American Realism and the real world

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-402
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Real World ◽  
World View ◽  
International System ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Power Rule

Realism remains the dominant approach in America to international relations. Modern American realism has developed into a neorealist strand focused on the structure and outcomes of the international system, and a neoclassical strand concerned with the behaviour of individual states. Within each of these are hard-core offensive realists who see a world full of opportunities for aggressive ‘power maximisers’, and defensive realists who see more possibilities for cautious cooperation between ‘security seekers’. At its heart, however, realism remains a world-view where states and power rule. Realism's great claim to fame is that it explains those aspects of world politics that matter most to policymakers. However, three developments in this past decade give reason to question the relevance of the realist world-view.

International Political Theory and the Real World

2018 ◽  
pp. 2-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Brown ◽  
Robyn Eckersley
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Real World ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
The Real ◽  
International Political Theory

This chapter introduces and defends the themes around which the Handbook has been constructed: the importance of an engagement between International Political Theory (IPT) and “real-world” politics, and the need to establish links between IPT and the empirical findings of International Relations scholars. The “new realist” critique of “moralism” is examined along with the more general critique of ideal theory, and both are found to hit a very narrow target. The conventional distinction between “critical theory” and “problem-solving theory” is also challenged, and each is defended as an equally important, albeit different, stage in the life of a theory. The second half of this chapter sets out the principles upon which the Handbook is organized, and provides a guide to each section and chapter.

scholarly journals The hierarchical society: the politics of self-determination and the constitution of new states after 1919

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-396
Author(s):  
Maja Spanu
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of

International Relations scholarship disconnects the history of the so-called expansion of international society from the presence of hierarchies within it. In contrast, this article argues that these developments may in fact be premised on hierarchical arrangements whereby new states are subject to international tutelage as the price of acceptance to international society. It shows that hierarchies within international society are deeply entrenched with the politics of self-determination as international society expands. I substantiate this argument with primary and secondary material on the Minority Treaty provisions imposed on the new states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe admitted to the League of Nations after World War I. The implications of this claim for International Relations scholarship are twofold. First, my argument contributes to debates on the making of the international system of states by showing that the process of expansion of international society is premised on hierarchy, among and within states. Second, it speaks to the growing body of scholarship on hierarchy in world politics by historicising where hierarchies come from, examining how diverse hierarchies are nested and intersect, and revealing how different actors navigate these hierarchies.

Another Geopolitics? International Relations and the Boundaries of World Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regan Burles
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
Ecological Theories ◽  
Problems And Solutions ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Geopolitics has become a key site for articulating the limits of existing theories of international relations and exploring possibilities for alternative political formations that respond to the challenges posed by massive ecological change and global patterns of violence and inequality. This essay addresses three recent books on geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene: Simon Dalby's Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (2020), Jairus Victor Grove's Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019), and Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018). The review outlines and compares how these authors pose contemporary geopolitics as a problem and offer political ecology as the ground for an alternative geopolitics. The essay considers these books in the context of critiques of world politics in international relations to shed light on both the contributions and the limits of political ecological theories of global politics. I argue that the books under review encounter problems and solutions posed in Kant's critical and political writings in relation to the concepts of epigenesis and teleology. These provoke questions about the ontological conceptions of order that enable claims to world political authority in the form of a global international system coextensive with the earth's surface.

How Reputation Matters in International Relations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark J.C. Crescenzi
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Real World ◽  
World Politics

This chapter establishes a theory of reputation’s role in international relations. Using concepts such as learning and information, the theoretical model argues that reputation can impact a nation’s decision about whether to cooperate and negotiate peacefully with another state, or whether, based on that other state’s reputation, to decide to go towar. The chapter contains an historical illustration of the relevance and role of reputation in real-world politics that focuses on Tsar Alexander’s anticipation of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, and how Napoleon’s past actions in relation to other states influenced Alexander.

The Didactic Case in Teaching International Law

1970 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin ◽  
Douglas Castro ◽  
Arthur Roberto Capella Giannattasio
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Real World ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
The Real ◽  
Empirical Framework

According to a theoretical and empirical framework, didactic cases are an important tool to teacho International Law. This instrument increase students’ active participation in the classroom, empowers them to exercise their autonomy in the learning process, helps professors to present the foundations of the discipline and its complexity in the real world and helps to build the interdisciplinary bridge between International Law and International Relations.

Communism, fascism and counter-revolution in world politics

2001 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-686
Author(s):  
Michael Mann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
Effects Of War

This is a rich, impressive and timely book. At a time when American and neoliberal triumphalism deny the significance of any revolution later than 1776, and when almost no-one in the social sciences is still studying either revolution or class, Fred Halliday has demonstrated that we have been living in a revolutionary age, dominated by the conjoined effects of war and class revolution. In case you find his sub-title mysterious, Karl Marx noted that the Europe of his time was dominated by five Great Powers, but Revolution, ‘the sixth Great Power’, would soon overcome them all. Halliday would suggest that Marx was only half-right. Revolution did not overcome all five Powers, but it did transform them all—and their successors. Hannah Arendt and Martin Wight also emphasized that couplings of war and revolution have dominated much of modernity. But Halliday adds that these are not to be seen as ‘disruptions’ of International Relations, they are International Relations, since they have set the overall parameters of the modern international system. They did so, he says, in three distinct revolutionary phases from the sixteenth century to the present-day: sixteenth-seventeenth century religious wars/revolutions, late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlanticist wars/revolutions, and twentieth century wars/revolutions which became increasingly dominated by communism.

scholarly journals Linking academia and the ‘real world’ in International Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cottey ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Real World ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Skill Sets ◽  
The Real ◽  
Work Placement ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

This talk will reflect on the challenges of linking academic programmes and teaching, on the one hand, with the policy-makers and practitioners, on the other, with particular reference to the discipline of international relations (which focuses on relations between states, international organisations and global political and socio-economic dynamics). The talk will draw on experience from University College Cork’s Department of Government and Politics, which has an extensive, market-leading work placement programme, and from UCC’s MSc International Public Policy and Diplomacy, which is a new model of international relations masters seeking to bridge academia and the world of policy. Our experience shows that it is possible to link academia and the world of policy and practitioners, but that it is not easy, even in an apparently very policy-oriented discipline, and that it involves significant challenges. The talk will highlight a number of challenges involved in linking the academic study of international relations with the ‘real world’ of international politics: bridging academia and policy/practitioners is not easy in the disciplines of political science and international relations – the two have different needs and, often, different languages; the development and maintenance of work placements and other elements of engagement with policymakers and practitioners involves very significant workload and needs to be properly supported in terms of staffing and infrastructure; and in politics and international relations, the skill sets which policy-makers and practitioners need often differ from those that universities normally provide. Finding the ‘right’ balance between academic disciplinary requirements/standards and the needs of employers is a difficult task.

scholarly journals Multipolar model of international system: stability and conflict

2016 ◽  
pp. 234-248
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Rozumyuk
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
System Stability ◽  
Berlin Crisis ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Basic Approaches ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Cold War

It is researched a theoretical model of a multipolar system of international relations at the article. Interest to this themes is caused by needs of Ukrainian political science and diplomacy in schemes of understanding and mechanisms of an adaptation to demands of the modern system of international relations. The aim of the article is to determine factors of a stability and conflicts of a multipolar model of a system of international relations. It is studied basic approaches of designing multipolar model, defined the main factors of its stability and conflicts, highlighted an interdependence of the world politics and knowledge about it. Because of an availability of opposing viewpoints from leading scholars about the stability and conflicts in unipolar, bipolar and multipolar systems, the author concludes that these indicators are important parameters of the real historical system of international relations, but not its abstract model. It is alleged that researchers, which emphasized at more stability of a multipolar system, their theoretical arguments had selected under the direct influence of acute bipolar confrontation during the “Cold War” from the mid-40s to mid-60s of the twentieth century (the Berlin Crisis, the Korean War, the Caribbean Crisis), opposing the “nuclear madness” of a constraint an idealized picture of European “concert of nations” at the first half of the nineteenth century. Instead, cooperation between East and West during the Brezhnev’s «discharging» and Gorbachev’s «new 248 thinking» gave serious reasons for a perception and appraisal by politologists of a bipolar system as stable and without conflicts. Accordingly, the number of poles of a theoretical model of the international system says about its stability not more than a form a glass about a quality of a poured wine.

Political Approaches

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-78
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett ◽  
Martha Finnemore
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social World ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Interstate Cooperation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
World Organization

This chapter examines how prominent theories capture the various ways that the UN affects world politics. Different theories of international relations (IR) cast the UN in distinctive roles, which logically lead scholars to identify distinctive kinds of effects. We identify five roles that the UN might have: as an agent of great powers doing their bidding; as a mechanism for interstate cooperation; as a governor of an international society of states; as a constructor of the social world; and as a legitimation forum. Each role has roots in a well-known theory of international politics. In many, perhaps most, real-world political situations, the UN plays more than one of these roles, but these stylized theoretical arguments about the world body’s influence help discipline our thinking. They force us to be explicit about which effects of the world organization we think are important, what is causing them, and why.

The Globalization of World Politics

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Real World ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Apply Theory ◽  
Eighth Edition ◽  
Comprehensive Coverage

The Globalization of World Politics is an introduction to international relations (IR) and offers comprehensive coverage of key theories and global issues. The eighth edition features several new chapters that reflect on the latest developments in the field, including postcolonial and decolonial approaches, and refugees and forced migration. Pedagogical features—such as case studies and questions, a debating feature, and end-of-chapter questions—help readers to evaluate key IR debates and apply theory and IR concepts to real world events.

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