Turn In International Relations Research Articles

The Emotional Turn in International Relations: The Analysis of Emotions

Bu çalışma hem geleneksel hem de eleştirel tartışmalara ve analizlere odaklanarak, Uluslararası İlişkiler (Uİ) disiplininde duyguları detaylı bir şekilde incelemektedir. Uİ’de duyguların araştırma objesi olarak çalışılması uzun yıllar boyunca reddedilmiştir. Ancak, duyguların, akademik çalışmalarda ele alınması 2000’li yıllarda başlamıştır. Bu çalışmalar, duyguları, Uİ perspektiflerine getirmeye değer araştırma objeleri olarak görmektedir. Bu yüzden, bu dönemin başlangıcı “duygusal dönüş” (emotional turn) olarak adlandırılmaktadır. Disiplinde bu dönüm noktası ile, duygular farklı çerçevelerde ve farklı analizlerde yer almaya başlamıştır. Çeşitli analizlerle beslenen duygular literatürü, Uİ disiplinindeki temel kuramsal sorulardan birisi olan, “Dünya nasıl çalışıyor?” sorusuna farklı yaklaşımlar ve analizler sağlamaktadır. Uİ alanındaki akademik çalışmalar ve tartışmalarda, duyguların genel olarak nasıl çalışılacağı farklılaşmaktadır. Makalenin birinci bölümünde Uİ disiplininde duyguların farklı rolleri incelenecektir. Ayrıca, duyguların Uİ alanında hangi alt çalışma alanlarında kullanılabildiği anlatılacaktır. İkinci bölümde, Uİ’de duyguların farklı kavramsal ve kuramsal tartışmaları analiz edilecektir. Üçüncü kısımda, “Duygu nedir?” ve “Duygu nasıl ele alınmalıdır?” sorularına cevaben, bu çalışma farklı duygu tanımlamaları ortaya koymaktadır. Bu bölüm, farklı duygu çeşitlerini detaylı bir şekilde analiz edecektir: 1) Sosyal inşacı duygu (constructivist emotion), 2) Güç öğesi olan duygu, 3) Toplumsal güç olan duygu. Çalışmanın bir sonraki bölümünde, duygulara bakışta kuramsal perspektiflerdeki değişimler irdelenecektir. Bu bağlamda, iki önemli kuramsal tartışma ele alınacaktır. Bunlardan birincisi, duygular ve rasyonalite arasında değişen ilişkilere ışık tutacaktır. İkincisi ise, disiplinde son yıllarda önem kazanan, öznelerarası (intersubjective) duygulardır. Sonuç olarak, duyguların öneminin vurgulanmasıyla hem siyasi hem de sosyal algılamalarımızda duyguların dünya perspektifimizi genişlettiğini görmekteyiz.

THE LOKARNO AGREEMENTS OF 1925 ON THE PAGES OF THE SOVIET PROVINCIAL PRESS

The article is devoted to the study of the role of local print media as an important means of forming public opinion of Soviet citizens in the mid-1920s. The author traces the coverage in local newspapers of events related to the preparation of the Rhenish Guarantee Pact, the Locarno Conference and the ratification of the signed agreements. The subject of the study is the materials of local press publications of different regions of the USSR. They present various aspects of the stated topic. The author concludes that the regional newspapers of 1925 can be considered sufficiently informed and clearly stated the views of the country's leadership on the turn in international relations, which took place in the European political arena during the period in question. Local periodicals actively contributed to the formation of Soviet citizens by all possible means, both verbal and visual, ideas about the duplicity of the policy of Western countries on the preservation of peace and prevention of war.

2022: Российская Арктика во времена перемен

The purpose of the article is to comprehend the problems of the Russian Arctic against the background of a special military operation in Ukraine in 2022. The research methodology is based on interdisciplinarity, general scientific methods, priority use of primary sources. The author investigates the current topics of determining the outer limits of the Russian continental shelf in the Arctic, Russia’s participation in the Arctic Council, the US Arctic strategy in 2019, 2022 and the US Arctic strategy in 2022. The volume of freight traffic in the Northern Sea Route and the Arctic Basin over the past few years, the activities of the newly established in 2022 FSBI “Glavsevmorput”, the creation of a single platform of digital services are analyzed. Due to Russia’s ongoing Asian turn in international relations to the east, the increase in the vol-ume of cargo transportation to Asia and the sanctions of the collective West, there is an urgent need to bring existing regulations, navigation rules in line with the current reality in the economy and politics, to ensure the security of the entire Russian Arctic. In perspective, the transformation of the NSR water area into the sea transport corridor from Murmansk in the west to Vladivostok in the east becomes quite possible. In 2022, a modified procedure for identifying existing names of geographical objects was approved. An important aspect is the appearance on the map of the names of the Russians participated in the study of the Arctic. The complex of external and internal challenges in the Russian Arctic is not limited to the problems mentioned in the article and requires further research.

But Where is the Magic? Emotional-relational Humans and their Untold Stories in International Relations

The affective turn in International Relations (IR) has been engaged in the critical project of returning the emotional to the international for a while now. Following these efforts to reinvest humanity in politics, this article seeks to investigate if an engagement with emotional humans can provide refuge from, grapple with and ultimately transform a disenchanted world of IR and spell new worlds into existence that place the emotional-relational at the centre of its practice. Drawing on feminist, aesthetic and decolonial scholarship on emotional-relational humans, I argue that such imaginations can open routes to recovery for emotional worlds in the discipline. I introduce magical realist fiction as a genre of literary writing which embraces the magical ability of humans who resist and transform unbearably rational worlds through their emotional relations with each other. Gleaning moments of emotional incantations by humans–in Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera–which work to transform a world that becomes too difficult to bear for its inhabitants, I contend that IR stands to gain invaluable lessons by immersing itself in the kind of emotional magic that such literature and its resident humans spell into being.

WhatsApp with Diplomatic Practices in Geneva? Diplomats, Digital Technologies, and Adaptation in Practice

Abstract Diplomats in embassies and permanent representations are increasingly using the messaging application WhatsApp to communicate with their peers. They use WhatsApp groups to coordinate initiatives at multilateral forums, communicate more rapidly with headquarters and stay in touch with organizational developments at home, as well as form more personal working relations among their peers. To make sense of this phenomenon, our analysis looks at adaptation in practice. Instead of separating digital practices from offline/traditional ways of doing things, we build on the practice turn in International Relations and develop a nuanced framework in which improvising agents in a transformed context adapt to new realities while continuously being influenced by past ways of doing things—a phenomenon called “hysteresis” by practice turners. We analyze how traditional practices are supplemented by new technologies (complementarities) as well as how offline and online relationships are shaped by similar practical logics (similarities). We apply these micro-lenses to understand multilateral diplomacy at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. Building on twenty-three interviews with practitioners, we find that WhatsApp redefines the meaning of face-to-face interactions among ambassadors and permanent representatives and makes physical meetings between diplomats more—rather than less—important.

Creative Pedagogy in IR Examination. When Fiction Unleashes the Learning Process

Although the esthetic turn in International Relations (IR) has recently expanded to teaching, with professors promoting the mobilization of artistic material in the classroom, its use in students’ productions and examinations has received scarce attention. Drawing on a course at Sciences Po Paris dedicated to IR normative theory and given for five years at the graduate level, this research argues the added value of creative fictional writing by students in assimilating philosophical concepts. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis on five cohorts, both surveyed and interviewed in groups, it builds on in-depth feedback from a large sample of students. It appears that beyond long-term familiarization of students with authors and practical skills improvement, such exercise enhances their creativity and self-esteem by releasing their imaginations, and inspiring hope in democracy in the younger generation.

The Practice of Soft Power

Turkey exerts significant influence over Balkans Muslims. While some of this has to do with Turkey’s military and economic power, much relates to their shared religiosity and common history. Some may characterize this as “soft power”; however, this term struggles to completely explain these dynamics. Many Balkans Muslims have an ambivalent attitude towards Turkey, even as they accept its influence. Moreover, Turkish influence comes not from passive qualities it possesses but active steps it takes to maintain its image. We argue that this can be better explained through the practice turn in international relations; Turkey follows commonly accepted religious practices that Balkans Muslims recognize, granting Turkey influence even if they do not internalize its dominant position. We demonstrate this with the results of interviews conducted among Balkans Muslim political, religious and media figures. The article provides insight into the strategies non-state religious actors, states and the media implement in world politics, while also expanding our understanding of soft power in the world.

Turning towards practices: on the common ground of international relations and European studies

AbstractThe so-called practice turn in International Relations (IR) has established a new paradigm that puts practitioners' quotidian doings front and centre of IR theorizing. It is proving to be an influential development also for area studies (AS) that share much of IR's scholarship and objects of study. This is certainly the case for European studies (ES) where the works of International Practice Theory (IPT) scholars has greatly contributed to raise attention to situated, mundane, and everyday practices of EU institutions. This article reviews the contribution of IPT scholars to ES to assess the added value of this research agenda and its potential to become a ‘trading zone’ where IR and ES/AS scholars can advance understanding of how the local and the global connect. It also identifies two challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the extant literature: (1) finding ways to theorize and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated practices to EU-wide doings (generalization challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism). The article ends by calling for a global practice theory as a way to tackle these two challenges.

‘Acting under Chapter 7’: rhetorical entrapment, rhetorical hollowing, and the authorization of force in the UN Security Council, 1995–2017

After more than 25 years of scholarship, the deliberative turn in international relations (IR) theory is ready to be revisited with a fresh perspective. Using new methods from automated text analyses, this explorative article investigates how rhetoric may bind action. It does so by building upon Schimmelfennig’s original account of rhetorical entrapment. To begin, I theorize the opposite of entrapment, which I call rhetorical hollowing. Rhetorical hollowing describes a situation in which actors use normative rhetoric, but instead of advancing their interests, such rhetoric fails to increase their chances of obtaining the desired outcome because the normative force of their rhetoric has eroded over time. To provide plausibility to both entrapment and hollowing, I present two mechanisms by which language is connected with action in the United Nations Security Council. Finally, I run a series of time-series-cross-section models on selected dictionary terms conducive to entrapment or hollowing on all speeches and an original Security Council resolution corpus from 1995 to 2017. The research shows that while mentioning ‘human rights’ is consistently associated with increased odds of authorization of force; the word ‘terrorism’ is associated with a decrease of odds for intervention. This finding suggests that some terms may not only entrap or hollow but also normatively backfire.

The Community of Shared Future for Mankind and China’s Legalist Turn in International Relations

Abstract The introduction presents China’s legalist turn in international relations against the background of the Trump administration’s backlash against international law and international organizations. The next section retraces the origins and evolution of the Community of Shared Future for Mankind (CSFM) up to its incorporation in the preamble to the Chinese Constitution. Section 3 examines the main tenets of the CSFM on the basis of XI Jinping’s writings with the visual aid of a “paifang” (“牌坊”). In this representation of a Chinese architectural arch or gateway structure, the “foundation” of the CSFM is, first, assimilated to China’s acknowledgement of the centrality of “interdependence” in the international community. Second, the “pillars” of the CSFM are identified as the goals of global peace, international common security, inclusive international development and international ecological civilization. Third, the “wooden beams” that bind the CSFM together are assimilated into the principles of sovereign equality, inter-civilizational dialogue and multilateralism, while the principle of “win-win” cooperation is represented as the CSFM’s “frontispiece”. The concluding section points to the benefits of China deepening its legalist approach to international relations as the most fitting companion to its grand strategy of “peaceful/development rise”.

The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war: toward an embodied ontology of war as experience

AbstractThis paper examines the emergence of the corporeal turn in International Relations (IR) research on war. It argues that a lack of a sustained ontological investigation leaves open two theoretical gaps, which impedes the development of an embodied theory of war: (1) the core concept of a body and its linkages with war are underdeveloped, and (2) existing research on the embodiment of war slips into discursivism or empiricism. The paper invites the corporeal turn scholarship to bring ontology to the forefront of IR war research and to expand a pool of theoretical resources for analyzing the corporeality of war by turning to existential phenomenology. With the phenomenological concept of the lived body placed at the heart of war ontology, war is conceived as a complex social institution with the generative powers born out of the capacity of the violent politics of injury to disrupt the lived bodies' sense-making and agential capacities, on the one hand, and the potential of individuals and communities to reclaim their interpretive integrity and agency through embodied everyday practices, on the other.

Reclaiming Substances in Relationalism: Quantum Holography and Substance-based Relational Analysis in World Politics

The relational turn in International Relations (IR) has made important contributions by challenging the substantialist claim to substance/thing as ontological primitives, by drawing much-needed attention to relations as ontologically fundamental, and by introducing a diversity of relational ways of being/becoming, knowing and doing. Yet, while rightly repudiating substantialism, the relational turn has remained ambivalent about the concept of substance itself, leaving open an important question: How should we understand substance within a relational ontology? As a result, we are left with different and sometimes confusing positions on the issue of substances vis-à-vis relations. Seeing this gap as a missed opportunity for relationalism in IR, this article seeks to bring substance back in without falling back into substantialism. It draws on a quantum conception of substance via the idea of quantum holography (QH) and its related notion of whole-part duality, and stresses the little-understood dual and inseparable nature of substance-relation (‘relatance’). The concept of substance-relation duality not only enriches our relational thinking, but also allows us to engage in relational analysis through a reimagined notion of substance. To illustrate, the article turns to a substance-based relational analysis of US-China relations.

Emotions, De/Attachment, and the Digital Archive: Reading Violence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)

The study of global politics is not an exercise in objectivity and rationality, but one that is embodied, personal, and deeply affective. Feminist scholarship both within and outside of International Relations (IR) have pioneered discussions of embracing our affective experiences as researchers, as well as maintaining ethical commitments to research participants and collaborators. In addition to feminist contributions, the emotional turn in IR has seen the emergence of vibrant scholarship exploring the role of emotions in sites and processes of global politics, as well as the role of emotions in the research process. In this article, I aim to contribute to this growing body of scholarship by speaking to these and other questions that explore the role of emotions in researchers’ engagement with their work. In particular, I draw on and interrogate my own emotional entanglements with the digital archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The goal of this article is to provide insights into the emotional process of reading and interpreting testimonies of violence, and to illuminate ethical concerns that arise – particularly as an ‘outsider’ – when reading and representing trauma in my research.

How to make elite experiments work in International Relations

For decades, many International Relations (IR) scholars did not engage in elite experiments, because they viewed it as too risky, too costly, or too difficult to implement. However, as part of a behavioral turn in IR, a growing number of scholars have begun to adopt the method in their own research. This shift raises important questions. Under what conditions do elite experiments add value to IR scholarship? How can scholars overcome the logistical and ethical challenges of sampling such an elusive group? This article makes an original conceptual contribution to methodological debates on the role of behavioral approaches by analyzing experiments on foreign policy elites. We analyze the method’s strengths and weaknesses, evaluate ethical considerations, and present what is—to the best of our knowledge—the most comprehensive set of implementation guidelines. Our article draws on recently published IR research and argues that the payoffs from elite experiments are well worth the effort.

Everyday visuality and risk management: Representing (in)security in UN peacekeeping

ABSTRACT Visuality is a central aspect of everyday security governance. In the recent visual turn in International Relations, however, the more mundane and routine visualities of security have been widely neglected. To address this gap, this article proposes a framework for analyzing the messages of security and risk conveyed by different modes of visual representations, ranging from press photos and educational images to outwardly appearances. Taking the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) as an example, it shows that everyday visual representations reflect and contribute to security risk management in four ways: (1) They assist in the construction of self and other identities with regard to security, (2) they help to identify potential vulnerabilities, (3) they are used to educate people how to detect, assess, and behave in risky situations, and (4) they are employed to deter violent attacks.

Traversing the Romance of a Liberal International Order: The Democratic Peace Thesis and the Regional Security Problematique in South Asia

The democratic peace hypothesis, which is embedded in the neo-Kantian romance of liberal cosmopolitan idealism, was framed in the spatiotemporal context of the Cold War bipolarity. Michael Doyle, who is one of its proponents, invoked the Kantian philosophical abstraction of ‘the perpetual peace’ by providing an intellectual defence and moral high ground for the values of the Liberal Capitalist world. In the post–Cold War setting, Francis Fukuyama re-casted the hypothesis and portrayed the triumph of liberal international order as ‘the end of history’. He attempted to reframe the democratic peace thesis, not only to celebrate liberal values as the normative exemplar for ordering a post–Cold War international system but also to provide an intellectual defence for the newly emerging space for American leadership in a post-hegemonic international system. This intellectual defence of the ethical supremacy of liberal idealism in the world, shaped by the leadership of the USA, was entrenched in the epistemological Imperialism of the West. Besides, it also reflected an exclusionary idea of the history of international relations that was heavily grounded in the chronology of the post-Westphalia international order. Situating ourselves in this framework, this article is an attempt to critique the epistemic foundations of the democratic peace hypothesis, by deconstructing its assertions in the geostrategic context of the regional security architecture in South Asia. The article criticizes the democratic peace thesis, using an analysis of the Kargil conflict (1999) between India and Pakistan, and by placing ourselves in the epistemological framework of the historical turn in international relations.

Enfolding wholes in parts: quantum holography and International Relations

This article stands at the intersection between the relational turn in International Relations (IR) and the quantum turn in the social sciences (and more recently in IR as well). The relational turn draws much-needed attention to the centrality of relations in global politics, yet its imprecise conceptualization of whole-part relations casts shadow over its relational ontological foundation. The quantum turn, meanwhile, challenges the observed–observer dichotomy as well as the classical views about causality, determinacy, and measurement. Yet, despite their common stance against the Newtonian ontology, the relational and quantum turns have largely neglected each other at least in the IR context. This article aims to bridge this gap by introducing a quantum holographic approach to relationality. Drawing on theoretical physicist David Bohm’s work on quantum theory and his key concepts about wholeness and the implicate order, the article argues that the world is being holographically (trans)formed: its parts are not only parts of the whole, but also enfold the whole, like in a hologram. This quantum holographic ontology contributes to both a clearer differentiation between internal/implicate relations and external/explicate relations and a renewed emphasis on wholeness and whole-part duality. In doing so, it not only provides new conceptual tools to rethink IR as holographic relations which involve the dynamic processes and mechanisms of enfoldment and unfoldment, but also has important policy and ethical implications for the conduct of “foreign” relations and for transforming the way we think about identity, survival, relationship, and responsibility.

‘HOME-GROWNING’ INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINES: A PRE-THEORISATION

The ‘home-grown’ turn in international relations (IR) theory emerged to describe original theorising of non-Western IR from the periphery in the periphery. Enthused with the indigenisation movement in the Philippines as our country belongs to the periphery, we delve into pre-theorisations of home growning by applying it to Philippine philosophical, politicohistorical, and psycho-anthropological concepts in a schematic analysis. This paper also deliberated the significance of ‘paglundag kasama ang wika’ (existential immersion with the Filipino language), ‘pantayong pananaw’ (perspective from-us-for-us, Filipinos), ‘pagsasakatutubo mula sa labas’ (indigenisation-from-without), and ‘pagpapalitaw ng nasa loob’ (indigenisation from within) in abstracting non-Western IR concepts. We contend that Philippine languages play a central role in the Filipino lived experience of the ‘international’ towards the possibility of contribution to the indigenisation and home-growness of IR as an academic discipline in the Philippines. Keywords: home-grown international relations, indigenisation, Philippine psychology, Filipino philosophy, Southeast Asia

‘Practice time!’Doxic futuresin security and defence diplomacy after Brexit

AbstractTime constitutes social life and time management is central to the everyday conduct of international politics. For some reason, however, the practice turn in International Relations (IR) has produced knowledge about how past practices constitute international politics but not about how the future is also a constitutive feature in and on social life. Introducing a novel perspective on practice and temporality, the article argues that intersubjectively situated representations of the future by practitioners in international politics contribute substantially to our understanding of political processes and the making of international politics. To develop what appears a contradiction in terms – that ‘future-practices’ are driven by tacit know-how and conscious reflection simultaneously – the article develops the concept of doxic futures: representations of the future rooted in practical knowledge and tacit assumptions about the self-evident nature of the social world. The argument is illustrated with a case study of European security and defence diplomacy after the UK voted to leave the EU. Through the envisioning of two concrete doxic futures, a ‘Europe of buying together’ and the UK as a third country in EU defence, diplomats effectively tried to save European security and defence cooperation from the potentially disintegrating effects of Brexit.

East-West dichotomy: historical and cultural aspect

The purpose of the article is a historical and cultural analysis of the dichotomy of the East and the West as antinomy systems with immanent semantic codes. Methodology. The conceptual methodological core of the study is a historical-comparative analysis of the East–West dichotomy. With the help of the hermeneutic interpretation method, the peculiarities of eastern and western civilizations which determine their dichotomy are revealed; the dialogic method is used to determine the mechanisms of interaction of civilizations. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the conceptualization of the phenomenon of East–West dichotomy from the standpoint of the binary opposition I–Other. Based on the historical-comparative analysis of Eastern and Western civilizations, the factors, mechanisms, and results of their interaction at various stages of world history are revealed. A hypothesis was advanced to explain the transition of the world system from globalization to a new form of internationalization – dialogization. Сonclusions. The historical-culturological aspect of the East-West dichotomy is considered from the perspective of the concept I–Other. The factors of the worldview parallelism of Eastern and Western civilizations as antinomian systems with different worldviews, traditions, economic and military-political potential are identified. The semantic transformations of the East-West dichotomy are studied in the context of the entry of one culture into the semiosphere of another culture in a time perspective. The factors of the dialogical turn in international relations in the context of global integration processes at the turn of the XX – XXI centuries are revealed. It is shown that in the XXI century globalization is being replaced by dialogization as a modern form of internationalization of social life based on the communicative principle.