International Relations Community Research Articles

Political and Military Implications of Private Military Contractors in Russia

The topic, which is of personal interest, makes an impression that contractors are only a marginal part of the modern security studies, the academic community of international relations and the public interest. The world is in constant evolution, dominated by more urgent topics and the previous ones are pushed into the background, which specifically in this case poses a great threat. Article focuses on the issue of private military contractors as an alternative to modern privatisation of military and overview of their main differences to the known mercenaries, ethics, and their restrictions with the aim to showcase timelessness and adequate usability of these contractors with the focus on characterising the Russian Private Military Companies and their recent operations. We intend to look at the role of Russian Private Military Contractors and analyse the possible impact that these companies may have and continuously still have in the sphere of international relations and security studies. We offer an updated viewpoint on their place in the current global governance order, and we showcase why and how have they achieved their status. Such findings are crucial for understanding the role of non-state actors in the current security environment.

Vietnam's Emergence as a Middle Power in Asia: Unfolding the Power–Knowledge Nexus

With Asia's current geopolitical rise, International Relations communities in China, Japan and India have attempted to develop indigenous theoretical approaches that attract heated scholarly debates. Little attention, however, is paid to the state of affairs in weaker states. As power today is widely diffused to various actors in the international system beyond the big powers, the power–knowledge literature should be broadened to respond to the growing multiplexity of world order and the call for diversity of International Relations knowledge. As a case in point, this study examines how Vietnam's emerging middle power status has shaped policy and scholarly discourses in the country regarding the trajectory of Vietnam's foreign policy and the burgeoning interest of its International Relations community in a Vietnamese School of Diplomacy. Such scholarly endeavour will help shed light on the heightened agency of middle powers in world politics and the prospects for a Southeast Asian contribution to global International Relations heritage.

South–South Knowledge Production and Hegemony: Searching for Africa in Chinese Theories of IR

Abstract There is a growing community of international relations (IR) scholars who argue for the importance of investigating Global South approaches to IR scholarship, making room for theories and concepts that challenge the discipline's Eurocentricity, and debating the merits and pitfalls of globalizing IR by including perspectives from various Global South locations. In addition to acknowledging this existing critical scholarship that aims at resisting mainstream epistemologies and methodologies of knowing and doing IR, this article's central contribution is to probe the epistemic hegemony and knowledge-production hierarchies that are emerging from within the Global South. The article does not seek to uncover the truth about the representation of Global South actors by Global South IR communities. Instead, it is interested in demonstrating how epistemic hegemony and knowledge-production hierarchies do not exist only in relationships of exclusion and Othering but also in relations of inclusion and Selving. We illustrate our argument with an analysis of the representations of “Africa” in China-based IR intellectual communities. We find that Chinese discourses on solidarity, friendship, community, and shared history lead to a narrative of sameness and Selving whereby Chinese postcolonial experiences are taken to be expandable and applicable to other developing states, making Chinese perspectives seem representative of others, thereby silencing and representing African voices at once.

Methodological Nationalism in International Relations: A Quantitative Assessment of Academia in Turkey (2015-2019)

This article seeks to expand the discussion on Methodological Nationalism (MN)within the discipline of International Relations (IR), to contribute to MN literature from the perspective of IR studies and to evaluate the prevalence of MN in the field by the quantification of selected works. To achieve these goals, the article, firstly, recapitulates the general MN literature and critically evaluates this discussion in IR. Later, it identifies the forms of MN as they appear in IR with two faces: Level of analysis (nation-as-arena) and unit of analysis (nation-as-actor). Secondly, the article proposes a method to assess the prevalence of MN through quantification. Finally, the article applies its method to IR works to address the question of how widespread MN is in academia in Turkey. The findings demonstrate the proportional pervasiveness of MN within the IR community of Turkey, which is part of the “periphery” in the discipline. The findings also let us draw some hypothetical conclusions, which have the potential to be a springboard for further research on the MN-IR nexus.

Sanctions in international politics: Expectations and reality

Sanctions have a long history, which spans over two thousand years. In fact, the first recorded cases of sanctions go as far back as ancient Greece. In the Middle Ages, such measures were formalized in legislation and were called repressalia. Under their current name, sanctions came to be known after World War I: the power to deploy sanctions was described in the League of Nations' Covenant. After the establishment of the United Nations, such measures were included into the Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Traditionally, sanctions are seen as a foreign policy tool falling between diplomacy and military force and applied in response to the undesirable actions of a certain state. Unlike diplomatic intervention efforts, sanctions have a more pronounced economic effect and are seen as more likely to bring the desired change in the target state's behaviour on the international arena. Unlike military force, sanctions are a less costly alternative and they also carry less risk of further escalation of the conflict. Lately, the topic of international sanctions has gained much urgency worldwide and has been actively discussed in the academic circles. The debates mostly centre around the impact of sanctions on the target's economy and their appropriateness as a foreign policy tool. There is, however, a perceived shortage of studies providing a comprehensive analysis of sanctions' impact on the regional, national and international levels as well as the specific tools of sanction policy and their effectiveness. More inquiry is needed into the challenges faced by target countries as well as the whole international community in relation to sanctions. The papers included in this special issue can be divided into three groups. The first group deals with the theory and methodology of sanctions studies. A.A.Pobedin in his paper 'Reconsidering Contemporary Classifications of Sanctions in the Light of the Russia Sanctions Regime' systematizes the approaches to the classification of international economic sanctions and proposes a qualitative model that can be used to examine specific sanctions regimes. The second group of studies includes the papers analyzing specific sanctions episodes. Special attention is given to comparative analysis of sanctions in different countries. I.V.Lazanyuk and D.Mambu Diu investigate the development of the Angolan economy under the pressure of sanctions. The authors focus on the role and mechanisms of the sanctions adopted by Western countries against Angola and some other African states. O.S.Sukharev and E.N.Voronchikhina compare the development of Iran and Russia during their respective sanctions episodes by looking at the dynamics of each country's macro-indicators. L.L.Bozhko in her paper 'Challenges of Anti-Russia Sanctions for Metals and Mining Enterprises in Kazakhstan' considers the problem from the perspective of Kazakhstan, which is not targeted by sanctions but is nevertheless affected by them because of its close trade ties with Russia. The study aims to identify and describe the strategies and models of behaviour used by Kazakhstani companies to avoid the risks of secondary sanctions. The third group comprises articles discussing the impact of sanctions on specific economic sectors and regions of Russia. I.S.Belik, N.V.Starodubets, A.I.Yachmeneva, and K.A. Prokopov estimate the potential losses incurred by Russian metal exporters due to the introduction of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism in the EU and the sanctions pressure. S.A.Balashova and T.Musin analyze the problems and prospects of the Russian cloud computing market under sanctions. Since further dynamics of the market is surrounded with uncertainty related to the behaviour of the key drivers and the possible introduction of new sanctions, several scenarios are built for the development of the Russian cloud market and implementation of cloud technologies. E.A. Zakharchuk considers three scenarios of economic development of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, the largest oil and gas region of Russia, under sanctions. The article estimates the impact of the sanctions on specific areas of Yamal, especially the development of new hydrocarbon deposits in the Arctic. M.Y.Ilyushkina, A.V.Stepanov, G.N.Valiakhmetova, and A.S.Burnasov describe the tendencies and prospects of development of Russian industrial regions under sanctions. They focus on the case of Sverdlovsk region, which has a high concentration of mining and manufacturing (heavy engineering) enterprises.

Cyber-Attack: Its Definition, Regulation, and ASEAN Cooperation to Handle with it

The development of technology brings changes in human life, and the shift of most human activities to cyberspace is now a challenge for every country in the world. Cyber-attacks are crimes that have developed rapidly with the development of information communication and technology (ICT). Due to its impact, cyber-attacks can be considered as a crime called a crime of aggression. The focus of this paper is to determine the urgency of regulating cyberattacks as a crime of aggression and to find out the extent to which the international community has made cybercrime the focus of contemporary crime research, which is referred to as a crime of aggression. This paper shows that international cooperation is needed to create an international regime that is respected and universally accepted by the international community in relation to cyber-attacks, which can also be referred to as crimes of aggression. It is because cyber-attacks in its nature are transnational crimes and need a cooperation such as the framework of ASEAN to deal with.

The false promise of global IR: exposing the paradox of dependent development

AbstractConcerned about the continued dominance of Western International Relations (IR) theories, the global IR community has proposed various measures to address disciplinary hierarchies through encouraging dialogue and pluralism. By investigating the pedagogical preferences of instructors from 45 countries, this paper questions the global IR initiative's emancipatory potential, arguing that disciplinary practices in IR resemble those of dependent development. The study develops a new typology of IR theoretical (IRT) scholarship and examines the readings assigned in 151 IRT syllabi worldwide for evidence of similarity, replication, and assimilation. The findings show that mainstream core IRTs dominate syllabi globally, regardless of region, language of instruction, or instructors' educational/linguistic backgrounds. This domination extends to periphery scholars not using their own local products. Even when they do seek alternative approaches, they prefer to import core alternatives, that is, critical traditions, rather than homegrown IRTs. Finally, the results show that even in syllabi taught in local languages the readings remain dominated by core IRT works. These findings expose a structural defect in the current cry for global IR, by revealing the system's dependent development paradox. The paper concludes with suggestions for creating a symmetric interdependent structure, in the aim of achieving a genuine globalization of IR.

Indian-Pakistani Border: Historical Development and Contemporary Principles of Reconciling Contradictions

The article is devoted to the study of the issue of the historical foundations of the existing border conflicts between India and Pakistan and the latest efforts of these two states and the international community in relation of resolving them. The roots of the existing Indian-Pakistani border conflicts go back to the time when India was a part of British colonial empire. To a decisive extent, such conflicts were a consequence of the British authority’s policy, which, in an effort to weaken the liberation movement in India, incited enmity between the largest ethno-religious groups of the population – Hindus and Muslims. This policy eventually led to the formation of two separate neighboring states – India and Pakistan, and these countries inherited numerous border conflicts. The largest among them is Kashmir, due to the gap of this territory between India and Pakistan. For several decades, the state of Jammu and Kashmir, according to Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, had a special status and broad autonomy.However, the Indian government, headed by N. Modi, eliminated this special status by removing this article from the country’s constitution in August 2019.
 Over the past year, under the influence of serious geopolitical changes in the Indo-Pacific region and South Asia, the government of N. Modi initiated a return to the consideration of the status of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir, and also seeks to develop an updated format for his stay in India. On June 25, 2021 the prime minister of India held an important meeting with a group of prominent politicians from Kashmir, which was the first public event by the Indian government after the liquidation of the Kashmir autonomy. During the meeting, a number of issues were discussed about the preparation for the future elections in the region. N. Modi described the meeting as “an important step towards increasing efforts in the development and progress of the territory of Jammu and Kashmir”.

The Legon School of International Relations

AbstractThe article explores the Legon School of International Relations (LSIR) which is the research, teaching, and academic programming of International Relations (IR) at the University of Ghana, Legon. The LSIR came out of attempts to decolonise knowledge production, dissemination, and academic programing in Ghana in early 1960s. The article shows that the LSIR is decolonial in theoretical perspective, grounded in southern epistemologies, relational in ontology, qualitative in methodology, practice-based, and it is equity-oriented. Although the LSIR scholarship as a package is distinctive, some of its ideas overlap with the work of several contemporary IR communities in the West. The article highlights implications of the LSIR story for the IR communities in the West and the value of paying close attention to the works of IR centres of scholarship in Africa.

Editorial

Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (ZIB) is the flagship journal of the German International Relations community. According to a poll amongst German political scientists across various sub-fields conducted in 2009 it is also considered the best German-language journal in Political Science at large. ZIB publishes articles that make original as well as theoretically and methodically reflected contributions to the study of international relations. The thematic spectrum includes the entire range of IR, including IR theory, foreign policy analysis, international institutions, peace and conflict resolution, security policy, European integration, North-South relations, development policy, and international economic relations.

Editorial

Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen (ZIB) is the flagship journal of the German International Relations community. According to a poll amongst German political scientists across various sub-fields conducted in 2009 it is also considered the best German-language journal in Political Science at large. ZIB publishes articles that make original as well as theoretically and methodically reflected contributions to the study of international relations. The thematic spectrum includes the entire range of IR, including IR theory, foreign policy analysis, international institutions, peace and conflict resolution, security policy, European integration, North-South relations, development policy, and international economic relations.

Multilingual Genre Practices in International Relations

Globalisation has produced not only denser, but also linguistically more complex communication networks. Multilingual practices have transformed the academic and professional lives of language learners, and imposed new requirements on LSP teaching. This article foregrounds genres in multilingual globalised contexts. Genres have been recognised as one of the key focuses of LSP. Although previous research highlighted the importance of developing relevant field-specific genre practices, little attention has been paid to the nature of genre repertoires in the field of International Relations (IR). We report on the findings of a qualitative study into genre practices of the IR community. We set out to examine the typical genres of IR in academic and in professional settings. We focus on the languages in which these genres are enacted, and on the transformation of genre practices that occurs as a result of the community members’ trajectories through different academic and professional or institutional contexts. The analysis of genre collections and of the data collected through semi-structured interviews with IR students, professors, and graduates, reveals the rich, diverse, and asymmetrical patterns of genre use in three languages: French, Slovene, and English. The study suggests that the informants’ disciplinary communication has changed considerably over the past twenty years, and that the changes in the genre ecologies require new approaches to teaching about genres. Based on the findings of the study, the paper discusses the challenges of multilingual realities for LSP teachers and genre analysts.

Methodology as a Lingua Franca in International Relations: Peripheral Self-reflections on Dialogue with the Core

Abstract Scholarly dialogue between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ or ‘West/non-West’ in many disciplinary communities has become an issue of discussion in recent decades, spawned in part by increased expectations in many periphery communities of being published in core journals, and complicated by factors such as the linguistic hegemony of English and concerns about access. The International Relations (IR) discipline has been at the forefront of this discussion. However, despite widespread awareness of the issue, and a dedicated push for greater emphasis on local theorising out of the periphery, the cutting edge of global IR scholarship still remains core dominant. This article proposes that a focus on ‘quality’ methodology, in the broadest possible sense of having transparent and effectively applied research designs, could serve as a lingua franca to promote the exchange of ideas in a way less prone to disadvantage periphery scholars. The article goes on to examine this issue by focusing on the case of the Turkish IR disciplinary community. It looks at how methodological issues are currently considered in Turkish IR pedagogy and scholarship and then offers a self-reflective assessment of the quality of methodology in Turkish IR. It concludes by offering suggestions on how the Turkish IR disciplinary community could better address methodological issues and, ultimately, perhaps achieve greater impact within the global IR community.

Grown from within: Building a Chinese School of International Relations

Over the years, this author has been involved in the ‘Chinese school of International Relations (IR)’ debate. In this article I try to reflect on these discussions or debates from which some insights can be retrieved to inform future research and further growth of a Chinese School of IR. Should a Chinese school be set as the goal? If so, how should this be pursued? This debate and the relevant efforts have proved to be a promising movement in the Chinese IR community, demonstrating that a Chinese school of IR is inevitable and it actually is evolving. A theory is a generalization or cluster of generalizations. This article argues that from the ‘Tsinghua approach’, a ‘moral realism’ has sprung up. Qin Yaqin’s theorizing is centered around relationality and has been productive. A theory of symbiosis in the world community is being developed by a group of Shanghai-based scholars, and a ‘symbiosis school’ has grown up. Overall, four distinct theories of Chinese origins, i.e., relational theory, moral realism, tianxia theory and gongsheng/symbiotic theory, have appeared. Thus, IR theory-building in China in the first two decades of the 21st century has rendered the question ‘why there is no IR theory in China’ obsolete.

Theory-Driven Analysis of Large Corpora: Semisupervised Topic Classification of the UN Speeches

There is a growing interest in quantitative analysis of large corpora among the international relations (IR) scholars, but many of them find it difficult to perform analysis consistently with existing theoretical frameworks using unsupervised machine learning models to further develop the field. To solve this problem, we created a set of techniques that utilize a semisupervised model that allows researchers to classify documents into predefined categories efficiently. We propose a dictionary making procedure to avoid inclusion of words that are likely to confuse the model and deteriorate the its classification performance classification accuracy using a new entropy-based diagnostic tool. In our experiments, we classify sentences of the United Nations General Assembly speeches into six predefined categories using the seeded Latent Dirichlet allocation and Newsmap, which were trained with a small “seed word dictionary” that we created following the procedure. The result shows that, while keyword dictionary can only classify 25% of sentences, Newsmap can classify over 60% of them accurately correctly and; its accuracy exceeds 70% when contextual information is taken into consideration by kernel smoothing of topic likelihoods. We argue that once seed word dictionaries are created by the international relations community, semisupervised models would become more useful than unsupervised models for theory-driven text analysis.

Neoliberal co-optation, power relations and informality in the Balkan International Relations profession

The article attempts to assess the importance of informal networks in achieving internationally recognised academic standards set in four Balkan countries by the reform of higher education institutions and the International Relations (IR) profession in particular. Starting from the core-periphery division of the Global IR, the authors are examining the results of these reforms by focusing on the neoliberalisation of the university and the professional subordination of peripheral IR communities to the Western-dominated epistemic community (including ‘brain drain’ and recruitment of ‘organic’ intellectuals). Based on the interviews conducted with Balkan IR scholars, the authors conclude that informality is viewed as social capital, that is, a means of acquiring benefits by virtue of personal ties with the ‘gatekeepers’ of core IR. In that respect, interviewees suggest three possible solutions for overcoming the epistemic dependence of the Balkan IR community: development of local standards, stimulation of critical approach and better preparation for international standards, while the authors of the article also propose the fourth possibility: abandoning the core-periphery division, and thinking beyond geopolitical and geocultural divisions – the main idea behind the Global IR project.

Academic publishing and open access: Costs, benefits and options for publishing research

This article briefly sets out a political economy of academic publishing, exploring what the costs and benefits of this model are/were for the academic community. It then moves to explore forms of open access publication available to the social science (politics and international relations) community in the United Kingdom and beyond. The article concludes by asking why (given its likely advantages), the open access model is not ubiquitous and suggests that the future of publication lies in the hands of early career researchers.

Great illusions or great transformations? Human rights and international relations a hundred years on

Human rights have been in the practice of international relations, but they have not been central to academic thinking on International Relations (IR) for most of the century since the discipline became institutionalized in 1919. We suggest two related reasons for this relative neglect by the IR community. First, the US heartland of IR prioritized other institutions of international order during the 1950s and 1960s, primarily the balance of power, diplomacy, and arms control. Second, human rights were treated with suspicion by realists in particular given their view that morality in foreign policy was potentially disruptive of international order. If the emergent discipline of IR largely ignored the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so did the rest of the world according to the revisionist history of human rights offered by Samuel Moyn. He challenges the idea that the birth of the regime was the culmination of a 150-year struggle that began in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers and ended with a new globalized framework of rights for all. While IR was slow to come to human rights, the pace in the last three decades has quickened considerably; the area of protecting the basic right of security from violence being a case in point, where several IR scholars have been pivotal in the development of action-guiding theory. Developing a critical theme in Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919-1939, we consider whether these institutional developments represent great illusions or great transformations in international relations in Carr’s terms.

An Intellectual Confession from a Member of the “Non-White” IR Community: A Friendly Reply to David Lake’s “White Man’s IR”

ABSTRACTDavid Lake wrote that International Relations (IR)1 will be a more diverse and better field of study if we embrace varied “life experiences and intuitions,” especially those of “marginalized” scholars, about politics and how the world works. Although concurring with his admonition, I also believe that his call for “greater diversity” in IR and his approach to realizing it need to be subject to critical scrutiny, being reconsidered in terms of reflexivity—more specifically, self-reflection by “marginalized” scholars. For this reason, as a “non-white” scholar working in a “non-Western” (or, in Lake’s words, “underrepresented”) IR community, I want to make my own confession to better understand what is at stake in promoting diversity in the academy from a different angle.

Older persons’ right to health – a challenge to international law

ABSTRACTOver the next 30 years, the number of people aged over 65 will exceed the number of children worldwide. Moreover, people at extreme old age will constitute a significant group of older adults. Undoubtedly, global ageing appears as a great challenge to the whole international community in relation to the protection of rights of older persons, including their right to health. The last one is recognised on international forums as one of the most current and complex issues. Therefore, in this paper, I discuss how the right of older adults to health is protected by international norms, and identify trends and perspectives for implementing this right effectively. Examining the degree of protection, I analyse existing international instruments and their interpretation provided by international bodies. I consider that the new international developments should fill in the existing loophole in international law and oblige States to focus on elimination of ageism, age discrimination in access to health care and various barriers to enjoying the right to health by older persons.