scholarly journals Do International Rules and Norms Apply to Nonstate Actors?

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Lemke

Abstract The nonstate actors of interest in this article are territorial contenders: political entities that control populated territory, function like sovereign states but are not recognized as sovereign states by other members of the international system. Sometimes they are de facto states, sometimes they are rebel groups, sometimes they are neither of these, instead existing in control of territory with neither conflict against the sovereign state within whose borders they exist nor claims to a state of their own. New data about territorial contenders permit me to evaluate arguments about changing rules and norms in the international system. I find support for claims about the consequences of changing rules about which actors are recognized as sovereign states but not for claims about a norm against conquest after World War II. In the discussion section, I consider implications of these findings for future research.

Author(s):  
Phillip Y. Lipscy ◽  
Nobuhiko Tamaki

Japan’s emergence as a great power and economic powerhouse coincided with the rise of international organizations in global politics. International organizations now facilitate cooperation in essentially all arenas of international relations. This article surveys major academic debates about Japan and international organizations across three time periods: from the Meiji Restoration until World War II; the postwar liberal international order; and the recent era of contestation. Japan has played a variety of roles—as creator, reformer, and disruptor of international organizations. After World War II, Japan contributed actively to the liberal international order as a key democratic ally of the United States. Recent shifts in the international system and Japanese domestic politics are reconfiguring Japan’s policy toward international organizations, opening exciting avenues for future research.


2020 ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Burhanettin Duran

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the domestic and foreign policy agendas of all countries have been turned upside down. The pandemic has brought new problems and competition areas to states and to the international system. While the pandemic politically calls to mind the post-World War II era, it can also be compared with the 2008 crisis due to its economic effects such as unemployment and the disruption of global supply chains. A debate immediately began for a new international system; however, it seems that the current international system will be affected, but will not experience a radical change. That is, a new international order is not expected, while disorder is most likely in the post-pandemic period. In an atmosphere of global instability where debates on the U.S.-led international system have been worn for a while, in the post-pandemic period states will invest in self-sufficiency and redefine their strategic areas, especially in health security. The decline of U.S. leadership, the challenging policies of China, the effects of Chinese policies on the U.S.-China relations and the EU’s deepening crisis are going to be the main discussion topics that will determine the future of the international system.


Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimia Zare ◽  
Habibollah Saeeidinia

Iran and Russia have common interests, especially in political terms, because of the common borders and territorial neighborhood. This has led to a specific sensitivity to how the two countries are approaching each other. Despite the importance of the two countries' relations, it is observed that in the history of the relations between Iran and Russia, various issues and issues have always been hindered by the close relations between the two countries. The beginning of Iran-Soviet relations during the Second Pahlavi era was accompanied by issues such as World War II and subsequent events. The relations between the two countries were influenced by the factors and system variables of the international system, such as the Cold War, the US-Soviet rivalry, the Second World War and the entry of the Allies into Iran, the deconstruction of the relations between the two post-Cold War superpowers, and so on.The main question of the current research is that the political relations between Iran and Russia influenced by the second Pahlavi period?To answer this question, the hypothesis was that Iran's political economic relations were fluctuating in the second Pahlavi era and influenced by the changing system theory of the international system with the Soviet Union. The findings suggest that various variables such as the structure of the international system and international events, including World War II, the arrival of controversial forces in Iran, the Cold War, the post-Cold War, the US and Soviet policies, and the variables such as the issue of oil Azerbaijan's autonomy, Tudeh's actions in Iran, the issue of fisheries and borders. Also, the policies adopted by Iranian politicians, including negative balance policy, positive nationalism and independent national policy, have affected Iran-Soviet relations. In a general conclusion, from 1320 (1942) to 1357 (1979), the relationship between Iran and Russia has been an upward trend towards peaceful coexistence. But expansion of further relations in the economic, technical and cultural fields has been political rather than political.


Author(s):  
David J Ulbrich

The introduction to this anthology connects a diverse collection of essays that examine the 1940s as the critical decade in the United States’ ascendance in the Pacific Rim. Following the end of World War II, the United States assumed the hegemonic role in the region when Japan’s defeat created military and political vacuums in the region. It is in this context that this anthology stands not only as a précis of current scholarship but also as a prospectus for future research. The contributors’ chapters eschew the traditional focus on military operations that has dominated the historiography of 1940s in the Pacific Basin and East Asia. Instead, the contributors venture into areas of race, gender, technology, culture, media, diplomacy, and institutions, all of which add nuance and clarity to the existing literature of World War II and the early Cold War.


Author(s):  
Anna Oltman ◽  
Jonathan Renshon

Immigration has taken on renewed prominence in both domestic and international politics. Typical approaches to this pressing theoretical and policy problem, however, focus on either domestic politics (e.g., filling labor needs and integrating migrants into society) or international relations (e.g., international law or norms regarding the treatment of migrants). In this sense, work on immigration has coalesced around two ways of seeing this problem, one micro, one macro, and neither one related to foreign policy. This is particularly unfortunate given that a foreign policy approach—grounded in “mid-range theory,” an “actor-specific” approach, and a sensitivity to factors both above and below the state level—has the potential to add a great deal to our understanding of immigration in IR. A review of the literature reveals two approaches to immigration in IR. The first, largely grounded in the methods and assumptions of political economy, focuses on the “pull” or demand factors that incentivize and regulate migration to a receiving country. The second focuses on “push” factors that drive people from their homelands. This latter approach concentrates on displaced populations, human rights norms, and institutions and cooperation among states. Both approaches contribute a great deal, but are, unfortunately, isolated from each other: an outcome that is at least partly attributable to an arbitrary and politically expedient distinction between “refugees” and “ economic migrants” that countries found it in their interests to make in the aftermath of World War II. This discussion of immigration and foreign policy thus begins by surveying the theoretical and empirical landscape and providing a framework with which to understand contributions thus far. The following section will highlight three major themes emerging in an innovative new body of research. Fundamentally, these themes revolve around integration: whether it is the integration of security into immigration studies (typically dominated by an economics-based approach), of identity concerns into the public’s immigration preferences, or a focus on the multiple actors located in between the domestic public and international regimes. Suggestions for future research will conclude our discussion.


Author(s):  
Tannis Y. Arbuckle ◽  
Dolores Pushkar ◽  
June Chaikelson ◽  
David Andres

ABSTRACTThis paper reviews the literature on the relation of coping and control processes to health outcomes in late adulthood and presents new data on relations between coping and control processes and health for 295 World War II veterans. The results for the veterans showed that health was positively associated with cognitive coping, and negatively associated with behavioural coping and avoidance. No association was found between perceived locus of control and health. These findings, together with those in the literature, were discussed in terms of their implications for future research on the role of coping and control in health maintenance and their significance for people working with older persons.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 147-164
Author(s):  
Steven Jobbitt

The communist takeover in Hungary after World War II presented obvious challenges, hardships, and even dangers for the conservative-nationalist scholars who were part of the intellectual elite of the interwar period. Marginalized within the new socio-political order that emerged after the communist consolidation of power in 1948-49, conservative-nationalist intellectuals who were not completely silenced by the communists either retreated from public life entirely, or else found themselves having to struggle to remain relevant within the state-socialist system then under construction. Though limited in what they could publish, and relegated to minor and often precarious positions within the scholarly community, former conservative-nationalist scholars were nevertheless granted limited spaces within which they could produce relevant and even important scholarship, and in so doing could also “reinvent” themselves—if in many cases only partially and perhaps opportunistically—as public intellectuals. Focusing on the life and work of Ferenc Fodor between 1948 and his death in 1962, this article explores the concrete ways that a once-prominent geographer of the interwar period continued to contribute to geographical knowledge production under communism, and how he used this scholarly work as leverage in his attempts to partially rehabilitate himself in the early communist period. Contributing to a growing body of critical work on Hungarian geography under communism (see articles by Márton Czirfusz and Róbert Győri in this issue, for example), this study helps to lay the groundwork for future research on the relationship between the politics of scholarly production and the spatial re-imagining of postwar Hungary.


Author(s):  
Charles Pennaforte ◽  
Ricardo Luigi

The two first decades of the 21 st Century were marked by the recrudescence of two powerhouses, Russia and China. Given their important role on global geopolitics, these two countries took advantage of the gaps resulted from yet another crisis on the structure of global capitalism, which influenced the relative decline of the United States capacity to impose its will on the international system as they had been able to do so since the end of World War II. This article’s objective is to analyze the global geopolitical rearrangement due to a weakened United States which opened the possibility for the BRICS nations to emerge as possible sources of power. To reinforce this analysis, the world-systems perspective, (here on referred to as WSP) elaborated mainly by Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi is used, as well as a geopolitical approach to provide a link to international relations theories. Therefore, this paper is divided on to four sections. The first one interrelates the geopolitical theories and those of the WSP. The second section is guided towards understanding the origins and fundamentals of the WSP. On the third section, an approach is made towards the motivations and the effects of the rearrangement of power on the world’s geopolitics. Finally, on the last section, the roles and opportunities that have arisen from the emergence of the BRICS nations on the international system are presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 887
Author(s):  
Federico Steinberg

In recent years, the world economy is undergoing major structural transformations that are questioning the international economic order in effect since World War II, while putting in check the social contract in which stability was established in advanced democracies. The rise of the emerging powers, the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that has followed it, the challenges associated with the emergence of the knowledge economy or climate change and the increase in inequality, to mention just a few issues, they are forcing governments to rethink the management of an increasingly intense economic interdependence to respond to new global problems. But this rethinking occurs precisely at a time of change in the balances of power in the international system (characterized by the rise of emerging powers and the relative decline of the West, especially Europe), which makes finding solutions much more difficult Cooperatives to increasingly complex and more transnational challenges.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document