Understanding Of World Politics Research Articles

Analyzing international organizations: How the concepts we use affect the answers we get

We explore how “international organizations” have been conceptualized and operationalized in the field of International Relations (IR), identify an important gap between the two, and demonstrate how this shapes our understanding of world politics. Traditionally, we show, IR has embraced a broad conception of international organizations (IOs) that appreciates variation in design. However, the literature has largely coalesced around a measurement standard that reflects the characteristics of major postwar IOs. Prevailing measures, therefore, mainly count formal IOs—bodies founded with legally binding agreements—and omit informal IOs, which are founded with non-binding instruments. We argue that this produces a disconnect between theory and empirical evidence used in the field, since scholars frequently make arguments about IOs in general but draw inferences from formal IOs only. After reviewing how this disconnect has emerged, we use an original dataset on state membership in 260 informal IOs to reanalyze a number of important studies, showing heterogeneous effects for subtypes of IOs that conflict with existing theories to varying degrees. These differences imply that formal and informal IOs have different effects and that existing findings in the field are partly artifacts of the specific way IO variables have been operationalized by scholars. Based on this, we offer recommendations for how to improve research practices moving forward.

Popular culture, the body and world politics

Popular culture is widely understood to intersect with and shape our understanding of world politics. Numerous studies have highlighted the way language and imagery from literature, drama, film, television and other sites of cultural production make their way into political discourses on geopolitics, terrorism, immigration, globalisation and arms control, to name a few. Conversely, world events, especially international crises, provide rich materials for popular culture across mediums and genres. This interchange has often been understood through the theory of intertextuality, which highlights the way the meaning and authority of any text is established by drawing on, or positioning against, other texts from the surrounding culture. This article develops an account of intertextuality that takes seriously the embodied dimensions of popular culture and political discourse. Revisiting the work of Julia Kristeva, I argue that a framework binding together bodies, discourses and social practices offers a promising avenue for International Relations scholars grappling with the embodied aspects of intertextuality. The article explores the implications and potential of this conceptualisation through a case analysis of the sport–war intertext and spectacular war. In doing so, it demonstrates that the legitimising effects ordinarily understood to accompany intertextuality are intensified when bodily drives, impulses and affect are taken into account.

WORLD POLITICS NETWORK: FROM CONCEPTUALIZATION PROBLEM TO THE CROWD GLOBALIZATION

The article deals with theoretical problems associated with understanding of world politics as a network object. The author assumes that the transformation of world politics in a global, global network actualizes the study of the individual as its most ancient and constant actor, acting according to the «rules of the network». He sets out his understanding of the network approach to world politics and analysis of the subject-object relations arising in the course of development of the world political processes. A significant attention is paid to crowd facing the global arena and opportunities of manipulating them. Mastered means of access to global communication networks crowd gets the opportunity of «governance without government». This, according to the author, can’t turn him into a trendsetter in world politics.

The Role of Games and Simulations to Teach Abstract Concepts of Anarchy, Cooperation, and Conflict in World Politics

Games and simulations are increasingly used in courses on international politics. This study explores the hypothesis that games are better than simulations (as well as only reading and lectures) in introducing students to abstract concepts integral to an understanding of world politics. The study compares a two-level Prisoner's Dilemma game created by Joseph K. Young with a role-play simulation of India-Pakistan negotiations over nuclear disarmament in the 1990s. The study subjects are 149 undergraduate students. The findings suggest that, although an active-learning activity (game or simulation) promotes greater student learning than reading and lecture alone, whether the activity is a game or a simulation generally does not make a statistically significant difference with regard to knowledge gained. This is with the exception of the importance of regime type, which was understood better by those who played the game, and the effect of anarchy, which was better understood by those who were part of the simulation. Student perceptions of learning also tended to be higher among those who played the game.

Fred Halliday, Marxism and the Cold War

Though possibly best known today as a specialist on the Middle East and Islam, it is often forgotten how central the Cold War was in defining Fred Halliday's understanding of world politics before 1989 and indeed even after. Building on the earlier work of Isaac Deutscher and E. H. Carr, Halliday developed a distinct theory of the Cold War which afforded him great insights but ultimately failed in explaining the complexities of the East-West relationship, and why it came to an abrupt conclusion in the late 1980s.

From Here We Begin: A Survey of Scholarship on the International Relations of the Gulf

Academic writing on the international relations of the Gulf has mushroomed over the last decade and a half, but for the most part the quality of work has not kept pace with the quantity. As a result, most literature on the topic adds little to our understanding of world politics, either in the region or in the world at large. This essay surveys the state of existing scholarship in three broad areas: foreign policy studies, security studies and the dynamics of interstate interaction. For the most part, it finds that works dealing with Gulf affairs are framed in terms of concepts and methodologies that lag far behind the times in each field, which makes it difficult if not impossible to integrate the region into larger theoretical debates. By indicating ways that literature on foreign policy, security and interstate interaction in the Gulf might close the gap with state-of-the-art scholarship, the paper hopes to encourage specialists in the region to pay greater attention to the kinds of arguments and research designs they employ, thereby raising the visibility and utility of their research beyond the narrow confines of Middle East studies.

Generic universalism in world politics: beyond international anarchy and the world state

Even though the notion of ‘world politics’ has become increasingly widespread in the discipline of International Relations, its deployment in the disciplinary discourse has been highly problematic. This article argues that the impasse of the discourse on world politics is owing to its commitment to a political ontology of identitarian pluralism, most forcefully articulated in the work of Carl Schmitt, which limits the political imagination to the binary opposition of the preservation of international anarchy and its hierarchical domestication in the world state. As long as politics is cast in identitarian terms, it is impossible to conceive of the universal dimension of political praxis other than in terms of the universalization of some particular content, i.e. as a hegemonic project. We shall then outline the pathway towards a non-identitarian understanding of world politics through an engagement with the universalist themes in the philosophy of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. We shall reconstitute the authors’ alternative to identity politics that rehabilitates the notion of universalism from ‘postmodern’ criticism and reconstructs the category of the universal in non-identitarian or generic terms of indiscernibility and ‘whatever being’. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical dimension of generic world politics as a radically egalitarian process of the emergence of the world community of ‘whatever singularities’.

Embedded Liberalism in Counterpoint: Reading Woody Guthrie's Reciprocal Economy

`Culture' and cultural analysis have recently become important to our understanding of world politics and international studies. Cultural analysis has been less central, however, to work in International Political Economy (IPE). This article is an experiment in thinking through the possibilities of one cultural methodology — contrapuntal analysis — and the potential it might have in opening up discussions of cultural analysis in IPE. To explore these possibilities, this article works though a cultural reading of `embedded liberalism'; a moment key to founding narratives in both critical and mainstream strands of IPE. The article uses a strategy of counterpoint — the attempt to place objects in relational relief in order to stress atonal contrast — as a way to highlight `other' stories of embedded liberalism. To make this case, the article retells the story of Woody Guthrie's conception of debt as a relational practice of belonging. Guthrie's alternative conception of finance, formulated in the 1940s, can, I argue, help place our conventional stories of embedded liberalism in counterpoint. This is a critical gesture, moreover, which might also help provoke more relational analyses of our own globalised and neo-liberal present.

E. H. Carr: a ‘historical realist’ approach for the globalisation era

Realist international relations scholars have approached the connection between economics and security in two ways. Cold War-era realists derived the national interest from the international balance of power, and assessed the utility of both military and economic instruments of statecraft. A second realist approach, advanced by E. H. Carr in his 1939 The Twenty Years' Crisis, places interstate competition in the context of another struggle over wealth and power in which no-one's primary concern is the national interest. That is the realm of capitalism (and resistance to capitalism). That deeper set of connections between economics and security was overlooked in Cold War IR literature, at considerable cost to our understanding of world politics. Understanding why Carr's ‘historical realism’ was bypassed can help pave the way for a more fruitful realist approach to comprehending a new era in world politics.

Human Nature and World Politics: Cognition, Identity, and Influence

Many psychologists deem it self‐evident that psychology can make fundamental contributions to our understanding of world politics. Many social scientists, however, argue that policymakers are tightly constrained by macro political and economic forces. This article will advance a systemic approach to world politics that challenges: (a) psychologists by highlighting ways in which macro social structures may transform the character of “basic” intrapsychic processes; (b) anti‐psychological theorists by showing that even the most sweepingly deterministic macro claims—for example, claims about the power of free trade to promote peace—rest on controversial assumptions about human nature. Systemic approaches to world politics are far more consistent with how seasoned diplomats—from Dag Hammarskjöld to Henry Kissinger—have historically approached geopolitical problems than are the traditional but increasingly obsolete micro and macro dualities that have dominated academic analyses.

Using Game Theory to Link Domestic and International Politics

How do the links between domestic politics and the international system affect the way that states interact in the global arena? Scholars are giving this question greater attention today than they have in the past. One reason is that many see the end of the cold war as having made domestic politics more important in foreign policy matters. Similarly, the increasing importance of economic affairs in international relations has made domestic interest groups and coalitions more salient. Theoretical developments in the field of international relations also point toward a greater need to study the links between domestic politics and foreign affairs. For several decades, many in the field organized their arguments around particular levels of analysis or made claims about the primacy of one level over another (Singer 1961; Waltz [1954] 1959, 1979). Although the distinction has helped scholars make significant contributions to our understanding of international politics, many now feel a theoretical synthesis of variables from the international system and domestic politics is necessary. Some scholars who argue for a move past the levels-of-analysis distinction take issue with the positivist epistemology underlying most work in international relations. In particular, constructivists argue that looking at how states and systems mutually constitute each other can increase our understanding of world politics (Ashley 1984; Cox 1981; Wendt 1992). Others maintain that a positivist synthesis is possible, under the rubric of two-level games or a similar metaphor (Evans, Jacobson, and Putnam 1993; Mastanduno, Lake, and Ikenberry 1989; Putnam 1988). The contributors to this special issue agree with the latter position; we need not toss out the positivist baby with the levels-of-analysis bathwater. This issue explores the role that game theory can play in transcending the levelsof-analysis distinction and debate. The contributors show that game-theoretic tools can help scholars think rigorously about the simultaneous or interactive effects of

Bridging the theory/meta-theory gap in international relations

The field of international relations (IR) theory is something of a misnomer; since it is constituted by two distinct, though not unrelated, scholarly enterprises. Its core consists of first order theorizing about the structure and dynamics of the international system, and as such it attempts to contribute directly to our understanding of world politics in the form of substantive theories like realism, liberalism, and so on. The proliferation of such theories in recent years, however, has been a cause for some disciplinary concern (or celebration as the case may be), not least because the substantive disagreements between them are as often over what kinds of questions and answers are important or legitimate as they are over the 'facts of the matter'. This has helped open the door since the mid-1980s to a wave of second order or meta-theorizing in the field. The objective of this type of theorizing is also to increase our understanding of world politics, but it does so indirectly by focusing on the ontological and epistemological issues of what constitute important or legitimate questions and answers for IR scholarship, rather than on the structure and dynamics of the international system per se.

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class

With The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, Kees van der Pijl put class formation at the heart of our understanding of world politics and the global economy. This landmark study dissects one of the most decisive phenomena of the twentieth century - the rise of an Atlantic ruling class of multinational banks and corporations. A new preface by the author evaluates the book's significance in the light of recent political and economic developments.