Canada and/in the World

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 351-367
Author(s):  
Petra Dolata

Canada and/in the World is a broad topic that has produced a wide range of diverse publications in the twenty-first century, not only in political science but also in history and other neighbouring disciplines. What they all share is an interest in investigating how Canada, either as a state, a polity, a society, a culture or an idea, intersects with and is part of the international. Yet, along this spectrum we find literature spanning from problem-solving to critical—to use Robert Cox's distinction (1986)—as well as from heavily empirical and policy relevant to theoretically informed. Some works aim to explain, some to facilitate understanding and others to challenge and deconstruct. Thus, while there might be a traditional core of positivist writing centring on liberal internationalism and to a lesser extent (neo)realism, which some claim can be condensed into a list of “the ten most important books on Canadian foreign policy” (Kirton, 2009), there are also strong critical voices that challenge core assumptions about how we conceptualize and examine Canada and/in the world.

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-355
Author(s):  
Madhu Bhalla

Shiv Shankar Menon, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy. Gurgaon: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2016, pp. 243, ₹599. ISBN: 9780670089239. Shyam Saran, How India Sees the World: Kautilya to the 21st Century. New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2017, pp. 312, ₹599. ISBN: 9789386228406.


Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds

The dissolution of the Soviet Union did not erase the need for a global U.S. Navy, as events in the Middle East and elsewhere provoked serial crises that led to the dispatch of U.S. naval combat groups to various hot spots around the world. ‘The U.S. Navy in the twenty-first century’ explains how the U.S. Navy continues to fulfill many of its historic missions—suppressing pirates, protecting trade, and pursuing drug runners. It is also a potent instrument of American foreign policy and a barometer of American concern. In addition to its deterrent and peacekeeping roles, the U.S. Navy also acts as a first responder to natural or man-made disasters that call for humane intervention.


2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-132
Author(s):  
Dejan Tadic

The paper analyses the application of the concept of soft power in contemporary international relations in the case of the implementation of the foreign policy of the Russian Federation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author departs with the assumption that the government in Moscow uses a wide range of the soft power instruments and prove it on the case study of the combined use of hard and soft power instruments during the engagement in Syria. The analysis also includes the recent Russian foreign policy actions towards Serbia, and stresses out that the Russian Federation does not recognise sufficiently clear the benefits that our country provides in terms of promoting Russian national interests through the sophisticated application of the concept of soft power. The author concludes that the Russian Federation has not been using the full potential of their own sources of soft power in the foreign policy implementation process, and that the use of soft power is not sophisticated and optimal-except in the media.


Author(s):  
Joshua T. Searle ◽  
Kenneth G. C. Newport

This chapter examines futuristic interpretations of Revelation in the modern period, highlighting how specific interpretations have had a real-world impact on society and geopolitics. It begins with an overview of the diverse cultural applications of futuristic readings of Revelation to the modern world, and then the focus shifts to an examination of how apocalyptic rhetoric confers meaning and coherence on the world in the minds of futuristic interpreters. This is followed by a discussion of the origins of premillennial dispensationalism and its role in shaping American foreign policy toward the Middle East. The chapter concludes with an assessment of whether futurism will retain its influence further into the twenty-first century and beyond.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 614-628
Author(s):  
Leigh Sarty

This paper examines how China and Russia play into the opportunities and constraints that shape Canadian foreign policy. While both countries contribute significantly to the challenges of twenty-first-century world politics, neither is a juggernaut: both face serious internal difficulties and fear the West in ways that should temper our preoccupation with relative decline. The paper concludes that, by seeing these authoritarian powers as more fragile than frightening, Canada can worry less about how engagement might be seen to reward bad behaviour and more about beneficial outcomes in areas that serve Canadian interests.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Claire Colebrook

There is something more catastrophic than the end of the world, especially when ‘world’ is understood as the horizon of meaning and expectation that has composed the West. If the Anthropocene is the geological period marking the point at which the earth as a living system has been altered by ‘anthropos,’ the Trumpocene marks the twenty-first-century recognition that the destruction of the planet has occurred by way of racial violence, slavery and annihilation. Rather than saving the world, recognizing the Trumpocene demands that we think about destroying the barbarism that has marked the earth.


Author(s):  
Berthold Schoene

This chapter looks at how the contemporary British and Irish novel is becoming part of a new globalized world literature, which imagines the world as it manifests itself both within (‘glocally’) and outside nationalist demarcations. At its weakest, often against its own best intentions, this new cosmopolitan writing cannot but simply reinscribe the old imperial power relations. Or, it provides an essential component of the West’s ideological superstructure for globalization’s neoliberal business of rampant upward wealth accumulation. At its best, however, this newly emergent genre promotes a cosmopolitan ethics of justice, resistance. It also promotes dissent while working hard to expose and deconstruct the extant hegemonies and engaging in a radical imaginative recasting of global relations.


The world faces significant and interrelated challenges in the twenty-first century which threaten human rights in a number of ways. This book examines the relationship between human rights and three of the largest challenges of the twenty-first century: conflict and security, environment, and poverty. Technological advances in fighting wars have led to the introduction of new weapons which threaten to transform the very nature of conflict. In addition, states confront threats to security which arise from a new set of international actors not clearly defined and which operate globally. Climate change, with its potentially catastrophic impacts, features a combination of characteristics which are novel for humanity. The problem is caused by the sum of innumerable individual actions across the globe and over time, and similarly involves risks that are geographically and temporally diffuse. In recent decades, the challenges involved in addressing global and national poverty have also changed. For example, the relative share of the poor in the world population has decreased significantly while the relative share of the poor who live in countries with significant domestic capacity has increased strongly. Overcoming these global and interlocking threats constitutes this century’s core political and moral task. This book examines how these challenges may be addressed using a human rights framework. It considers how these challenges threaten human rights and seeks to reassess our understanding of human rights in the light of these challenges. The analysis considers both foundational and applied questions. The approach is multidisciplinary and contributors include some of the most prominent lawyers, philosophers, and political theorists in the debate. The authors not only include leading academics but also those who have played important roles in shaping the policy debates on these questions. Each Part includes contributions by those who have served as Special Rapporteurs within the United Nations human rights system on the challenges under consideration.


Author(s):  
Jon Stewart

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel treats the religions of the world under the rubric “the determinate religion.” This is a part of his corpus that has traditionally been neglected, since scholars have struggled to understand what philosophical work it is supposed to do. The present study argues that Hegel’s rich analyses of Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Egyptian and Greek polytheism, and the Roman religion are not simply irrelevant historical material, as is often thought. Instead, they play a central role in Hegel’s argument for what he regards as the truth of Christianity. Hegel believes that the different conceptions of the gods in the world religions are reflections of individual peoples at specific periods in history. These conceptions might at first glance appear random and chaotic, but there is, Hegel claims, a discernible logic in them. Simultaneously a theory of mythology, history, and philosophical anthropology, Hegel’s account of the world religions goes far beyond the field of philosophy of religion. The controversial issues surrounding his treatment of the non-European religions are still very much with us today and make his account of religion an issue of continued topicality in the academic landscape of the twenty-first century.


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