Authority In World Politics Research Articles

Ritual and authority in world politics

The contributions to this Forum on Ritual and Authority in World Politics examine the role that ritual performances play in the constitution of positions of authority and the maintenance of relations of authority in historical and contemporary international relations. The Forum takes as its point of departure three related observations: (i) that recent years have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest in ritual as a recurring feature of international practice, but (ii) that this recent interest in ritual has not extended, thus far, to the study of international authority, (iii) in spite of political anthropologists’ long-standing claim that the performance of ritual is absolutely crucial to the production of authority. The performance of ritual grounds, makes tangible and enhances various forms of authority, including forms of international authority, historical and contemporary. The contributions to this Forum demonstrate the veracity of that claim in five different empirical contexts—Byzantine diplomacy, early modern cross-cultural encounters, British imperialism in India, military lawyering in America’s armed forces, and the casting of ballots in Crimea and the US—and attempt also to explain precisely how it is that ritual served to undergird and stabilise authority in these various instances.

International Public Administrations on Twitter: A Comparison of Digital Authority in Global Climate Policy

International organizations and their secretariats, called international public administrations (IPAs), have been found to hold considerable authority in world politics. This study conceptualizes and measures IPA authority in the digital sphere. It proposes the concept of digital authority to measure the authority of actors in online social networks (OSN), such as Twitter. Applying exponential random graph models (ERGMs) based on Twitter data during climate change negotiations the article compares the authority of IPAs to that of other actors. The findings show that IPAs are attributed as much authority as state actors in global climate communication networks on Twitter.

SHEVARDNADZE'S GEOSTRATEGIC CARAMBOLA

Search for Geopolitical Strategy for Georgia means finding a special road to a civilized future that will be in line with the country's historical and cultural specificity and uniqueness. After the unfavorable conditions, there was created a short but very profitable term implementing its geopolitical and geostrategic interests. Everything depended on the ability of the Georgian politicians, how much they would you be able to determine, understand and mobilize the situation. In this case Georgian diplomacy was appropriate. The government which was in a very difficult position soon clarified the situation and was able to use this chance as much as possible. Accordingly, the country received an impressive geopolitical dividend. Georgian diplomacy achieved great success in the geopolitical context. The factor of the President of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, played a major role, he created a desirable background for Western politics in Georgia with his authority in world politics and great political activity.

Hierarchy salience and social action: disentangling class, status, and authority in world politics

Hierarchy is a persistent feature of international politics. Existing accounts recognize that there are many ways in which actors can stand in relation to one another. Yet they struggle to make sense of this complexity. This study considers Max Weber’s contribution to understanding international hierarchy. It discusses three ideal types of stratification based on the distribution of capabilities (class), estimations of honor and prestige (status), and command relationships (authority). Following the neo-Weberian approach, these dimensions matter because they make social action intelligible. Furthermore, Weber clarifies how class and status are connected and how these two dimensions relate to authority through the process of ‘social closure’. The study concludes that scholars who focus exclusively on authority structures miss the fact that authority typically derives from other forms of stratification: although based on different logics of social stratification, class and status hierarchies often coalesce into (legitimate) authority.

International Legitimacy Lost? Rule and Resistance When America Is First

The pillars of the Pax Americana are decaying. There are two critical challenges. Our interests with our closest allies have been drifting apart for decades, with increasingly serious consequences. A new populist and economic nationalist coalition has been mobilized in the United States, challenging the internationalist coalition that has prevailed at home since the second World War. These challenges are not the product of President Donald J. Trump. He is the manifestation of these challenges, not their cause. Understanding these challenges requires examining anew the role of international legitimacy and authority in world politics and recognizing that different international orders have different distributional consequences. This essay summarizes my past research on the incentives for international hierarchy, integrates the role of domestic interests into that theory, and explores the nature and role of international legitimacy in the study of world order. Part II examines the Pax Americana, and contrasts this order with those found in the Caribbean basin and Middle East. The final section outlines the changing incentives for cooperation between the United States and Europe, discusses the rise of populism in the United States, and suggests ways of addressing the current challenges to internationalism.

Global governance vs empire: Why world order moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy

Current debates in International Relations (IR) entail two different claims regarding the global structures evolving in the post-Cold War world. Some suggest that the scope of the US power amounts to lasting American hegemony or even to a US empire; others speak of global governance in light of waning capacities of single states to tackle international problems or the growing salience of non-state actors. In this article, we discuss these two bodies of literature in conjunction. We argue that the global governance literature and the empire literature use different lenses to observe the same object, that is, world politics after the Cold War, and that they both address the question of power and authority in IR. The global governance literature identifies a diffusion of power and authority in world politics and thus a move from anarchy to heterarchy. The empire literature, in contrast, identifies a concentration of power and authority in the hands of the United States and thus a move from anarchy to hierarchy. We discuss different attempts to redress this seeming contradiction and show that there is much ground to believe that world politics is in fact characterised by both a concentration and a dispersion of power and authority. What we may see is neither global governance nor empire alone, but rather moves towards heterarchy and hierarchy at the same time.

Symbolic power in European diplomacy: the struggle between national foreign services and the EU's External Action Service

AbstractNational diplomacy is challenged by the rise of non-state actors from transnational companies to non-governmental organisations. In trying to explain these challenges, scholars tend to either focus on a specific new actor or argue that states will remain the dominant diplomatic players. This article develops an alternative Bourdieu-inspired framework addressing symbolic power. It conceptualises diplomacy in terms of a social field with agents (field incumbents and newcomers alike) who co-construct and reproduce the field by struggling for dominant positions. The framework is applied to the EU's new diplomatic service (the European External Action Service, EEAS), which is one of the most important foreign policy inventions in Europe to date. I show that the EEAS does not challenge national diplomacy in a material sense – but at a symbolic level. The EEAS questions the state's meta-capital, that is, its monopoly of symbolic power and this explains the counter-strategies adopted by national foreign services. The struggles to define the ‘genuine’ diplomat reveal a rupture in the European diplomatic field, pointing towards a transformation of European statehood and the emergence of a hybrid form of diplomacy. A focus on symbolic power opens up new avenues for the study of transformations of authority in world politics.

Who Put You in Charge? Private Entrepreneurial Authority in World Politics

This paper presents a new conceptual framework for the study of private authority. I introduce the concept of private entrepreneurial authority where private actors are able to induce deference from others, without ex-ante permission from states to do so. I argue that entrepreneurial authority expands the conceptual and empirical formulation of the role of private actors in world politics, and helps bridge the gap between legalistic approaches to authority that focus on delegation and sociological approaches that focus on legitimacy. This theoretical contribution is critical to understanding the range of variation of private authority. I also present a new longitudinal dataset in the area of environment to describe entrepreneurial authority. I operationalize the concept of entrepreneurial authority by looking specifically at environmental certification schemes, such as “dolphin-safe” tuna or “sustainably harvested” timber. There is a considerable body of literature arguing that private authority is on the rise, yet there is little, if any quantitative data to substantiate this claim. This new dataset, which covers five decades of privately-created environmental standards, is able to engage directly with these arguments using quantitative data rather than single cases. The paper presents findings from these data, and develops hypotheses based on cross-sectoral variation.

Nuclear Proliferation and Authority in World Politics

Nuclear Proliferation and Authority in World Politics

Transnational Public-Private Partnerships in International Relations: Making Sense of Concepts, Research Frameworks, and Results

Transnational public-private partnerships (PPPs) have become a popular theme in International Relations (IR) research. Such partnerships constitute a hybrid type of governance, in which nonstate actors co-govern along with state actors for the provision of collective goods, and thereby adopt governance functions that have formerly been the sole authority of sovereign states. Their recent proliferation is an expression of the contemporary reconfiguration of authority in world politics that poses essential questions on the effectiveness and the legitimacy of global governance. In this article, we critically survey the literature on transnational PPPs with respect to three central issues: Why do transnational PPPs emerge, under what conditions are they effective, and under what conditions are they legitimate governance instruments? We point to weaknesses of current research on PPPs and suggest how these weaknesses can be addressed. We argue that the application of IR theories and compliance theories in particular opens up the possibility for systematic comparative research that is necessary to obtain conclusive knowledge about the emergence, effectiveness, and legitimacy of transnational PPPs. Furthermore, the article introduces the concept of complex performance to capture possible unintended side effects of PPPs and their implications on global governance.

Borders, Territory, Law1

This article takes as its starting point legal arguments deployed by the United Nations on the situation of detainees held in Guantánamo Bay. This case raises a series of provocative questions about the contemporary relation between borders, territory, and law. First, it challenges dominant assumptions about the nature and location of authority in world politics based upon a conventional logic of inside/outside. Second, it raises the issue of what critical theoretical/philosophical resources might be available in order to rethink the above relation. Third, it summons the need to develop alternative border imaginaries. It is argued that some prospects for addressing these questions are found in the work of Benjamin, Derrida, Schmitt, and Agamben.

Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, and World Politics

International law, and the world politics that creates and sustains it, has increasingly manifested a tension between the primacy of state sovereignty and other values that would challenge that primacy.' One of those challenging values is individual human rights. A persistent question is receiving renewed attention at the end of the twentieth century: is the international community entitled to override state sovereignty in the interest of protecting persons? United Nations action concerning Iraqi Kurds during 1991-1992 is but one manifestation of this renewed tension between state sovereignty and human rights. Situations demanding intervention to protect persons present a number of fundamental questions. For human rights violations occurring materially within a territorial state, what principle prevails: state sovereignty, or the international community's interest in protecting human rights? How is the community interest to be manifested, by nonforcible or also forcible measures, and by whom executed, states or international organizations? Which internationally recognized rights, if any, might seem to qualify for international forcible protection? In this essay we focus on what has been traditionally called humanitarian intervention. We examine the legal status of the claimed prerogative of a foreign actor to use force within the territorial jurisdiction of a state, without the consent of the ruling authority, to ameliorate or terminate violations of internationally recognized human rights. This is not a technical legal question, if properly understood. It is a fundamental political question about authority in world politics. In an era of rhetoric about a New World Order, this Gordian knot has taken on renewed importance. Brian Urquhart, an experienced former United