scholarly journals Common-Pool Hierarchy: Explaining the Emergence of Cooperative Hierarchies

Author(s):  
Jesse Dillon Savage

Abstract Hierarchy in international relations has often been understood as an arrangement with a single dominant state controlling aspects of the subordinate actor's sovereignty. While such arrangements play an important role in structuring international politics, it does not exhaust the forms that hierarchy can take. Very often hierarchies have developed where multiple states jointly claim control of the same sovereign rights of the subordinate state. This paper introduces a new conceptualization of hierarchy where the sovereign rights of the subordinate state are understood as a resource that can be controlled by multiple dominant states. As with other resources, different types of property regimes can be developed to organize access and extraction of sovereignty, such as common property resources regimes. Finally, an explanation of common-pool hierarchy regimes is developed and explored using two case studies: European imperialism in the nineteenth-century China and the scramble for Africa.

2021 ◽  
pp. 317-318
Author(s):  
Martin Wight

Wight praised Meinecke’s Die Idee der Staatsräson, translated as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’état and its Place in Modern History, as ‘by any odds the most important and enduring book on international relations published in the 1920s, and perhaps between the wars’. It is, Wight wrote, ‘an essay in the historiography of human thought, a study of how Machiavelli’s principles infiltrated into European statecraft, how thinkers and politicians who most strenuously repudiated him found it necessary to borrow from him, and how the idea of raison d’état developed to guide the greatest statesmen from Richelieu to Bismarck, until it was swamped by the ignorant popular passions of 1918’. Meinecke was preoccupied, Wight observed, with (in Meinecke’s words) ‘that tragic duality which came into historical life through the medium of Machiavellism—that indivisible and fateful combination of poison and curative power which it contained’. Moreover, Wight added, the tension between ‘necessity’ and ‘moral traditions’ has been recognized by some statesmen ‘as the central experience of international politics’. Wight noted that ‘Meinecke, despite his honourable retirement under the Nazis, was infected with the German heresy of idealizing State power and fatalistically abdicating personal responsibility. … Yet it was easier for a Burckhardt or an Acton, in the security of nineteenth-century Switzerland or Britain, to condemn power as evil without qualification.’


Author(s):  
John Breuilly

This chapter examines the role of nationalism and national self-determination (NSD) in shaping the major institution of modern international relations: the nation-state. It considers different types of nationalism and how they vary from one another, whether the commonly accepted sequence of nation > nationalism > nation-state is actually the reverse of the normal historical sequence, and whether the principle of NSD is compatible with that of state sovereignty. The chapter also explores the contribution of nationalism to the globalization of world politics and the changing meanings of NSD since 1918. Four case studies of nationalism are presented: Kurdistan, Germany, India, and Yugoslavia. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether the principle of NSD threatens stable international relations.


Author(s):  
John Breuilly

This chapter examines the role of nationalism and national self-determination (NSD) in shaping the major institution of modern international relations: the nation-state. It considers different types of nationalism and how they vary from one another, whether the commonly accepted sequence of nation > nationalism > nation-state is actually the reverse of the normal historical sequence, and whether the principle of NSD is incompatible with that of state sovereignty. The chapter also explores the contribution of nationalism to the globalization of world politics and the changing meanings of NSD since 1918. Four case studies of nationalism are presented, in Kurdistan, Germany, India, and Yugoslavia. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether the principle of NSD threatens stable international relations.


Author(s):  
Tim Dunne

This chapter examines the core assumptions of liberalism regarding world politics. It explores why liberals believe in progress, what explains the ascendancy of liberal ideas in world politics since 1945, and whether liberal solutions to global problems are hard to achieve and difficult to sustain. The chapter also considers central ideas in liberal thinking on international relations, including internationalism, idealism, and institutionalism. It concludes with an assessment of the challenges confronting liberalism. Two case studies are presented: one dealing with imperialism and internationalism in nineteenth-century Britain, and the other with the 1990–1991 Gulf War and its implications for collective security. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether democracy is a better system of government and whether it should be promoted by peaceful and forceful means.


Author(s):  
Helen M. Kinsella

This chapter examines international feminism, focusing on how feminist international relations theories are necessary for understanding international politics, what feminist international relations theories provide for understanding international politics, and how feminist international relations theories have influenced the practice of international politics. The chapter proceeds by explaining feminism and feminist international relations theory as well as feminist conceptions of gender and power. It also discusses four feminist international relations theories: liberal feminist international relations, critical feminist international relations, postcolonial feminist international relations, and poststructural feminist international relations. Two case studies of women's organizations are presented: the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom and the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. There is also an Opposing Opinions box that asks whether feminist foreign policy changes states' foreign policy decisions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 629-651
Author(s):  
Diana Panke

States address many of today’s global problems in international organizations (IOs). At the same time, regional international organizations (RIOs) play important roles in IOs, as a series of case studies suggests. RIO member states can speak on behalf of an RIO in IO negotiations. This paper explores under what conditions states voice RIO positions instead of national ones in IOs and thereby turn into agents of regionalization. Based on a novel dataset of more than 500 international negotiations and a quantitative analysis of theory-guided International Relations hypotheses, this paper shows that states are increasingly likely to negotiate on behalf of an RIO, when they regard grouping positions into regional blocs in IO negotiations as more effective, when they have a formal role as RIO chair, and when they possess financial and staff capacities needed in order to voice a regional position in international negotiations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhim Adhikari

The paper analyses open access and common property resource systems drawing insights from new institutional economics, especially property rights theory and policy analysis. This analysis of common pool resources (CPRs) under common property regimes indicates that local communities devise formal and informal institutions in managing the local commons. The paper further discusses how N. S. Jodha’s empirical work on the economics of CPRs has enhanced our understanding of the role of CPRs in the livelihood strategies of the poor in the developing world. Devolution of authority to local resource users is emphasized as an institutional imperative in designing appropriate forms of governance structures for CPR management.


1989 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul W. Schroeder

Students of international politics do not need to be told of the unsatisfactory state of balance of power theory. The problems are well known: the ambiguous nature of the concept and the numerous ways it has been defined, the various distinct and partly contradictory meanings given to it in practice and the divergent purposes it serves (description, analysis, prescription, and propaganda); and the apparent failure of attempts clearly to define balance of power as a system and specify its operating rules. Not surprisingly, some scholars have become sceptical about the balance of power ‘system’ and a few have even denied that balance of power politics prevailed in the nineteenth century. None of the methods generally used seems to promise much help. These have included studying the views and theories of balance of power held by individual publicists, theorists, and statesmen, making case studies of the balance of power in certain limited periods, analysing events and policies within an assumed balance of power framework, or constructing theoretical analyses comparing the supposed system of balance of power to other systems. Undoubtedly a method for operationalizing the study of the balance of power would be very valuable, and efforts to do this have yielded useful information. But the obstacles to establishing reliable indices of power and status and the problems of quantifying alignments and co-operation-conflict ratios in international affairs are formidable indeed.


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