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Occidental nation-states' democratic principles have been progressively influencing the way they conduct their international relations. Parliamentary actors, for instance, have been organizing transnational forums in order to debate their perspectives on foreign policy. In Latin America, nevertheless, this trend is limited by the presidential tradition and the intergovernmental character of regionalism. How, thus, can the creation of a parliament in Mercosur in 2006 be explained? This paper aims to evaluate the reasons for the Mercosur Parliament's construction beyond official discourse. The analysis, based on the theoretical framework of the «3 Is» and qualitative interviews, identifies factors related to institutions, interests and ideas which have had a joint role in this political outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at analyzing the emergence of European militaries capabilities--understood as a tool incorporated in a wider security continuum -- as the expansion of European bureaucratic struggles towards new arenas. Drawing on sociological work in EU studies and in International Relations, it presents an account of the EU-UN cooperation as a central locus enabling the construction of CSDP. The argument is articulated through a dual-dynamic of internationalization and autonomization, and on the role-played by the former High Representative for CFSP, Javier Solana, and his staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce the main strengths of Raymond Aron's political judgment concerning the "friend-enemy" polarity. In light of that question, we revisit Aron's political philosophy in order to show its "intention" and the way it accounts for to the tension between domestic politics and international relations, norm and exception, the "meaning " of politics (friendship) and the permanent possibility of war (enmity). Aron's critical analysis of Carl Schmitt's criterion of the "political" turns out to be a particularly revealing example of Aron's approach. The article then identifies the "lessons" to be drawn from the Aronian outlook concerning the understanding of the nature of the political world, its changing configurations and its genuine seriousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Liberia's reconstruction by external actors and it analyses in particular Liberia's Governance and Economic Management Assistance Programme (GEMAP), a program which implies co-signatures by international experts for state expenditures. The paper argues that Liberia is in a paradoxical situation between conditioned partnership and co-sovereignty with its international partners, which is neither voluntary, nor clearly imposed. The author adopts a theoretical framework based en path-dependency to enhance the understanding of this phenomenon. She analyses the basis and the functions of GEMAP to illustrate this situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the epistemological debate in International Relations and reassesses criticisms of positivism. Critical approaches have often failed to specify the problem of positivism. It thus remains unclear whether there is a path beyond it. This article focuses on the poststructuralist contribution to this debate, which comes closer to correctly identifying why positivism reifies international relations. Indeed, poststructuralists have correctly identified how the role of difference in the construction of meaning illustrates why our theories are always independent from the world they supposedly describe, although not arbitrary. The article moves away from a construction and argues that recognizing the centrality of difference can instead offer a field on which to conceptualize a new form of analytical and critical rigour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of the multilayered patchwork of investment agreements for theories of global governance and international relations. In particular, it examines more closely the concept of intersecting regime and its applicability to the case of international investment rules. It argues that rules on investment constitute a specific kind of intersecting regime that has not yet been considered in that literature. The case study describes the problem of overlapping rules in the governance of foreign direct investment in the hemisphere and demonstrates how these overlaps are due to competing legalization projects stemming from different political visions about the regulation of foreign investment ; how it is manifested in sets of overlapping and contradictory norms and rules ; and discusses the effects of this institutional overlap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]