike in the hierarchically structured organizations that have dominated the literature on diffusion, institutional creation, and change in IOs are the result of decentralized bargaining among sovereign governments. This paper develops a heuristic model that shows how diffusion between IOs shapes decision-making within them through its impact on the institutional preferences of individual governments. The model establishes that, unlike in diffusion processes among states, convergence is an unlikely outcome of diffusion between IOs. By implication, studies that take institutional convergence as their starting point are likely to underestimate the pervasiveness of diffusion effects. I demonstrate these arguments with a case study of the establishment of a regional dispute settlement system in Mercosur, a regional organization in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can there be a "radical IR?" Scholars have given little attention to the question of the following: where is radicalism in the discipline? I argue that not only is it possible to think about radical international theory, but that it is necessary in the contemporary world. International theorists have to grapple with developments of fundamental change, including the so-described decline of the (neo)liberal international order, transformations in global capital, and an upsurge in populist political movements that advocate for fundamental political change. In approaching the question of radicalism in IR, the article develops a working definition of radicalism as an approach to politics that focuses on the International as a whole, uses theoretical tools from the humanistic sciences to engage in an active politics of fundamental transformation, and deploys methods that are historicist, genealogical, and oriented toward "getting to the root of things." Additionally, the paper illustrates the virtues and promises of a radical IR by using the case of (neo)liberal world order arguments to show how a radical IR could change the trajectory of these engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The received view in international relations (IR) is that the European multistate system was created when the medieval religious order broke down in the centuries following the Reformation. This view, which sees the medieval Catholic Church as a factor that hindered the advent of the multistate system, ignores a key insight of medieval historians, namely that the deeper historical precondition for the European multistate system was that the Church challenged the notions of empire and hegemony after the eleventh-century conflict of church and state. By mining this body of historiography, this paper shows how the end of the fusion of lay and religious authority in general and the Church's persistent interest in avoiding that one secular polity outmatched the others in particular contributed to the development of the European multistate system. These insights not only question dominant historiographic assumptions of IR, but may also be said to challenge the epistemological approaches of much of this scholarship. Resumen El criterio aceptado en Relaciones Internacionales (RI) es que el sistema multiestatal europeo se creó tras el colapso del orden religioso medieval en los siglos posteriores a la Reforma. Este criterio, que considera a la Iglesia católica como un factor que dificultó el advenimiento del sistema multiestatal, ignora un conocimiento clave de los historiadores medievales, específicamente, que la condición previa histórica más profunda del sistema multiestatal europeo fue que la Iglesia desafió las nociones de imperio y hegemonía después del conflicto entre la iglesia y el estado en el siglos XI. Al indagar exhaustivamente este cuerpo de historiografía, este informe demuestra cómo el fin de la fusión entre autoridad laica y religiosa en general y el interés persistente de la Iglesia por evitar que una forma de gobierno secular supere a las otras en particular contribuyeron al desarrollo del sistema multiestatal europeo. Estas conclusiones no solo cuestionan las conjeturas historiográficas dominantes de RI, sino que puede decirse que también desafían los abordajes epistemiológicos de gran parte de esta erudición. Extrait Le point de vue généralement accepté dans les relations internationales est que le système multiétatique européen s'est constitué lorsque l'ordre religieux médiéval s'est effondré dans les siècles qui ont suivi la Réforme. Ce point de vue, qui voit l'Église catholique médiévale comme un facteur ayant empêché l'avènement du système multiétatique, omet une perspective clé des historiens médiévaux, c'est-à-dire que l'une des conditions historiques préalables plus profondes à l'établissement du système multiétatique européen a été le fait que l'Église avait remis en question les notions d'empire et d'hégémonie après le conflit entre Église et État du 11e siècle. En exploitant ce corpus historiographique, cet article montre comment la fin de la fusion des autorités laïques et religieuses en général, et l'intérêt persistant de l'Église à éviter qu'un régime laïque ne dépasse les autres en particulier, ont contribué au développement du système multiétatique européen. Ces perspectives remettent non seulement en question les hypothèses historiographiques dominantes, mais nous pouvons considérer qu'elles remettent également en question les approches épistémologiques d'une grande partie des recherches dans ce domaine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an original theoretical framework for the study of insults in international relations (IR). Bringing into IR the two main theoretical approaches to aggravating language, slurs and dysphemisms, we conceptualize insults' disruptive impact on international interactions in a way that explains their logic, consequences, and risks. Specifically, we argue that insults constitute both at once tactical tools used by international actors to achieve their interests by disrupting an interaction and modifying the payoffs associated with it and linguistic artifacts constructing and sharpening self- and other identities. The components of our theoretical framework are illustrated with a wide range of empirical cases of international insults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the perennial problem of peaceful change (how to bring about a change in the status quo by means other than war?) by reflecting on the post-Cold War order from 1991 to 2017. We examine the problem at three different levels of analysis: systemic (great power interactions), interactive (peaceful territorial change), and domestic (democratization efforts). At the interactive level, we assess the record of successes and failures of peaceful territorial changes since 1991 to the present. At the systemic level, we assess the inherent difficulties embedded in systemic peaceful change (the decline of the US hegemony, the rise of China, the revival of Russia?). At the domestic level, we focus upon democratization efforts. In this context, we particularly emphasize the contours of the emerging illiberal international order in keeping peace and the status quo, bringing war, or facilitating the possibility of peaceful change. Finally, we suggest possible links between domestic, interactive, and systemic peaceful change, and suggest an agenda for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory paper of the presidential issue examines IR theory's problems and prospects in understanding when and how change happens, especially peaceful transformations in world politics. The ISA 2017 Baltimore conference was aimed at taking an assessment of our understanding of change, its different manifestations as well as implications. The papers in this special issue deal with important questions on different markers and manifestations of change in world politics. The implications might range from epochal transformations to limited changes in the international system, especially within and between regions to incremental changes in how international treaties and global governance initiatives are promulgated, which in turn produce long-term and/or short-term changes in the architecture of world politics. It also addresses the following questions: How do different IR paradigms address change? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Can we understand change sequentially or cumulatively or combining their insights? How do material and ideational factors link together in generating change? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses interpretive epistemology in international relations (IR) and its advantages to address the field's sociological composition, its scholars' identity, and knowledge structuration. The research proposes to engage in sociological reflexivity on IR methods and the way in which knowledge accumulation and structuration are driven by canonical assumptions of what are considered "normal"/"good" scientific procedures. The central argument focuses on interpretive epistemological approaches as possible venues for research to participate in the collective effort to address, and redress, the imbalance between the sociology of the field and its knowledge production and structuration processes. By allowing dialogue around meanings and interpretation among increasingly diverse members, an interpretive stance on IR opens the floor to criticism and rival interpretations. More specifically, the paper presents the methodology of interpretive phenomenological analysis as a method which both emphasizes context and actor specificity with regard to the subject of study and fully acknowledges the researcher's identity and voice in scientific inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategies of subordinate states in hegemonic or asymmetrical relations have been widely studied by international relations scholars. Such works generally focus on how a subordinate state can influence the hegemon's behavior so as to address and further the interests of the subordinate state. The relation between subordinate-state agency and the hegemonic system, the makeup of the hegemonic order, itself receives less attention. Through analysis of two cases of US hegemony in Latin America, this article examines how subordinate-state agency may strengthen or weaken the hegemonic system and, as such, makes a case for subordinate-state agency as an underpinning element of hegemony. It explores Colombian agency in the design phase of Plan Colombia as contributing to US hegemony, while Bolivian agency under the presidency of Evo Morales is examined as a challenge. In both instances, it was the United States, rather than the Latin American states, that took on a passive role, leaving the initiative with Colombia and Bolivia. Therefore, instead of reaffirmations of active one-way US hegemony versus passive subordinate states, the paper proposes to understand both cases as demonstrating the importance of subordinate-state agency in the configuration of the hegemonic system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes stock of the debate about the so-called warning-response-gap regarding armed conflict within states. It argues that while the existing literature has focused strongly on 'better prediction,' it has neglected the analysis of the conditions under which warnings are being noticed, accepted, prioritized and responded to by policy-makers. This has led to a simplistic understanding of how communicative, cognitive and political processes involving a range of actors can influence both the perception as well as the response to warnings. The paper also criticizes that many normative judgments about the desirability of preventive action are suffering from hindsight bias and insufficient attention to balancing problems related to risk substitution, opportunity costs and moral hazard. In response to these deficits, the paper puts forward a modified model of warning as a persuasive process. It can help us to ascertain under what circumstances warning succeed in overcoming cognitive and political barriers to preventive action and to help establishing benchmarks for assessing success and failure from a normative perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global economy is experiencing the digitalization of production, exchange, and consumption of goods and services. The internet and cross-border data flows are becoming important channels of trade as more products are traded through the web or integrate features that rely on digital connectivity. Reflecting the autonomy states have to enact such policies, national variations in internet governance have expanded over the previous decade, with states increasingly looking to use internet and data policies for economic and trade objectives. These dynamics are having important implications on the international trade regime through challenging existing trade rules and creating demands for new rules. This has resulted in growing debates in the trade arena around "digital trade," as a number of states, led by the United States, push for rules as a way to discipline national internet policies and support trade in digital goods and services. This paper examines the political economy of this campaign. We argue that the objectives of this campaign go beyond updating rules to better fit the "Internet age" into achieving further liberalization of trade in goods and services. We highlight the technological contingency of existing international rules and show how technological shifts have been a driver of competitive regime creation and forum shifting contributing to processes of fragmentation of the international trade regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the inception of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) in 2000, feminist academia has been closely interested in the developing women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda in international affairs. The majority of this work has emerged from within feminist international relations (Mcleod 2015 ; Shepherd 2008) and feminist legal studies. Less attention has been paid to the WPS agenda by feminist political science. As a result, less consideration has been given to political institutions within the WPS framework. This paper argues that the design and implementation of postconflict political institutions is an important component of the WPS agenda and one which deserves greater attention. It demonstrates that using certain tenets of feminist political science, and feminist institutionalism in particular, can offer key insights into greater understanding of the importance of political institutions within postconflict societies. The article illustrates how political institutions have been underconsidered within academic work on the WPS agenda. It then argues that political institutions are an important part of the puzzle when it comes to implementing the WPS agenda. It shows how feminist institutional theory can help to provide key insights into the nature of postconflict institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to two debates about international relations (IR) as a discipline: first, how global is IR, and how is it structured? Second, what is the state of theory in IR? We conducted (co-) citation analyses of both Web of Science (WoS) and—for the first time— non-WoS publications from Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. With regard to the first question, we find that global IR resembles a core–periphery structure as a "hub and spoke" system whereby transatlantic core nodes are interconnected to each other and to some periphery nodes, while the periphery nodes are connected to the core but not to each other. IR scholarship in the periphery quotes the transatlantic theory cluster but is not linked to each other, not even in the same region. Knowledge produced in the periphery has to go through the transatlantic core in order to be recognized globally. As to the transatlantic core, we identify two major (co-) citation clusters: one committed to IR theory-building across issue areas from a variety of perspectives and the other focused on security studies with a strong emphasis on quantitative methods. With regard to the second question, global IR hangs together through references to the IR theory cluster consisting of North American and European authors who appear to define what IR theory is. Scholars in the periphery refer to this transatlantic IR theory cluster when engaging in theory-building. IR theories have become rather diverse and pluralistic, even in the core. While scholars still refer to the big "isms," they use them around the globe in a synthesizing manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most discussions concerning how to evaluate theories make reference to empirical, methodological, logical, or normative criticisms. Less attention is given to how challenges in the theory itself affect the choice of cases. In this paper, I put forward the concept of observational criticism, which aims to trace biases in the empirical employment of a theory. While it overlaps with some of the criticisms mentioned above, observational criticism distinctly focuses on what we can learn about a theory through the prominence or absence of cases, or types of case, in the scholarship. To this end, I suggest a three-stage approach for this criticism and I demonstrate each of these stages, as well as the utility of this framework, through a consideration of securitization scholarship-and more specifically of how securitization studies have overlooked the case of securitization moves in Israel. I suggest that although the concept of securitization has generated a great many studies on various theoretical and empirical issues, and despite the prominence of security discourse and practices in Israel, securitization scholarship has tended to avoid studying the securitization processes of this country. Following this mode of criticism, I argue that securitization theory could be more easily implemented in the case of Israel by, among other things, further clarifying the meaning of securitization success and its duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the primary international firewall in place against the diffusion of nuclear weapons and related equipment, materials, and knowledge. It links the transformative moments of the nuclear non-proliferation regime to select events. It posits these shocks either (i) revealed the presence of, or (ii) instigated fears about new or accelerated diffusion flows, with clear implications for nuclearization. By recasting the regime's evolution in this manner, the paper provides newfound insight as to the timing and character of change. It also reveals the considerable impact of diffusion processes beyond outcomes of diffusion and non-diffusion, adding definition to the firewall concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extending cue theory and arguments about heuristics, in this article we argue that in the European Union (EU) member states, trust in the EU acts as a proxy for trust in the United Nations. While existing studies have shown that citizens take cues from national political institutions in order to form an opinion about institutions at the transnational and international level, this study illuminates why and shows how the same is done from the EU to the international level. It further shows that the less politically aware citizens are, the more likely they are to use the EU as a proxy for assessing institutional structures at the international level. The findings suggest that the sociological legitimacy of international organizations should be assessed in a more nuanced manner that takes into consideration regional institutions. This is a methodologically instructive paper, drawing on several waves of the European Social Survey and additionally employing an elaborate replication design, confirming our main findings using empirical data from four international studies, with alternative question wordings, different question order, and different response formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of recent discussions of cognitive and ethical dilemmas related to International Relations (IR) scholarship, this paper proposes to engage the 'problem of values' in IR as a composite question whose cognitive treatment requires the objectivation of the more profoundly institutional and social processes that subtend its emergence and evolution within the discipline. This analysis is hereby offered as an exercise in reflexive scholarship. Insofar as the question of values constitutes a defining cognitive and moral concern for reflexive knowledge itself, the paper also points to the need for its reformulation within an epistemic framework that is capable of moving beyond reflexivity to Reflexivism proper, understood as a systematic socio-cognitive practice of reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its starting point the possibility of empirical and theoretical cross-fertilization between strategic culturalists and realists. Indeed, recent neoclassical realist writings indicate that there is currently a move away from the more abstract theorizing of Waltzian neorealism. In order to conduct detailed foreign policy analysis, these authors have included an increasing array of variables including nonmaterial factors. The paper argues that much can be gained from examination of the alternative explanations of state behavior provided by strategic culture and neoclassical realism. Yet the benefits of competitive collaboration depend upon the particular conception of strategic culture under consideration. The paper identifies four main conceptions of strategic culture and examines the type of collaboration with neoclassical realism that is possible for each one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the principal competing visions of global politics that are currently advanced in the public discourse about globalization in opposition to the traditional state-centered perspective. The first part of the paper develops an analysis of ideal models as cultural resources that grounds the different reading of human bonds. The second part applies the notion of ideal models to the new scenario of globalization, and identifies four alternative interpretations of the notion of global politics: namely Neo-liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, Alter-globalism, and Dialogue among Civilizations. The principal characteristics of these four notions are presented in order to map the current debate on the future of global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relationship between the way the discipline of International Relations (IR) is studied in the U.S. and U.S. foreign policy itself. Referring to the events of September 11 the paper argues that mainstream U.S. IR defines the appropriate methods of how to study international relations in such a narrow way as to restrict understanding of other cultures and rationalities. By relying on culturally and historically specific distinctions between politics and economics, between private and public, and between domestic and foreiggn policies, U.S. IR explains a narrow range of world political events and does so from a U.S. perspective. This makes it difficult to account for many of the most pressing inequalities in the world, and thus raises the question of the linkage between academia, the civil society in which it is located, and the role that it should serve in encouraging a wide debate on the motivations and views of those outside the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our age is marked by two main trajectories: globalization and democratization–which are not readily compatible. While the move toward democracy requires a certain civic equality among all participants, globalization in its present form fosters or enhances social inequality. The paper concentrates on three main types of inequality: those of power, wealth and knowledge. In each of these domains the presentation follows a prominent mentor or set of mentors: in the first domain the political scientist Samuel Huntington; in the second the economist Amartya Sen; and in the last the philosophers Heidegger and Gadamer. By way of conclusion, the paper issues a plea for cosmopolitan or global democratic justice, as a counterpoise to prevailing modes of global inequality and inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to present a broad yet systematic framework for thinking about the role of popular culture (PC) in international conflict management and resolution, from an International Relations perspective. Protracted conflicts often involve a non-material dimension, as they become central elements in the rival states' sense of identity, and as societies develop over time strong beliefs about the conflict, which help sustain it over time. Popular culture can play an important role in shaping and changing this non-material dimension of international conflicts. This is largely due to the unique characteristics of PC products that can reach a large number of people, and can convey both information and emotions. Despite this potential, the role of PC in international conflicts has not been systematically analyzed, due to internal divides within the field of IR between positivist and critical understandings of what PC is and how it should be studied, and due to the very interdisciplinary nature of PC and its operation, which leads to many discussions of PC within different disciplines that do not engage each other. The paper examines the multiple roles that PC can play in the context of protracted conflicts. It examines its role domestically within states-societies that live under conflict; the role of PC as a foreign policy tool used by governments vis-à-vis the publics of their rival; the role and limits of PC in challenging conflicts and facilitating transitions to peace; and finally the impact of the joint consumption of global PC by citizens of states in conflict. These different roles of PC are illustrated throughout with examples from different protracted conflict around the world. The goal of this framework is to serve as a focal point for research that transcends the disciplinary divides and allows for fruitful engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relational turn of IR stresses the processual constitution of the state. The indigenous theory of Chinese IR adopts the relational turn but contends that the Chinese experiences are distinctive. Relying on the case of Singapore-Taiwan relationship, this paper argues that the Chinese relationality attests to a bilateral sensibility that does not confront the relational turn in general, which is multilateral. The case further contributes to the relational turn in showing non-security and affirmative components of relationality to the extent that the studies of the relational turn have remained embedded in the security concerns. The case applies the theory of "balance of relationship," in which nations can practice selfrestraint not in response to unilateral strategic calculus or multilateral rule making, but to bilateral reciprocity. The balance of relationship of the two proceeds at both the statist and the personal levels, introducing the affect of passion to the relational turn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposed large-scale intentional interventions in natural systems in order to counter climate change, typically called "climate engineering" or "geoengineering," stand to dramatically alter the international politics of climate change and potentially much more. There is currently a significant and growing literature on the international politics of climate engineering. However, it has been produced primarily by scholars from outside the discipline of International Relations (IR). We are concerned that IR scholars are missing a critical opportunity to offer insights into, and perhaps help shape, the emerging international politics of climate engineering. To that end, the primary goal of this paper is to call the attention of the IR community to these developments. Thus, we offer here an overview of the existing literature on the international politics of climate engineering and a preliminary assessment of its strengths and lacunae. We trace several key themes in this corpus, including problem structure, the concern that climate engineering could undermine emissions cuts, the potentially "slippery slope" of research and development, unilateral implementation, interstate conflict, militarization, rising tensions between industrialized and developing countries, and governance challenges and opportunities. The international politics of climate engineering is then considered through the lenses of the leading IR theories (Realism, Institutionalism, Liberalism, and Constructivism), exploring both what they have contributed and possible lines of future inquiry. Disciplinary IR scholars should have much to say on a number of topics related to climate engineering, including its power and transformational potentials, the possibility of counter-climate engineering, issues of institutional design, international law, and emergent practices. We believe that it is incumbent on the IR community, whose defining focus is international relations, to turn its attention to these unprecedented technologies and to the full scope of possible ramifications they might have for the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of ethnographic methods is on the rise in International Relations. However, research in this area has largely been constrained to critical or interpretive analysis of nontraditional objects of study. This has been driven in part by two practical problems that limit ethnographic analysis: that of aggregation, as international phenomena are necessarily large in scale, and that of access, as institutional settings are often closed or secretive. While we commend critical and nontraditional research for driving much-needed expansion of the disciplinary agenda, we offer a complementary account, arguing that scholars can also use ethnographic methods in explanatory research. To do so, we draw on two methodological literatures in anthropology. The first approximates ethnographic research through historical immersion. The second applies ethnographic methods at multiple research sites, tracking transnational phenomena across them. The paper sketches prospective studies of each kind, concerning the creation and implementation of the United Nations. While neither method is entirely new to IR, the methodological literatures in question have yet to receive systematic treatment in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the model of diffusion outlined by Solingen ( International Studies Quarterly, 56, 2012, 631) to the case of Chinese who studied abroad after 1978. It assesses the ability of those who have not returned to pressure the state to introduce Western academic, scientific, and business norms. It looks at the role of the returnees and national leaders in introducing these norms, particularly as a means to create world-class universities, scientific research centers, and modern private firms. It demonstrates the power of firewalls (including institutional leaders, the Chinese marketplace, and administrators who lose under reform) to block the diffusionary process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberals have discovered the system level of analysis. Two somewhat competing strands of system-level liberal scholarship have emerged. The first emphasizes the system's normative dynamics and the democratic peace. The second has sought to conceive of capitalism as a property of the international system and theorize its effects. While a number of propositions and mechanisms have been identified, the literature has failed to develop an overarching account of system structure. Using Durkheim's distinction between mechanical and organic societies, and Waltz's tripartite definition of structure, this paper develops a liberal grand-theory that integrates these two strands of liberal systemic thinking. The theory generates a number of large propositions: the structure's dominant tendency is integration; it pushes states to specialize; and it induces a competitive normal politics. I also propose a typology of systems that vary according to liberal homogeneity and a liberal normative framework and mutual economic dependence, with important implications for the question of systemic stability. By way of conclusion, I offer a few thoughts on the value of grand-theorizing in International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thies, Wallace J. (2012) Is the EU Collapsing? International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2012.01110.x This paper argues that the conventional wisdom about the European Union (EU) is wrong. It questions whether the EU is now or ever has been on the brink of collapse. And it offers reasons for believing that an international organization made up entirely of liberal democratic states will exhibit great resilience and impressive staying power. We can never say never when discussing the prospect of an EU collapse, but we can make a strong case that the democracies that comprise the EU will continue to find ways to muddle through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Half a century after the "Second Great Debate" in international relations (IR) started, scholars still perceive the qualitative versus quantitative division as their principal divide, and yet we do not have a good grasp of the impact of this divide. My research explores how the divide shaped the incentives and behaviors of scholars and influenced the organization of our academic communities and knowledge production. The impact of the divide expressed itself in the distribution of research among methodologies in terms of relative quantity and impact. Less obviously, and yet more importantly, the divide influenced the distribution of quantitative research among different institution types, across fields and journals, and with respect to policy engagement. Using the TRIP database of 7,792 IR articles in twelve top journals from 1980 to 2014, I classify journal articles into three categories—quantitative-only, qualitative-only, and mixed-methods—and categorize author institutions into similar types—publishing quantitative research only, producing nonquantitative work only, and publishing various proportions of quantitative research. Notably, qualitative and quantitative works switched positions over time in terms of relative quantity and impact, with quantitative research more likely published but only slightly more cited in the recent decade. More importantly, the divide produced other less obvious but more serious outcomes. Among 1,111 institutions that ever published IR research in twelve top journals over thirty-five years, two-thirds published nonquantitative research only; fifty-three institutions published more than half of all quantitative articles; institutions publishing quantitative-only or nonquantitative-only research constituted two modal categories. Political science journals published more quantitative research, persistently and with growing convergence; IR journals also evolved toward publishing more quantitative research though with persistent divergence and forming two clusters. Quantitative articles and political science journals were significantly less engaged in providing policy prescriptions than qualitative articles and IR journals. To overcome this lasting and self-perpetuating divide, we must better understand its impact, learn to appreciate alternative approaches, and change the way we train future scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As constructivists and other advocates of constitutive theories have often noted, the natural world is very different from the social one. Our ideas about the social world not only reflect that world, but help shape and create it; we are part of the reality we try to describe and explain, and we therefore have the potential to alter the reality a theory is merely intended to describe or explain. Our theories about the social world may thus become self-fulfilling prophecies or autogenetic in character, or they may self-negate. And yet while social constructivists often make this point in epistemological debates, there have been relatively few attempts so far to address its empirical implications. With that objective in mind, this paper examines two prominent IR theories—the democratic peace and the commercial peace—arguing that each has a self-fulfilling character rather than being true or false in any objective or timeless sense, as well as the potential of a currently self-negating thesis—the clash of civilizations—to become self-fulfilling; each theory is, to paraphrase the now time-honored expression, what the relevant actors make of it. The article also probes the processes by which theories become self-generating or self-negating. It is suggested that a number of frameworks developed outside political science—especially diffusion theory, memetics, social contagion theories, George Lakoff’s metaphor-based model, Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” approach and social network analysis—may in combination help us understand both how political ideas spread through academic and policy communities and why particular ideas “win out” over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several papers which discuss the tradition of pragmatism in international relations. It explores the paradoxical divide between pragmatic practice and positivist pretense in international relation scholarship. It also discusses the process of generating a more articulate and useful dialogue between international relations and pragmatism. It explains the relevance of rhetorical pragmatism in international relations. The pragmatic philosophical ontology involving the conjunction of two basic commitments or wagers about the relationship between the mind and the world is also addressed.