International Political Sociology Research Articles

World Society, Social Differentiation and Time

Kessler, Oliver. (2012) World Society, Social Differentiation and Time. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2012.00151.x © 2012 International Studies Association In the current attempt to develop a Global Political Sociology, the concept of functional differentiation increasingly attracts attention. Functional differentiation seems to promise an avenue to describe global processes beyond a methodological nationalism. In this contribution I argue that while we have already made some progress in describing the spatial implications of functional differentiation, less effort has been spent on the temporal side of the story. This contribution highlights this aspect and points to shifting temporalities in the context of finance and international law. This perspective suggests that many “governance problems” might be due to the clash of different temporalities co-existing in world society.

International Political Sociology: Opening Spaces, Stretching Lines

Since its appearance, International Political Sociology ( IPS ) has tried to respond to the diversification of scholarly concerns in contemporary international studies. Its primary intellectual signature has been the creation of a stimulating and influential meeting ground between work in sociology, political theory, and international studies. A wide range of traditions from historical, legal, economic, cultural, and political sociology have been brought to bear on some of the key questions defining world politics today. We and the new editorial team are strongly committed to further explore this work at the interstices between sociology and international studies. In particular, the journal will continue to develop along the lines set out by the founding editors in 2007 (Bigo and Walker 2007). The key characteristics defined by Didier Bigo and Rob Walker are the following. Contemporary enactments of worlds, the international, and the global have international studies reaching beyond its disciplinary resources again. Similarly, sociology has been increasingly reaching into international studies when moving beyond methodological nationalism to understand social transformations and global social phenomena. IPS seeks to intensify emerging conversations between sociology, social theory, and international studies. In particular, it seeks to engage the antagonisms at the heart of disciplinary divides and modern modes of organizing worlds in innovative ways. For that purpose, IPS seeks to creatively rework the modern categorical dichotomies of state and society, sovereignty and market, national and international, the social and political, nation and state, global and international, and community and society. To make this conversation possible, IPS calls for sustained engagement with sites and events that re-invent and skew in unsettling ways what is called social and political. The emphasis on sociology brings a renewed focus on practice, on …

“If Lehman Brothers Had Been Lehman Sisters...”: Gender and Myth in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis

Prugl, Elisabeth. (2012) “If Lehman Brothers Had Been Lehman Sisters…”: Gender and Myth in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis. International Political Sociology , doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00149.x © 2012 International Studies Association In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008/09, there was a remarkable preoccupation in the English-language press with gender relations in finance. Articles adduced masculinity as a variable that may have caused the crisis, speculated about the more prudent investment styles of women, and predicted the fall of macho and the end of men. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir, I argue that this discourse amounted to an exercise in meaning making through the construction of a myth of woman as financially responsible and men as reckless. I interpret the deployment of this myth in the press as a morality play of fall, rise, and redemption. The play provides a narrative that explains the unfamiliar of the crisis, offers a correcting mechanism in the form of prudent woman, and re-assembles a bourgeois worldview of social and economic harmony by advocating more gender diversity in finance.

Political Islam and State Legitimacy in Turkey: The Role of National Culture in Neoliberal State-Building

Blad, Cory and Banu Kocer. (2012) Political Islam and State Legitimacy in Turkey: The Role of National Culture in Neoliberal State-Building. International Political Sociology , doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2012.00150.x © 2012 International Studies Association The rise of Islamist parties to positions of political dominance in Turkey has been the subject of inquiry for scholars and concern for some American and European observers. This paper argues that this rise of Islamist political efficacy is the result of efforts to maintain state legitimacy in an era of neoliberalism. The integration of neoliberalism as a dominant political economic ideology reduces state economic regulatory capacities and social service endowment. The effect of this retrenchment is a commensurate reduction in state legitimation, as national populations view the state as unable—or unwilling—to meet requisite economic protectionist demands that were formerly exchanged for legitimate support. In an attempt to retain legitimate authority, neoliberal states are forced to move beyond economic protectionist strategies and embrace increasingly cultural legitimation approaches. We juxtapose the use of economic protectionist strategies in the 1945–1980 period with the integration of Islam as a cultural legitimation strategy following the 1980 coup in Turkey.

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Journal Article Contributors Get access International Political Sociology, Volume 6, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 112–113, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00153.x Published: 14 March 2012

The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global Transformation and the Problem of the State’s Two Territories1

Shah, Nisha. (2011) The Territorial Trap of the Territorial Trap: Global Transformation and the Problem of the State’s Two Territories. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00144.x © 2011 International Studies Association This paper argues that attempts by theories of globalization to overcome the “territorial trap” have failed. Describing how the modern state emerged with two interrelated territories—a political concept about bounded jurisdiction and public good that over time is effaced but reinforced as territory is defined as brute, physical terrain—it shows that the assumption in globalization theories that territory is the state’s physical area entrenches the normative defense of the territorial state as the framework of political order. The consequence is that overcoming the territorial trap not only requires uncovering how and why territory becomes an assumed political ideal, but also how and why this trap produces the subsequent trap of understanding territory primarily as the “physical substratum” of the sovereign state. Globalization theories’ analysis of political transformation must therefore focus not only on the “permeability” of territorial borders, but whether and how evolving notions of global space might be providing a different political theory. A preliminary discussion of efforts to uncover how an alternative global spatial principle is reassembling political authority suggests a possible means of escape and way forward.

Everyday Politics and Generational Conflicts in the World Economy

The world is getting old and so are we. Our societies are aging rapidly, presenting some new challenges to human interdependencies in both advanced and developing economies (Elias 1991). The challenges are mostly of the “everyday” variety, as I will clarify below, and can be seen as socio-economic, emotional-psychological, political, and conceptual. My aim here is to demonstrate why the emergence of intergenerational conflicts in the world economy is a topic worthy of attention to readers of International Political Sociology . The pitch is straightforward: scholars interested in international political sociology are concerned with changes in figurations of human interdependence. Intergenerational conflicts are fundamentally about changes to these figurations, with consequences for how we understand our societies, international relations, and ourselves. I suggest that what is sometimes called “process” or “processual” sociology, which focuses on figurations of human interdependence and the processes behind their evolution, provides an important boost to scholars of International Relation and International Political Economy who wish to address issues of generational change (Elias 1991; cf. Abbott 2001). Such issues are not typically handled well in fields where actors’ interests are often regarded as self-explanatory from their status as an entity (states want power, firms want profit, etc.). We can talk about “intergenerational contracts” to understand changes between generations, but such pacts are abstractions of obligations offered by one generation to another. We can easily see the violation of such a “contract” by the “Baby Boomers” generation, who took advantage of the welfare state at its peak, with stable jobs, cheaper housing, free education, easy love, and fat pensions. While there is some truth here, such a depiction paints over issues of mobility, race, stratification, and class. Demographers inform us of some general changes on how …

Resilience, Critical Infrastructure, and Molecular Security: The Excess of “Life” in Biopolitics1

This article investigates the political significance of the orientation of Western security relations around critical infrastructure (CI) and resilience planning. While the analysis is located in the International Political Sociology literature, it departs from recent biopolitical accounts of CIs and resilience. These accounts tend to present such apparatuses as closed, totalizing, and inevitably “successful” modes of governance. Rather, we argue that resilient CIs are open, vulnerable, and often absurd systems that continually falter, backfire, and often undermine themselves according to their own logic. By developing what we call a “molecular security” approach, we draw attention to the way in which life constantly evades capture. In this sense, we suggest, there is always an excess of “life” in biopolitics.

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Journal Article Contributors Get access International Political Sociology, Volume 5, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 346–347, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00138.x Published: 14 September 2011

Introduction to Symposium“A Different Reading of the International”: Pierre Bourdieu and International Studies

This special issue of International Political Sociology consists of a symposium of papers that demonstrate the possibilities applying the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to international studies, both theoretically and empirically. The papers are all derived from a panel entitled “A Different Reading of the International” organized at the 2010 ISA Annual Conference in New Orleans. Correspondingly, the main claim of this special issue is that the sociology of Bourdieu provides a different look at the international, one that is highly productive for further transforming international studies. Our interest in developing this specific symposium has moreover been spurred by the general momentum which Bourdieusian sociology currently is experiencing with respect to both international and European studies (for references, please see the individual chapters). In this growing literature, one can now distinguish between a grouping of more sociologically informed studies and an emergent body of political science research which draws on Bourdieusian concepts.

The Police of Civilization: The War on Terror as Civilizing Offensive

This article deals with two contemporary issues: the return of “civilization” as a category of international power and the common refrain that war is now looking more and more like a police action. The article shows that these two issues are deeply connected. They have their roots in the historical connection between “civilization” and “police.” Through an exercise the history of ideas as an essay in international political sociology, the article unravels the connection between these issues. In so doing, it suggests that a greater sensitivity to the broader police concept in the original police science might help us understand the war on terror as a civilizing offensive: as the violent conjunction of war and police.

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Journal Article Contributors Get access International Political Sociology, Volume 4, Issue 4, December 2010, Page 441, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2010.00116.x Published: 02 December 2010

IPS Referees 2008-2009

IPS Referees 2008–2009 International Political Sociology, Volume 4, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 436–440, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2010.00115.x Published: 02 December 2010

IPS FORUM CONTRIBUTION (ISSUE 3, VOL. 4): The Use of Law in International Political Sociology

The past few years have witnessed an increasing interest in law from the side of international political sociologists. Authors in the field of International Political Sociology had recourse to law in order to underpin and illustrate their arguments or used sociological tools to make sense of developments in law. The use of law in sociological analysis raises pertinent questions regarding the relationship between the two disciplines: How is international law portrayed in sociological analysis? What does sociology do to the study of international law? What are fruitful topics for further multidisciplinary cooperation between international political sociology and international law? This paper analyzes these questions on the basis of three articles with a specific focus on law, published in this journal: Tugba Basaran, “Security, Law, Borders: Spaces of Exclusion” (2008, 2(4):339–354); Philip Liste, “Articulating the Nexus of Politics and Law: War in Iraq and the Practice within Two Legal Systems” (2008, 2(1):38–55), and Antione Vaucheź, “The Force of a Weak Field: Law and Lawyers in the Government of the European Union (For a Renewed Research Agenda)” (2008, 2(2): 128–144).1

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Journal Article Contributors Get access International Political Sociology, Volume 4, Issue 2, June 2010, Pages 216–218, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2010.00101.x Published: 07 June 2010

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Journal Article Contributors Get access International Political Sociology, Volume 4, Issue 1, March 2010, Pages 104–105, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00094.x Published: 07 March 2010

Multistakeholderism or Elitism? The Creation of a Transnational Field of Internet Governance

Internet governance is representative of new forms of governance beyond state-to-state diplomacy. As other highly specialised issues in the global political economy, Internet governance is semi-privatised -it includes both state and non-state actors; and transnational, where space is reconfigured through processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. Several concepts have been used to qualify this type of governance, with multistakeholderism being the most common and most widely accepted among Internet governance scholars. It will be argued here that multistakeholderism fails to acknowledge important aspects of this type of governance and that the history of the emergence of Internet governance tends to hint towards other ways of describing the phenomena. While multistakeholderism tends to describe some form of equality among the different actors of a process, the notion of elitism stresses the power asymmetries that exist within a domain of governance. The paper tries to elaborate a theoretical framework that allows to better analyse the differentiated participation of the various stakeholders. It draws upon critical approaches to international Relations and political sociology to reconstruct the emergence of Internet governance as a global policy issue in the 1990s in order to get a historical perspective on the current debates on multistakeholderism and participation issues.

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Contributors Get access International Political Sociology, Volume 3, Issue 4, December 2009, Pages 469–470, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00087.x Published: 03 December 2009

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing

International Political Sociology Beyond European and North American Traditions of Social and Political Thought�Introduction

International Relations is mostly defined as a largely North American discipline with a strong anchoring in Europe. There are different views on what such a geographical or geocultural anchoring of knowledge …