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Teachers in the social studies and humanities are increasingly encouraged to internationalize their curriculum and international professional development trips such as the Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad are seen as a popular means of achieving this goal. This paper describes the learning opportunities offered in one such program to Belize, Central America, and the efforts of teachers who participated it to internationalize their curriculum. The analysis focuses on the following questions: What opportunities to learn do such programs afford teachers, both while they are overseas and when they return to their classrooms? And what do teachers learn from such professional development ? about students, about the world, about teaching and learning? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We join the debate on trade interdependence and conflict largely on the stir created by Katherine Barbieri (1996)?s intriguing findings on the subject. In her piece, she questions trade?s pacifying effect based on the estimated positive trade coefficient. We argue that Barbieri?s estimated trade coefficient has been biased by the omitted power variable. After the power variable is installed, the trade coefficient is no longer positive. First, we re-examine Barbieri?s models this time supplying the relevant missing variable (Power); we go beyond the narrow objective of a simple replication of Barbieri?s piece, however. In the second phase of the paper we pay closer attention to the two pieces by Oneal & Russettt as well as Gartzke and Li, first, to explain the counterintuitive outcome of Barbieri?s set-ups and second, to bolster our own empirical argument. In the end we conclude that power is more fundamental when it comes to trade interdependence and conflict. This is even true when different trade measures are used. The Power variable not only impacts Barbieri?s where her results become weaker, it impacts Oneal & Russet?s set-up as well. Without their Major Power variable, their results are not as strong. Indeed, they are rendered statistically insignificant. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for explanatory microfoundations in international relations theory means that “black boxes” are opened up, micro-level causes ascertained, and the boundaries between international relations and comparative politics gradually effaced. These developments, in many ways a response to the pitfalls of Structural Realism, are embedded within complexes of knowledge claims that are in turn parasitic on background ontological commitments in the form of a reductive philosophy of science. This reductive turn is at odds with the status of IR as a social science. After examining this recent (re)turn to building theories with microfoundations, and critically examining research on irreducible or “emergent” properties in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and social theory, I combine a scientific realist stance on the ontological status of causal entities with a reformulated nonreductive methodological component to arrive at a theory of synthetic emergence. This inquiry into the philosophical foundations of contemporary IR theory is necessary for understanding the challenges facing IR as a higher-level but supposedly less fundamental form of systematic inquiry, as well as clarifying new grounds for non-Waltzian but anti-reductionist theorizing in the study of international politics. After examining the implications of emergence for IR theory more generally, the last part of the paper is devoted to indicating some of the ways in which emergence theory could contribute to the research on the causal powers of international institutions. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issues are at the core of inter-state conflict. Territory, in particular, has been associated with war more frequently than any other issue in world politics, and states contending over territorial issues are more likely to escalate militarized disputes to war. Unfortunately, information on issues typically is produced alongside the coding of violent conflict. In this way we get a non-random set of cases to examine foreign policy decision-making and the issues at stake. While scholars have been calling for an issue-based approach to the study of international relations for some time, recent data collection efforts allow scholars to address the emergence of contentious issues more directly and how state leaders subsequently manage these issues over time. Results from the ICOW project indicate the importance of issue salience, regime type, and past conflict involvement in the resolution of territorial claims in the Americas. Other evidence suggests that international organizations better enable states to reach non-violent solutions to issues in contention. To date, research using ICOW data has focused on the resolution of territorial and maritime claims. Little is known about claim emergence and duration. Yet like the relationship between militarized conflict onset and subsequent escalation, the settlement of issues may be strongly influenced by factors that strongly affect claim onset. Little is known, though, about the conditions that lead states to assert territorial and maritime claims. More importantly, the conditions related to issue emergence may in part explain how issues are managed by state leaders and how long it takes to reach some form of lasting agreement. Issue emergence may also be related to international rivalry. Scholars insist that contentious issues are frequently at the heart of such long-term belligerent relationships and that the inability to resolve such issues in dispute contributes to the perpetuation of rivalry and the likely use of military force. This paper aims to test empirically whether rivalry explains issue claim onset. That is, does rivalry account for a large amount of claims recorded by the ICOW project and further does rivalry frustrate the non-violent resolution of these issues at stake? Preliminary evidence using the datasets of Thompson and Diehl and Goertz suggests that rivalry, along with power, democracy, and past militarized conflict, helps explain the onset of territorial claims. It further seems that both settlement of claims and their duration are likely related to emergence. As such, we model onset and duration together using a markov-transition logit on all dyads in the Western Hemisphere from 1816-2000. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some states seem to have such difficulty in collecting taxes while other states seem to find such a task much easier? This paper analyzes the relationship between ethnic diversity and tax compliance. By and large, two general patterns concerning this relationship have been observed in recent studies. First, in countries with sub-national ethnic groups, levels of tax compliance are generally lower than in countries without sub-national groups. This general finding has led some comparative scholars to draw the conclusion that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on the establishment of a well-functioning state, understood as high levels of state capacity and legitimacy. Secondly, in established, industrialized and democratic welfare states, the state capacity to collect taxes and provide public goods is sometimes falling with increased immigration, compared to areas with little or marginal heterogeneity. This seems to be true mostly for industrialized countries with long traditions as immigrant societies. Arguing for a more nuanced picture, this comparative study analyzes the relationship between ethnic diversity and tax compliance in industrialized, as well as in less-industrialized countries, by asking why the existence of multiple ethnic groups sometimes makes a difference for levels of tax compliance and sometimes not. This question really has three components. First, why do some cultural differences matter for politics and others not? Secondly, why do politically salient cleavages, when they become salient, give rise to varying intensity of conflict? And thirdly, how can you understand the mechanisms behind conflicts over public resources as distinct or different from the mechanisms behind other forms of ethnic conflict? ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diaspora involvement in civil war has been attracting increasing interest in political and social sciences. Especially in the literature on ?new wars? and on the ?economy of war? authors mention the diaspora as an influential actor. In this literature the diaspora is seen as a resource for armed groups and in this function as a prolonging factor of civil wars. Yet the existing literature also shows lacunae: the inner dynamic of the relation between diasporas and armed groups has hardly been addressed. Yet, it is the knowledge on mechanisms on the micropolitical level which is needed for all political efforts to end civil wars with diaspora involvement. The following paper seeks to provide answers to the question of how and under which circumstances a mobilization of the diaspora by armed groups is possible. The focal point of the analysis is on the financial side of the relationship. Drawing on theories of mobilization from social movement scholarship the presentation will highlight central mechanisms and structures of the mobilization process. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been many requirements that theorists have sought to satisfy in developing theories of IR, including explanatory criteria, an ability to predict, and some relevance to policy-making. The use of one form of conventionalism, a view that has received little attention in the social sciences, holds out much promise for solving many of these problems. This paper lays out some of the strengths of such an account of IR theory. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization, globality and globalism are some of the most commonly used nomenclatures within the various sub-fields of the social sciences and the humanities to address material as well as ideational aspects of global issues. This paper aims at looking at some literatures, particularly those within International Relations, International Political Economy and Sociology, in order to identify and mutually relate some of the key concepts and categories they adopt to address such matters. In so doing, the goal is to build a logical conceptual mapping of what is here termed as global relations; a multi-domain, multidimensional social manifestation. The argument is that a more formal, content specific conceptualization of global relations can help us properly address the various and complex global components of human action and intensions and their interactions. Finally, the case of religion as a global manifestation will be addressed as an example of how the concept of global relations can help us better understand different ways key global topics (and domains) are understood and dealt with within the various branches of social sciences. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive approaches to foreign policy analysis (FPA) focus on the psychological dimension of decision-making. These approaches assert that the personal characteristics of decision-making individuals are extremely important to understand why one option will be preferred over another when decision-makers have to choose between diverging policy alternatives. Many authors associated with the cognitive agenda in FPA have moreover underlined the fact that decision-makers tend to resort to historical analogies to guide them in making those choices. Unfortunately, very few comprehensive studies have yet been undertaken to survey and compare the roles ascribed to analogical thinking within FPA, in order to get a global picture of what this concept can contribute to better understand foreign policy decision-making. It is the preliminary results of such a survey that we will propose to present in our paper. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how Bourdieu’s framework of power analysis can be fruitfully used to keep a wider conceptualisation of power (‘Lukes-plus-Foucault’), and yet overcome a series of fallacies and problems that the analysis of power has encountered beforehand. More specifically, I try to show that such a framework can accommodate both the sociological turn (in its handling of the agency-structure divide) and the linguistic turn in the social sciences, centrally including the performative analysis of ‘power’. Yet, at the same time, the transfer of this approach to the study of an international power elite is marred with a series of difficulties, not the least of which the question whether such an elite can ever be circumscribed in the first place. Finally, also Bourdieu’s approach is not yet a guarantee to allow the two lineages of power analysis to meet in a more convincing way; the political theory lineage which stresses questions of governance, order and the ‘political’, and the social theory tradition which is interested in the role of power for understanding particular outcomes and modes of ‘domination’. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nexus between migration and development has received substantial attention from policy makers and researchers in recent years, leading to the launch of the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD). GFMD is a government-owned process of consult ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideal of value-free science retains a strong grip on the self-conception of political scientists, despite the fact that many contemporary philosophers of science regard it as a naive idea. We look at the practice of political science, specifically neorealist theory, to determine whether critiques of value-freedom do in fact locate problems in political science inquiry. We find that the structure of neorealist theory is not modeled on Weber's vision of value-freedom, but rather resembles the entwinement of fact and value in Hobbes's thought. We conclude by calling for a re-examination and reconceptualization of our notions of scientific objectivity, which we claim must be revised in view of the inescapable entwinement of facts and values. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most vital questions within IR today concern the stability of the international system in the wake of China's rise. According to power transition theorists, the potential for great power conflict hinges on Chinese satisfaction with the interna ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is assumed that neoliberal strategies to transform societies were more or less successful in the 1990s, dependent on specific constellations. However, in the last years we can observe a double crisis of neoliberal strategies and politics. At the one ha ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

H.E. Goemans’ theory of war termination frames war termination as a bargaining problem. He proposes that a necessary condition for war termination is the creation of a bargaining space between belligerents and the opening of a bargaining space can occur b ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the recent controversy within the intelligence community, the rise of “politicized intelligence,” and the increase in attention given to intelligence both within the government and the general public, efforts to explain the intelligence-policy relat ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few environmental issues are as prevalent and pervasive as climate change. With so many potential impacts, both in the biological system and in human responses to climate change, rigorous, theoretically driven social science research on adaptation is incr ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts across cultures and worldviews stall and impede social justice and collective advancement in today’s global world. Never have we been collectively so strong, yet intractable worldview conflicts continue to waste immeasurable quantities of human ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a great misunderstanding prevalent among critics of discourse analysis, a misunderstanding that is common to hostile and sympathetic critics alike. This misunderstanding involves the notion that the term "discourse" refers to an object, or to a category, or to a detachable element of a situation. To the contrary, I will argue that "discourse" -- at least in the Foucauldian sense -- is more like a way of seeing than it is like a thing seen. To engage in "discourse analysis" is to apprehend and analyze the entire empirical world in a distinctive way; it is not a way to focus on one aspect of that world in preference to others, and thus is not a claim to be deliberately ignoring things that the analyst acknowledges as significant. Hence the criticisms of discourse analysis (and of discourse analysts) for not giving adequate attention to "non-discursive" factors is either genuinely misguided or is a covert attempt to get the discourse analyst to give up discourse analysis in favor of some other mode of analysis; such a criticism is akin to criticizing a materialist for not taking ideas seriously enough, or to criticizing a neoliberal institutionalist for paying insufficient attention to military force. Because the theoretical perspectives in question all contain within them methodological and philosophical commitments which reveal the world in distinct ways, we need a better way to deal with methodological pluralism than having partisans of each camp simply critique others for not including their preferred factors and modes of analysis; regarding notions like "discourse" to be prosthetics rather than as names for objects of analysis is an important step in that direction. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The racialization of class relations and class differences in European capitalist societies was decisive in the racialization of global politics, in relation to colonialism, enslavement, imperialism and modern state formation. For David Theo Goldberg liberalism as “modernity’s definitive doctrine of self and society, of morality and politics, … served to make possible discursively, to legitimate ideologically, and to rationalize politico-economically prevailing sets of racially ordered conditions and racist exclusions … in promoting racial reasoning and its racist implications as central to modernity’s common moral, sociopolitical, and jurisprudential sense.” Keenan Malik argues that Enlightenment thinkers embraced two mutually exclusive doctrines of racial historicism (universal humanism) and racial naturalism (making biological race the source of inequality), apparently without recognizing the inconsistency. Nancy Stepan says the tendency of using “something that did not exist”â€"raceâ€"as the “starting point for proving that it did” demonstrates that “the history of racial science is a history of a series of accommodations of the sciences to deeply held convictions about the naturalness of the inequalities between human races.” Charles Mills connects the making of the Racial Contract with the production of global white supremacy as a system of power relations. I will explore issues around the role race has played in the formation of the political constitution of the modern state with reference to International Relations theory: I will examine how modern (Western) social and political thought naturalized race, culture, history, and time-space and historicized nature in theorizing about the making of the modern world. I will argue that African Diaspora contributions to International Relations discourses have differed with Western social and political thought only by degree rather than kind on the substantive issues like human nature, culture, race, power, the state, self-determination, sovereignty, subjectivity, identity and change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to test Gabel and Whitten’s (1997) model of support for European integration using a larger and two-decade more recent dataset. Based on previous findings regarding predictors of EU enlargement support, this study drops aggregate-level data and completes the model with individual-level variables pertaining to issue salience, perceived threats, media use, and knowledge about the European Union. The study, which analyzes survey data from 29 nations (unlike the original model which included only six), brings support to the original research design and also compares support for integration between EU citizens and respondents from candidate countries. The findings suggest that, as predicted by economic voting theory, economic self-interest plays no role in shaping attitudes toward integration. Perceptions of the national welfare, however, are good predictors of such support, as are perceived threats and roles associated with the European Union. Building on previous research on media use and public opinion, this study finds that in Europe, as compared to the trend in the United States, newspaper readership leads to less support to integration, whereas television watching has an opposite effect. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The project investigates the role of Polish public opinion in shaping the government’s decision to pursue an active policy in the Middle East, including the deployment of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. While public opinion in Poland generally supported the US and its War on Terror, it did not favor direct participation in Iraq; thus remains the question of how Poland could have proceeded with its war policy without majority public support. We argue that that the policymakers could purse a policy contrary to public preference because the cost of opposing public opinion was minimal in comparison to the benefits the administrations expected to receive from the U.S.Given that the media had aggressively focused on Polish membership in the European Union, we argue that the policymakers could effectively avoid justifying the drafting of Iraq policy as such policy never reached the kind of public interest as the issue of EU. As a result, we argue that public opposition to troop deployments in Iraq did not constrain Poland’s foreign policy in the region. We rely on public opinion data from 2002 until the present and interviews with policymakers from the two administrations responsible for drafting Polish policy towards the Middle East to test our argument. We also employ content analysis of major Polish newspapers to determine differences in the scope of Iraq and EU coverage. Such an approach will allow us to determine whether the public was too focused on the EU policy to effectively mobilize in the opposition to the Iraq War. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poliheuristic (PH) theory of decision-making emerged as an effort to integrate cognitive and rational theories of decision-making and has made important contributions to our understanding of both processes and outcomes in the domain of foreign policy decision-making. PH theory posits a two-stage decision-making process in which leaders first screen options in a non-compensatory fashion based on one (or a small number of) dimensions and then engage in a more rational comparison of the costs and benefits of the remaining options. Stage one processing is termed non- compensatory because options that are deemed unacceptable on the primary screening dimension (typically assumed to be the political dimension) are rejected no matter how attractive they may be on other dimensions. In this study, we identify and intend to address the following limitation of PH theory in light of the research on political leadership and decision-making: variation in the threshold of political acceptability across decision- makers and situations. We employ an experimental research design to test the hypotheses in regards to the impact of leadership style and decision situation on decisionmakers' perceptions and choices in a foreign policy crisis scenario. We also discuss the advantages that the experimental method offers to our study in comparison to other methods. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960s, domestic and international policy issues have increasingly been framed as ‘environmental’ by political actors and the media, and the political science discipline has explored this phenomenon in academic discourse. Thus far, however, there has been little self-conscious reflection on the character of the discipline’s response to these issues. Yet such reflexive self-awareness is important if academic enquiry is to advance understanding and to inform better policy choices. To address this deficiency, we measure the response of the political science discipline to the rise of environmental issues on the public policy agenda by examining articles on environmental themes in more than forty English-language political science journals published from 1960 to 2004. Political science sub-fields covered by the analysis include international relations, comparative politics, political theory, domestic politics, and public policy. Inferential statistics are employed to explore the development of scholarly activity in this area and to links issues such as the framing of environmental issues in the media, government action taken to address these issues, and the prestige ranking of the journals examined. Of particular interest is the “lag time” between the ascendance of an environmental issue on the public agenda and its appearance in academic journals, and the relative absence of articles about the environment in the most prestigious journals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the contemporary US. Currently there is a frenzy around US citizenship â€" who has it but shouldn’t have it, who should have it but doesn’t have it, who had it but renounced it. The sheer volume of ideas, images, and events and their mass circulation makes it almost impossible not to notice how unsettled and unsettling contemporary US citizenship has become. If, as designer Bruce Mau suggests, the success of a design is its invisibility, then it seems that the design of contemporary US citizenship is anything but a success (Mau, 2004:1). Taking seriously the claim that modern liberal citizenship is a failing design, I focus on how citizenship is designed and redesigned through history. My central research question is â€" What are the design principles of modern liberal citizenship, and how are they experienced in the contemporary US? Noting that modern liberal citizenship emerged from state security debates and that security concerns preoccupy those in the contemporary US, I investigate not only how citizenship is designed but how safe citizenship is designed. As such, I am less concerned with the legal definition of citizenship than with the practical packaging of citizenship as part of a design for safe living. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern cosmology, time is relative and yet irreversible. Time is not a simple succession of abstract "nows" or an objective framework within which things happen, but a dimension in the complex fields of spacetime. Similarly, time is involved in social phenomena in a complex manner. The historical nature of social being includes the emergence of the human species; the development of complex society and consciousness; and, subsequently, the geo-historical formation of all components of causal complexes, i.e. layers of agency, structure and mechanisms. Moreover, social interaction occurs in time. Adequate explanatory models have to account (i) for the irreversible temporal sequences of episodes and processes and (ii) for counterfactual, unactualised possibilities. Temporality is also an essential part of social action in a deeper sense. Following Paul Ricouer, I argue that there is a unity of having-been, coming-towards and making present, since these are thought and acted upon together by the actors. The making-present of practical action stems from the anticipation of possibilities of transformative action producing outcomes on the basis of understanding of that which has-been (history). The horizon of action is thus inherently temporal. This also raises the question of what is the practical point of social sciences if they can only say something about that which has already been and can no longer be shaped? Moreover, would it be possible to theorise history and the future in terms of structurally conditioned sequences of possibilities? I expand on the idea that there are different layers of time, in which counterfactual possibilities play out in different ways. Despite manifold contingencies, at a deeper level of world-historical time, and at a higher level of abstraction, it is plausible to develop accounts of grand stages of human history, extending them towards the future as well. I argue finally that it is not only possible but also necessary to combine the analysis of layers of geo-history, historical analogies, counterfactuals, possible futures and narratives within a single study, and that this can be done in a coherent and plausible manner. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines major power interactions in the late nineteenth century. It cites that traditional power transition (PT) theory predicts that a sudden increase in numbers of war are linked with scenarios in which a challenging state's power overtakes that of a dominant state. Also summarized are the features of a model that builds on the logic of PT theory and on that of its central rival, balance of power (BOP) theory, created to capture the relationship between power and conflict in interstate rivalries.

Numerous quantitative social science studies have addressed the question of why human rights abuses occur. As a result, there has been a cumulation of findings on contending explanations and progress toward a theoretical understanding of why physical integrity abuses are committed. Unfortunately, as yet these theoretical developments have been devoid of much practical application; progress in the theoretical realm has made little, if any, difference on the ground. In this study we address this unfortunate weakness in the literature. We explore the feasibility of creating a risk assessment vehicle, based on existing research in the human rights subfield. Borrowing an approach used by Gurr and Moore (1997) in their study on ethnic rebellion, we construct a risk assessment vehicle that is practically feasible in the sense that it uses data to develop expectations regarding likely increases and decreases in human rights abuses in subsequent years. Our results indicate that based on this year's data we can indeed isolate a set of cases that are at a higher risk of experiencing repression in the following year. Similarly, we can isolate a set of cases in which the conditions are ripe for a decline in repression. We expect that both of these analyses, which we call risk and opportunity assessments respectively, would be of interest to activists and policymakers in their efforts to allocate their limited resources in efforts to improve human rights conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study that suggests that diaspora, as a set of transnational symbolic repertoires of action, legitimates the questioning of the traditional correspondence between identities and political orders. It claims that diaspora is a political program that produces the effects of truth. It attempts to define the process of diasporization as the political act of creation of a homogenous group whose identity and loyalty is considered to be naturally linked to a distant homeland.

The article discusses a study which proposes a computational theory for the emergence of social complexity that accounts for the development of early forms of government as well as political development. The study centers on the concepts, mechanisms, and basic formal structure that constitute the canonical theory and inform the subsequent simulation model. It is explained that the canonical theory of social complexity is based on a fast process of crisis and opportunistic decision-making through collective action.

The article provides an overview of strengths and weaknesses of the social and behavioral (SB) sciences' contribution to the terrorism analytical discipline from an academic/government perspective. It recommends ways in which further research in the SB sciences can enable analysts to better assess, respond to and prevent current and future terrorist threats. It cites theories developed by SB science that are relevant to understanding the origins of terrorism.

The article focuses on a study that suggests a rationalist concept of power that is sufficiently abstract in order to encompass economic bargaining power as well as legal power within the World Trade Organization (WTO). It cites some general reflections on the conceptualization of power in social sciences. It elaborates the causal model of power to outline its application to power contexts within the WTO.

Waiting for the abstract.

Our study explores how marginalized groups at the university read and utilize academic knowledge in locating themselves in relation to the dominant collective. It regards the university as an sociocultural and political arena that hosts different ethnic groups, who are differently positioned in relation to its social and cultural ethos and national narratives. The students’ processes of location are triggered especially in the encounter with Social Sciences and Humanities -- subject areas that are shaped by cultural and social power relations. Our main postulation is that within higher educational institutions, social power relations hierarchize the positioning of minority and majority groups. Learning and the experience of university life are organized by power relations, and students construct identities within and against this power structure. To understand how different minority groups construct identity, position themselves as educated but also as distinct collectives, we must take into account how power relations order academic learning and how groups react/act within it. Our case study probes into the situation of marginalized groups at the Hebrew University, a university based on a strong national ethos. Founded both on the basis of the European model and emphasizing full Jewish life in the Land of Israel, the Hebrew University combines a desire for the pursuit of universal knowledge with a project of strengthening the particular Jewish nation. Among the groups hosted by the Hebrew University are not only indigenous and immigrant Jews and visiting Jews from the Diaspora, but also foreign non-Jews and local Palestinian Israeli citizens. Our study focuses on two noticeable, contrasting marginal groups, each located differently in relation to the national ethos and who bring with them different cultural capital regarding knowledge and academic learning. Palestinian Israeli women that are not part of the nation building project. These women also enter the university with cultural models of ways of knowing that are different from their Jewish Israeli counterparts. The second group is of Russian Jewish students, who are invited to join the Jewish collective and be part of the homeland. They enter the university with Western, appropriate cultural models of ways of knowing that largely correspond the dominant model at the university. For them, university studies are part and parcel of their welcomed immigration process. The aim of this research is to compare how students of two different minority groups locate themselves as educated elites in society. We try to understand how pre-university social positioning guides the ways in which cultural minority groups use knowledge. The comparison between these two minority groups helps highlight the different ways academic knowledge can be used to reframe and rework identities as minority educated elites. Embarking from the literacy approach to reading as a subjective practice of identity construction, we use personal narratives to reveal how meaning and collective national identity are constructed in the postcolonial context of institutionally represented power relations. Particularly, we study how members of the two groups read and utilize academic knowledge to locate themselves in relation to the Israeli-Jewish collective. Facing the unknown and the non-familiar sharpens the student’s reflexivity and obliges her to read and reflect on newly encountered knowledge. Immigrant groups often use academic knowledge as an arena for cultural reading and the inclusion in collective identity, yet when a group is excluded by the knowledge itself, as in the case of Palestinian-Israelis, their reading of it will bear different fruits. Through juxtaposing the groups of Palestinian and Russian students at the Hebrew University, we study how the two groups differently interpret national and cultural messages transmitted in the classroom to re-design their marginality in relation to the collective. The Russians take for granted the zionist messages in academic knowledge and utilize the knowledge to join hegemonic groups in Israeli society and culture. Resisting these same messages, the Palestinians utilize the same academic knowledge to elaborate themselves as part of a Palestinian ethno-national collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secularization theory has long held sway in the social sciences. If nowhere else, the secularization thesis seems to hold true in Western Europe. This study looks at one of the mechanisms behind the transformation of religious groups into secular nations, arguing that the universal nature of western religions (Catholicism, Protestantism) and their related goals of proselytism erode any religious foundation for nation-building. In other words, national identity is based on the unique characteristics of a given group. As such, the universal goals of the Catholic Church (i.e. a message for all mankind) and its related acceptance throughout many states in Europe means that Catholicism is of little use in building an Italian identity in contrast to a French or Spanish one. The result is nationalism built on other unique characteristics (language, history, culture) and a de-emphasis on religion (at least in terms of national identity). Examples from Western Europe are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resolve is a ubiquitous concept in IR theory, used to explain everything from why states win wars to how they prevail during crisis bargaining, from theories of audience costs to analyses of asymmetric conflicts. Despite its prominence, the concept remains heavily undertheorized, and is often used in inconsistent ways. I connect the IR literatures on resolve to a growing body of work on willpower and self-control from elsewhere in the social sciences to suggest that there have been two types of "stories" social scientists can tell about resolve - an inside, dispositional account, and an outside, situational one - but that neither one is sufficient by itself, and that taking resolve seriously requires us to think about the phenomenon in an interactionist manner that connects the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While neo-institutionalism has become one of the dominant paradigms of contemporary social science, its account of change remains one of its main weaknesses. As several authors have pointed out, it is better equipped to explain stability rather than flux. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While energy and environmental issues have moved to the forefront of policy making in recent years, research political science has lagged behind in important areas, particularly in terms of systematic analysis and the identification of generalizable, empi ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When leaders talk, how much credence can we give their speech? It is a common technique in political science to utilize the public speech of leaders to analyze both their intentions (i.e., their likely behaviors), as well as character traits and psycholo ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Fukuyama claimed that all the remaining conflicts of human life would eventually be resolved within the productive constraints of liberal polities, he was building on a rich tradition of liberal speculation on the history of human development and pro ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is widely regarded as the founding textbook of International Relations. This should suffice to demonstrate the close, if not inextricable, link between the disciplines of International Relations and History, although each of them is an independent discipline on its own right, of course.However, although the historical approach to International Relations does have a glorious past, it is open to question whether it continues to retain its validity in view of the cascading changes that have been taking place in contemporary international politics. The present contribution to this roundtable discussion will seek to explore the current position and the future trends as regards the use of History in the study of International Relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out a theory of differentiation derived from Sociology and Anthropology and argues that it can and should be applied to International relations (IR). Differentiation is about how to distinguish and analyze the components that make up any ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the knowledge produced by IR has a performative capacity is nowadays a commonsensical position â€" not only among constructivists. Representations of social science are not only descriptions of the world, but also construct (or perform) the world being ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists have often simplified reality to make it more explicable. They have done this in part through privileging method over the subject matter, and in privileging ontological types (like states) over actual actors . Such simplification has pr ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Othering of one’s (research) object is usually considered problematic in the studies of postcolonial and poststructural politics. Attempts to close the distance between the self and the other are desired. Unlike traditional anthropologists, however, the ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations theorists have increasingly taken into account the domestic factors influencing foreign policy and, ultimately, international relations. They have tended to focus, however, on policy initiation, rather than policy response. And y ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what sense can a global politics be embodied? Various theorists on the Left have sought a political orientation corresponding to a global interconnection of natural forces and laboring bodies. Thus, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]