International Relations Research Research Articles

Distinction within the ‘global north’? A Bourdieusian approach for analysing development discourse: The case of U.S. and E.U. relations with the Colombian state (2016–2022): A comparative analysis

The paper conducts a comparative analysis of EU (91 texts) and US (93 texts) discourses concerning post-peace accord Colombia (late 2016 to mid-2022). Employing a Bourdieu-influenced methodology, our proposal aims to reconcile Post-Development theories with International Relations research. This innovative and multidimensional approach illuminates both discursive continuities within Global North while concurrently providing a framework that allows to identify and interpret internal political divergences. Our findings highlight a shared commitment to a liberal conception of peacebuilding, alongside internal distinction strategies employed to legitimize respective policies towards Colombia.

PROSPECTS OF MATERIALISM IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY

One of the achievements of the reflectivist turn in international relations theory in the late 20th century was the attention given to the role of discourse and other ideational factors in international politics. In recent years, however, approaches critical of the discursive emphasis in international studies have emerged, seeking to restore the significance of non-discursive aspects of international relations such as geography, technology, and the non-human. This article offers a perspective on the development of international relations theory from the standpoint of the debate between materialism and idealism. Within this framework, it provides a brief overview of the historical evolution of international relations theory and subsequently delves into a detailed analysis of three strands of the new wave of materialist theorizing in the field - critical realism, new materialism, and neoclassical geopolitics. The article suggests considering the new materialist wave as, on the whole, a positive development, but also points out the necessity of taking into account the risk of “exiling” the human element from international relations research as such concepts proliferate. The possibility of collaboration between reflecivists and post-reflecivists, as well as between idealists and materialists in general, is underlined for the comprehensive study of contemporary international realities.

Conducting Care-full Research: Collaborative Research amidst Corona, a Coup, and Other Crises

Abstract Feminists have long called attention to often profoundly uneven power relations in international relations research, assumptions regarding who is able to be a “knowledge producer,” and the risks of extractive research. In research “on” and with young people, these dilemmas are compounded by ageist suppositions about youth competencies. This paper reflects on efforts by the authors to design and undertake a youth-led, adult-supported research project on youth activism and peace processes in South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Myanmar through virtual interviews. It discusses how our approach to skills training, mentorship, and research design empowers youth researchers to engage in dialogue with youth peacebuilders to establish a more collaborative research agenda. Centering collaboration offers opportunities for more responsive engagement with communities traditionally marginalized within the research environment. The global pandemic has raised questions about research at a distance, the requirements of “participation,” and the ethics of reciprocity with research participants as knowledge producers. In each case, challenges raised difficult questions about the ethics of pursuing research in these complex contexts. We offer the idea of care-full research that centers a feminist, reflexive approach, is collaborative in multiple ways, and generates new possibilities for knowledge creation amidst multiple crises and beyond.

Establishing trust and distrust when states leave international organisations: the case of Brexit

ABSTRACT Although EU and UK participants in Brexit negotiations emphasise the role that trust and distrust played for them, existing Brexit research has largely disregarded this factor. From a trust perspective, withdrawals from international organisations are highly significant events. When states leave a common institution and their relationship with each other is deprived of previous institutional certainties, trust becomes both necessary and precarious. Building on insights from trust research in International Relations, we argue that the former partners gauge whether the other side can be trusted based on two types of signals: signals of benevolence and of integrity. Our analysis shows that during Boris Johnson’s premiership, the EU lost trust in the UK government’s benevolence and integrity, mainly because the UK repeatedly failed to honour previous commitments. Rishi Sunak’s government countered the signals sent by its predecessor. By demonstrating its integrity and benevolence, it succeeded in rebuilding trust and facilitated the conclusion of the ‘Windsor Framework’. This not only sheds light on an under-researched dimension of the Brexit process. It also contributes to trust research, which has yet to fully acknowledge both the significance of signals of trustworthiness and leadership transitions in creating windows of opportunity for changes in trust dynamics.

A Feminist Critique of International Practices

Abstract Feminist social theories, especially intersectional and decolonial ones, have been footnotes at best in practice-oriented research in international relations. This disciplinary exclusion of gender studies’ concepts from “international practice theories” (IPTs) or the "practice turn" has marginalized inquiries into power and reflexivity in action. As a result, IPTs have failed to theorize how practitioners’ reflexivity is shaped by local manifestations of systemic lines of difference like race, gender, coloniality, or class. This Theory Note argues that intersectional and decolonial feminist approaches can address this gap. We demonstrate that positionality and privilege condition practical reflexivity by shaping (1) normative interpretations of the world, (2) the content of social critique, and (3) the reception of such critique. Taking feminists as foundational theorists of international practices is critical to addressing some ontological challenges encountered by current IPT scholarship. In this Theory Note, we develop a productive conversation between the two bodies of literature around concepts of background knowledge and competence, which allows for a better understanding of the interplay of structural power and individual reflexivity in everyday interactions.

Bao Dai Solution and the Formation of the “National Government of Vietnam” During the Indochina War (1945-1954)

After World War II, Vietnam declared independence from France and Japan following the victory of the resistance movement for independence led by the Viet Minh. However, with the regulations at the Yalta conference, France returned to wage war to force Vietnam and the entire Indochina peninsula to fall under French rule as before. In Vietnam, France refused to cooperate with Viet Minh because it believed that this organization was Communist. France tried every way to set up a “puppet” government and they turned to Bao Dai, an Emperor who had just been overthrown in August 1945. The Bao Dai solution was proposed by France to maintain colonialism in Vietnam. This solution aims to establish a “National Government of Vietnam” under French influence, maintaining French interests and influence. This research article aims to clarify the puppet nature of the “National Government of Vietnam” and show that it had an important influence on the situation in Vietnam during the Indochina War (1945-1954). Methods of exploiting historical documents, logical methods and international relations research methods are used to clarify the content of the research article.
  
 Received: 13 October 2023 / Accepted: 29 January 2024 / Published: 5 March 2024

Military Alliances under International Law

Abstract While military alliances have always been an important subject of research in international relations, relatively little study has been conducted on them in international law. Even though military alliances have been featured in the wider discussions on regional orders under international law, little systematic effort has been made to assess the extent to which various actions that are routine for or structured into the design and operation of military alliances are compatible with international law. This article aims to fill this gap by examining the implications of certain activities of military alliances under three areas of international law and is divided into three substantive sections. The first section examines how activities such as military exercises, force concentration and coercive demands, when undertaken by a military alliance, could heighten the risk of their violation of the prohibition of the threat of force under the UN Charter. The second section examines how certain standing arrangements of military alliances pre-dispose them to intervene in civil strife in allies or potential allies in potential violation of the norm against intervention in the domestic affairs of another State. The third section examines how, despite their often-explicit deference to the UN Charter, military alliances operate in tension with the collective security architecture of the UN and suggests ways to harmonise them. The article concludes that the sovereign rights of States to form military alliances do not create a carte blanche for military alliances to operate freely from any restraint of international law and calls for a more proactive approach to maintaining international peace and security in view of the complex nature of certain activities of military alliances under international law.

Critical Annotations on Historical Documents: Methodological Possibilities for International Relations Research

This process note explicates the methodological intervention of maintaining fieldnotes on government documents and its significance for historically situated international relations (IR) research. For the most part, IR scholarship treats archival documents as the neutral preserve of the state, representing its coherent national interests. Building on discussions around critical methods within IR, I argue that there is a need to reflexively engage with the writing and curating practices of the state. This process note deploys the ethnographic hallmark of thick description within IR research through critical annotations on archival documents and other government publications on India’s eastern Himalayan borderlands between 1880 and 1965. These annotations encourage a granular reading of government documents and situate them within a larger context of their production, reception, archival memorialisation and subsequent access. I propose that critical annotations help us move beyond post-hoc analyses of foreign policy in terms of success and failure. Instead, in viewing IR theorising as ‘unfinished dictionaries of the international’, I argue that critical annotations challenge a unitary view of the state and facilitate a more nuanced analysis of foreign policymaking emphasising historical contingencies within which policies are articulated and enacted.

Top-Category Inflation in Ordered International Relations Outcomes

Abstract Ordered dependent variables are widely employed in international relations (IR). These ordered dependent variables often suffer from inflated observations in their highest outcome category due to distinct processes. The application of standard ordered probit and ordered logit models to such ordinal measures will fail to capture these distinct processes, often producing biased inferences as a result. Yet IR researchers have thus far ignored the potential for top-category inflation in ordered outcome variables. We sensitize researchers to top-category inflation in ordered IR outcomes. We then intuitively extend the widely used zero-inflated ordered probit model to the top-category inflated setting, providing resources to facilitate the proper modeling of top-category inflation in ordered outcomes. Finally, we provide two applications to published IR research related to trade politics and political repression. Together, these applications illustrate the substantive and methodological potentials of our proposed tools for diagnosing and modeling top-category inflation in IR outcomes.

Mexican women's neglected early International Relations contributions

Abstract This article addresses the underrepresentation of women from the global South in International Relations (IR) thinking. Gender disparities and academic global inequalities affect the quality of research in IR. The cases of three prominent women scholars—Minerva Morales, Olga Pellicer and Rosario Green, affiliated with one of the first academic departments of IR in Latin America, the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de México—are illustrative of how power and asymmetries can shape the circulation of ideas and limit our understanding of international relations. Despite their relevant contributions and successful careers, these scholars faced structural limitations to reaching an international audience and receiving the same status as their male peers. An examination of their publications shows that their inclusion helps us to improve our knowledge of the plural sources of IR debates. Consequently, they enlighten us on the persistent trends and challenges that still characterize the international insertion of Latin American countries, which have political consequences. Global asymmetries, research creativity, development and debt issues, domestic constraints in foreign policy and the imperative but difficult multilateral cooperation are their main areas of analysis that resonate in current world politics.

The scholarship–practitioner nexus: lessons from Latin American foreign policy

Abstract Various studies have explored the role of International Relations research in policy-making, predominantly focusing on countries in the global North. However, there needs to be a better understanding of this dynamic in peripheral countries of the global South. This article addresses this gap by examining the relationship between theory and practice in Latin American foreign policy; the synergy between scholarly research and practical implementation offers valuable insights. This interplay sheds light on the impact research can have by developing unique theoretical frameworks and guiding current foreign policy strategies. Using Argentine foreign policy as a case-study, I explore specialized knowledge networks that have driven foreign policy studies, their inception in Latin America and pivotal theoretical developments that have influenced both academia and policy. Employing qualitative analysis, I triangulate data from diverse sources such as archives, official documents, journals, institutional histories, reports and expert interviews. This investigation underscores the collaborative efforts of Latin American scholars and policy-makers, driven by a shared goal to address regional challenges through both theoretical insights and practical solutions.

Reflection on methodology of the correlation between electromagnetic interference and safety in high-speed railways

PurposeIn the continuous development of high-speed railways, ensuring the safety of the operation control system is crucial. Electromagnetic interference (EMI) faults in signaling equipment may cause transportation interruptions, delays and even threaten the safety of train operations. Exploring the impact of disturbances on signaling equipment and establishing evaluation methods for the correlation between EMI and safety is urgently needed.Design/methodology/approachThis paper elaborates on the necessity and significance of studying the impact of EMI as an unavoidable and widespread risk factor in the external environment of high-speed railway operations and continuous development. The current status of research methods and achievements from the perspectives of standard systems, reliability analysis and safety assessment are examined layer by layer. Additionally, it provides prospects for innovative ideas for exploring the quantitative correlation between EMI and signaling safety.FindingsDespite certain innovative achievements in both domestic and international standard systems and related research for ensuring and evaluating railway signaling safety, there’s a lack of quantitative and strategic research on the degradation of safety performance in signaling equipment due to EMI. A quantitative correlation between EMI and safety has yet to be established. On this basis, this paper proposes considerations for research methods pertaining to the correlation between EMI and safety.Originality/valueThis paper overviews a series of methods and outcomes derived from domestic and international studies regarding railway signaling safety, encompassing standard systems, reliability analysis and safety assessment. Recognizing the necessity for quantitatively describing and predicting the impact of EMI on high-speed railway signaling safety, an innovative approach using risk assessment techniques as a bridge to establish the correlation between EMI and signaling safety is proposed.

What’s so Critical About Critical Oral History?

ABSTRACT James Blight, David Welch, and Janet Lang developed Critical Oral History in the 1980s and 1990s as an attempt to expand foreign policy history’s understanding of the past beyond a document-based epistemology. Despite this new method’s incorporation of “oral history” into its name, Blight, Welch, and Lang utilized few methodological or theoretical perspectives from oral history. While Critical Oral History has had a small renaissance in foreign policy history research in recent years, differentiation from political science’s method of expert interviews is still largely absent. In this article, I argue that if international history and international relations researchers are to use the concept of oral history as opposed to expert or elite interviews, it should be an indicator of the type of epistemological assumptions and thus, methodological analysis, in which memory is problematized. This will allow foreign policy history researchers to open a new variety of research questions and analytical foci while also problematizing memory. For oral historians, it offers reflections on intersubjective power relations and opportunities to expand understandings of misremembering, silence, and other key tenets of oral history theory. Examples from oral history interviews with retired Finnish and American diplomats are presented to implement these ideas in what I term a Foreign Policy Oral History method and methodology.

How the process of discovering cyberattacks biases our understanding of cybersecurity

Social scientists do not directly study cyberattacks; they draw inferences from attack reports that are public and visible. Like human rights violations or war casualties, there are missing cyberattacks that researchers have not observed. The existing approach is to either ignore missing data and assume they do not exist or argue that reported attacks accurately represent the missing events. This article is the first to detail the steps between attack, discovery and public report to identify sources of bias in cyber data. Visibility bias presents significant inferential challenges for cybersecurity – some attacks are easy to observe or claimed by attackers, while others take a long time to surface or are carried out by actors seeking to hide their actions. The article argues that missing attacks in public reporting likely share features of reported attacks that take the longest to surface. It builds on datasets of cyberattacks by or against Five Eyes (an intelligence alliance composed of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) governments and adds new data on when attacks occurred, when the media first reported them, and the characteristics of attackers and techniques. Leveraging survival models, it demonstrates how the delay between attack and disclosure depends on both the attacker’s identity (state or non-state) and the technical characteristics of the attack (whether it targets information confidentiality, integrity, or availability). The article argues that missing cybersecurity events are least likely to be carried out by non-state actors or target information availability. Our understanding of ‘persistent engagement,’ relative capabilities, ‘intelligence contests’ and cyber coercion rely on accurately measuring restraint. This article’s findings cast significant doubt on whether researchers have accurately measured and observed restraint, and informs how others should consider external validity. This article has implications for our understanding of data bias, empirical cybersecurity research and secrecy in international relations.

Was the result determined by disgruntled voters who did not go to the polls?

Üsküdar University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of Political Science and International Relations (English) and Postcolonial Studies Application and Research Center (PAMER) Director Asst. Prof. Fehmi Ağca evaluated the results of the 31 March 2024 Local Administrations General Election.

The success of young candidates in the elections is promising!

Political Science and International Relations Research Assistant Ali Ekmekçi valuated the entry of young people into politics in local elections and the election of a 22-year-old candidate as mayor.

Концептуализация публичной дипломатии в конструктивистской парадигме

In this article the author based on the results of his research makes an attempt to conceptualize public diplo-macy through the prism of the constructivist paradigm, one of the main ones in the science of international rela-tions. The author explains the low demand for the recognized paradigms of international relations research in the analysis of public diplomacy (the emphasis on states in the paradigms and the practical orientation of most studies of public diplomacy); reviews the central tenets of constructivism (the priority of social factors and the subjective nature of the international system) and the works in which it serves as a methodological platform. The author comes to the conclusion that in constructivism public diplomacy is interpreted as a means of form-ing, maintaining and adjusting the image of a particular state in the international arena. Its substantive, spatio-temporal and organizational aspects, if we adhere to constructivism, depend on the identity and roles of the actor who develops and implements it.

The Change of European International Relationship under the Background of the Russia-Ukraine War

The Russia-Ukraine war, as one of the most important geopolitical events since the twenty-first century, has increasingly become a major preoccupation of Politics and International Relations researchers. The researchers realise that the nature of the prospect of current and future European politics is still in controversy. This research aims to provide an understanding of the change of dynamics of current European states foreign policy and the international relationship under the background of the Russia-Ukraine war. The Russia-Ukraine war was one of the most crucial geopolitical events since the twenty-first century. Russia and Ukraine have a considerable influence on global politics and the economy, triggering a series of global turbulence after they went to war. Europe is the region that is most severely affected. A range of scholars and researchers proposed their own understanding of the issue and provided various perspectives. This research examines and analyses the current European international politics by looking at the different actions and motivations of foreign policy combined with theories of different schools. It shows that what Europeans had decided or done was not usually independent and restricted and affected by external pressures or internal economic considerations. These factors render the embarrassment of current European international relationships.

Trust and calculation in international negotiations: how trust was lost after Brexit

Abstract How does a loss of trust affect international negotiations? We know that trust enables cooperation and comes with the risk of betrayal. Yet the effects of lost trust are not well understood, with most research in International Relations (IR) focusing on how trust is initially built in adversarial relations. In this article, we conceptualize trust as the eclipsing of possible futures in which others do not behave cooperatively. When trust is lost, actors include further possibilities of non-cooperative behavior in their calculations and adjust their negotiating demands accordingly. We use this framework to explain the European Commission's response to Boris Johnson's government breaking its trust during the Brexit negotiations by deviating from the Political Declaration, introducing the Internal Market Bill, and not conducting border checks in the Irish Sea. Drawing on elite interviews, we trace how the Commission altered its expectations and consequently sought negotiated outcomes with tighter contracting, reduced discretion and retaliatory mechanisms. Analysing the interplay of trust and calculation on a granular level, we show that breaches of trust do not preclude future cooperation per se, but shape its form and extent in important ways.

Messaging Soleimani's killing: the communication vulnerabilities of authoritarian states

Abstract The capacity of authoritarian states to manipulate narratives and undermine the authority of western democracies is increasingly emphasized in International Relations research. Far less scrutiny has been paid to the ways in which the media environment creates communication vulnerabilities for these same repressive states. We address this research gap through a case-study of Persian-language commentary on the targeted assassination of Qasem Soleimani—a crescendo in the conflict between Iran and the United States. We examine how commentators on the two popular satellite channels interpreted Soleimani's killing and subsequent developments, and specifically, whether they rallied around the Iranian flag. The research method employed is qualitative media content analysis. The investigation reveals that the Islamic Republic did not benefit from a significant surge in patriotism among Iranian commentators; in fact, some openly applauded the attack. It was only when President Trump threatened to bomb Iranian cultural sites that the commentators rallied around the flag. The Islamic Republic faced a two-front narrative battle as communication attacks from within the national community intensified the information war with the US. The article concludes that authoritarian states are at a disadvantage when they require communication strategies beyond disinformation and distortion.