Defining the Scope

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-60
Author(s):  
Rosemary Foot
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Core Element ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
To Come ◽  
Global Influence ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides the building blocks for the argument that is to come. It explains the value of adopting a social ontology in order better to understand the way that power, beliefs, and image can interrelate in a mutually constitutive way to shape a state’s discourse and behaviour. The chapter also justifies the book’s focus on the UN in the post-Cold War era and the UN decision to make human protection a core element of UN activity. Turning to the China case, the chapter demonstrates Beijing’s growing role within the UN deriving from its greater familiarity with the UN environment, growing global influence and interests, and an increasingly more ambitious central leadership. It sets out China’s official and wider societal beliefs associated with the idea of human protection, explaining how and why the UN is useful to China in its performative role as ‘responsible great power’.

Charting the Tibet Issue in the Sino–Indian Border Dispute

China Report ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tsering Topgyal
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Great Power ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
New Realism ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Border Dispute ◽  
Indian Relations ◽  
Historical Developments

In official quarters in Beijing and New Delhi, the Tibet issue figures only as a bargaining chip to ‘regulate’ their bilateral relations, not as an issue that has an independent bearing on the intractability or resolution of the Sino–Indian border dispute. Scholars of the Sino–Indian border dispute either dismiss the relevance of the Tibet issue or treat it as only a prop in their framing of the dispute in terms of security, nationalism and great power rivalry. This article argues that the Tibet issue is more central to the border dispute than official and scholarly circles have recognised so far. The article demonstrates this through an examination of the historical roots of the border row, the centrality of Tibet and Tibetans in the boundary claims of both Beijing and New Delhi and the revelation of concurrent historical developments in the border dispute and the Sino–Tibetan conflict. On the place of Tibet in broader Sino–Indian relations, the article posits that while Tibet was a victim of India’s moralistic–idealist policies toward China in the 1950s, it has now become a victim of the new realism pervading India’s policy of engaging and emulating China in the post-Cold War era.

‘Realism as an Unsentimental Intellectual Temper’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mats Berdal
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Theoretical Construction

The post-Cold War era witnessed a growing tendency to justify the use and the threat of use of military force in international relations on humanitarian grounds. Freedman’s writing on the use of armed force in pursuit of humanitarian goals and his contribution to the field are explored in this chapter. He rejects the traditional dichotomies in International Relations scholarship between Realism and Idealism. Freedman’s work on ‘New Interventionism’, with the Chicago Speech contribution at its core, suggests that it is unhelpful to delineate sharply different existing schools of thought, or paradigms. Freedman draws a distinction between ‘realism as an unsentimental temper’ and realism as a ‘theoretical construction.’ Liberal values are important for Freedman and their universality is to be asserted, but that does not mean being naively oblivious to dangers and difficulties inherent in seeking to promote them as standards against which Western governments should be judged.

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