Unnatural acts

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-128
Author(s):  
Matthew Woods
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Arms

International relations theory overdetermines proliferation but few states possess nuclear arms. This article maintains the linguistic construction of ‘proliferation’ accounts for the international nonnuclear order. Following an overview of its approach, the article begins with a review of earlier works and notes the inability of ‘nuclear language studies’ to account for the order of rejection rather than acquisition of nuclear arms. The article traces that limitation to a practical assumption about the world that animates scholars to attend to how words distort rather than create reality. The article then introduces a version of constructivism that claims speech acts produce constitutive rules that create what ‘is’ and oblige order (as ‘same use’) to suggest how language accounts for the order that turns on rejection of nuclear weapons. Finally, the article illustrates how states, following this constructivist process, often used discursive practices that emphasized the ‘unnatural’ to create ‘proliferation’ between 1958 and 1968.

Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The World ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.

Introduction: Diversity and Disciplinarity in International Relations Theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Steve Smith
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Structural Realism ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
English School ◽  
International Theory ◽  
The World

This text argues that theory is central to explaining International Relations (IR) and that the discipline of IR is much more relevant to the world of international relations than it has been at any point in its history. Some chapters cover distinct IR theories ranging from realism/structural realism to liberalism/neoliberalism, the English school, constructivism, Marxism, critical theory, feminism, poststructuralism, green theory, and postcolonialism. Oher chapters explore International Relations theory and its relationship to social science, normative theory, globalization, and the discipline’s identity. This introduction explains why this edition has chosen to cover these theories, reflects on international theory and its relationship to the world, and considers the kind of assumptions about theory that underlie each of the approaches.

Challenges to Traditional International Relations Theory Posed by Environmental Change

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Dyer
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Practical Challenge ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Over Time

Changes in the environment can impact international relations theory, despite enjoying only a limited amount of attention from scholars of the discipline. The sorts of influence that may be identified include ontology, epistemology, concepts, and methods, all of these being related to varying perspectives on international relations. It is likely that the most profound implications arise at the ontological level, since this establishes assumptions about, for example, whether the world we wish to understand is both political and ecological. However, more recently the recognition of the practical challenge presented by the environment has become widespread, though it has not yet translated into a significant impact on the discipline of international relations, even when theoretical implications are noted. It is now almost obligatory to include the environment in any list of modern international relations concerns, as over time it has become necessary to include peace, underdevelopment, gender, or race, as they quite rightly became recognized as significant aspects of the field. Moreover, the environment, as a relatively novel subject matter, has naturally brought some critique and innovation to the field. However, studies of the environment are also subject to such descriptors as “mainstream” and “radical” in debates about how best to tackle the subject. As is often the case, the debates are sharpest among those with the greatest interest in the subject.

scholarly journals A Muslim Contribution to International Relations Theory: Aman (Peaceful Co-Existence and Mutual Respect) Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abd al-Fattah M. El-Awaisi
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Mutual Respect ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
Clash Of Civilisations ◽  
Peace Study ◽  
Normative Considerations ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Academic Debate

In the last ten years, the world has witnessed much debate on new forms of the global phenomena of fundamentalism and extremism. It is clear that many view Muslims as “the other” or outsider and vice-versa; an attitude of “us and them”, “our community and their community”. The concept of a ‘clash of civilisations’ has become part of our everyday vocabulary. The objective of this article is namely to develop the theory of Aman (peaceful co-existence and mutual respect) as a Muslim contribution to normative considerations in international relations theory. It is found that the main four components of this theory are: the methodology of Tadafu’ (counteraction), the concept of Adil (justice), the principle of not excluding others, and the constructive argumentation methodology. The theory has been tested and implemented by examining, in particular, Umar Assurance of Aman and the negotiations between Salah al-Din and King Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ of England over Islamicjerusalem in 1191. It is hoped that this theory could help place Muslim contributions in the epitome of global discourse of international relations theory, set the scene to advance the current research on the Muslim contributions to international relations theory including peace study and conflict resolution, and open up and promote intellectual and academic debate and understanding of this Muslim contributions to shed light on new lines of explanation. Although Islamicjerusalem is the most delicate issue of dispute between the current two conflicting parties, it is hoped that this theory will provide a better understanding for the world leaders who are trying to return peace to the region.  

scholarly journals Cooperation and Isolation: Understanding EU-Russia Dialogue

1970 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Chebakova
Keyword(s):  
International Cooperation ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Security Discourse ◽  
The World ◽  
Future Events ◽  
The Eu ◽  
Empirical Analyses

The promising agenda of EU-Russia cooperation has resulted in mutual frustration manifested in continuous, paradoxical crises and isolation between the partners. This article offers a possible way to reflect on an uneasy EU-Russia relationship. In this study, I make problems in EU-Russia cooperation discursively visible by scrutinizing the official speech acts articulated in EU-Russia political and security discourse. I demonstrate that these official speech acts create conditions for a responsive dialogue and, eventually, form a set of prevalent discursive practices that re-produce and reinforce problems in EU-Russia cooperation. Blending Bakhtin‟s dialogic analysis and Onuf‟s constructivist accounts, I strike a balance between theoretical and empirical analyses and develop a model for understanding current and possible future events in the EU-Russia partnership. This model of international cooperation can be transferable beyond its borders to similar examples of relationships currently existing all over the world.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Territorial State ◽  
Self Help ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

This book has sought to deepen the dialogue between history and international relations theory in examining a pivotal moment in the history of international relations. The Paris Peace Conference constituted a historically specific effort to reimagine “the world.” More specifically, it sought to replace anarchy under realism with “sovereignty.” The conference could not live comfortably with the radical liberalism of Wilsonianism, but the international contract made at the time of the armistice with Germany meant that the conference could not live without it. The territorial state and its discontents lay at the heart of sovereignty at the conference. Two logics of the state fought each other to a standstill in Paris—that of the self-help of realism, forever seeking unattainable “security,” and that of the state that exists only in relation to other states, toward some common end.

scholarly journals Who stole disarmament? History and nostalgia in nuclear abolition discourse

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (5) ◽  
pp. 1387-1403
Author(s):  
Kjølv Egeland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Arms Control ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
The World ◽  
Shared Goal ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Arms

Abstract Influential members of the disarmament community have in recent years maintained that further progress towards the international community's nominally shared goal of a world without nuclear weapons depends on recapturing the spirit and practices of cooperation that prevailed in the late 1980s and 1990s. Proponents of abolition, in this view, should focus their efforts on revitalizing the tried and tested arms control formula that was implemented following the end of the Cold War. In this article, I argue that this call to make disarmament great again reflects unwarranted nostalgia for a past that never was, fostering overconfidence in established approaches to the elimination of nuclear weapons. Far from putting the world on course to nuclear abolition, the end of the Cold War saw the legitimation of nuclear weapons as a hedge against ‘future uncertainties’ and entrenchment of the power structures that sustain the retention of nuclear armouries. By overselling past progress towards the elimination of nuclear arms, the nostalgic narrative of a lost abolitionist consensus is used to rationalize the existing nuclear order and delegitimize the pursuit of new approaches to elimination such as the movement to stigmatize nuclear weapons and the practice of nuclear deterrence.

Is a Pedagogy of Indigenous Solidarity Possible in the International Relations Theory Classroom?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Khalid ◽  
Mark McMillan ◽  
Jonathan Symons
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
First Nations ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Class Discussion ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives

Abstract How should teachers of international relations in settler-colonial states engage with First Nations’ sovereignty claims? While a growing body of recent scholarship explores how teaching might acknowledge and move beyond the discipline's racist and colonial origins, less research investigates how pedagogy might rectify inattention to Indigenous sovereignty. This paper reports on a class activity that sought to highlight how the discipline's foundational assumptions can naturalize Indigenous dispossession. In the class, students were asked to conduct discourse analysis of debates surrounding the “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” and to consider practices of Indigenous transnationalism. Although students generally succeeded in identifying how discursive practices consolidate the authority of the settler-colonial state, class discussion tended to reproduce the state's justificatory narratives and to classify First Nations’ claims as akin to those of any other ethnic minority. At a time when many universities are seeking to embed more Indigenous content within curriculum, we reflect on how the activity revealed epistemic colonialism's operation within educational settings. We argue that in addition to introducing Indigenous perspectives and knowledges, it is valuable for teaching in settler-colonial states to focus critical attention onto non-Indigenous practices that reproduce systemic injustice.

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