Introduction

Author(s):  
Oliver P. Richmond ◽  
Gëzim Visoka

This introductory chapter offers an overview of the key concepts and themes covered in the Handbook. The first section explores how peacebuilding, statebuilding, and peace formation are conceived in different international relations approaches and social science disciplines, offering an overview of the conceptual bedrock of major theories and approaches. The second section situates these approaches among other major global issues to illustrate their global, regional, and local resonance. The third section disaggregates key themes in peacebuilding and statebuilding studies. Finally, the fourth section looks at key features of postliberal peace and peace formation processes both in theory and in practice.

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-301
Author(s):  
Wesley D. Chapin

At the beginning of 1995, nearly two million Turkish nationals were living in Germany. While this represents only about 2.5% of the total population, the Turkish minority significantly influences German politics. As the single largest group of “foreigners” living in Germany, the Turkish population is a prime target of rightwing violence. Questions regarding Turkish rights to residency, work permits, and citizenship are controversial domestic political issues and their presence affects international relations between Germany and Turkey. This article examines the Turkish diaspora in Germany and its implications for Germany’s domestic and international politics. The first section identifies the status of the Turks living in Germany. The second traces the growth of the Turkish population in Germany. The third evaluates the domestic political and economic effects that the Turkish presence engenders, as well as prospects for assimilation. The fourth section identifies ways that international relations are influenced by the Turkish minority in Germany.


Author(s):  
Carlos Aurélio Pimenta de Faria

The purpose of this article is to analyze teaching and research on foreign policy in Brazil in the last two decades. The first section discusses how the main narratives about the evolution of International Relations in Brazil, considered as an area of knowledge, depict the place that has been designed, in the same area, to the study of foreign policy. The second section is devoted to an assessment of the status of foreign policy in IR teaching in the country, both at undergraduate and scricto sensu graduate programs. There is also a mapping and characterization of theses and dissertations which had foreign policy as object. The third section assesses the space given to studies on foreign policy in three academic forums nationwide, namely: the meetings of ABRI (Brazilian Association of International Relations), the ABCP (Brazilian Association of Political Science) and ANPOCS (National Association of Graduate Programs and Research in Social Sciences). In the fourth section there is a mapping and characterization of the published articles on foreign policy between 1990 and 2010, in the following IR Brazilian journals: Cena Internacional, Contexto Internacional, Política Externa and Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional. At last, the fifth and final section seeks to assess briefly the importance that comparative studies have in the sub-area of foreign policy in the country. The final considerations make a general assessment of the empirical research presented in the previous sections.


Author(s):  
David A. Baldwin

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the importance of the concept of power in political science. It then sets out the book's three main purposes. The first is to clarify and explicate Robert Dahl's concept of power. This is the concept of power most familiar to political scientists, the one most criticized. The second purpose is to examine twelve controversial issues in power analysis. The third is to describe and analyze the role of the concept of power in the international relations literature with particular reference to the three principal approaches—realism, neoliberalism, and constructivism. It is argued that a Dahlian perspective is potentially relevant to each of these theoretical approaches.


Author(s):  
Kevin C. Elliott ◽  
Ted Richards

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book Exploring Inductive Risk. It introduces the concept of inductive risk, briefly traces the history of the argument from inductive risk, and sets out the book’s chapters in terms of four themes. The first part, “Weighing Inductive Risk,” illustrates the concept of inductive risk and the judgments involved in weighing different sorts of errors. The chapters in the second part, “Evading Inductive Risk,” examine proposals by critics who argue that the value judgments associated with inductive risk should be made by citizens and policymakers, not by scientists. The third section, “The Breadth of Inductive Risk,” illustrates the wide variety of decision points throughout scientific practice where considerations of inductive risk are relevant. The book’s fourth section, “Exploring the Limits of Inductive Risk,” considers whether it still makes sense to apply the label of inductive risk to such a broad array of phenomena.


Author(s):  
Jon Towlson

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Close Encounters is a UFO movie that arose from a resurgence of ufology in the 1970s, which coincided with the growth of New Age movements, mysticism, alien-abduction cults, and an increasing belief in conspiracy theories. The film speaks to Utopianism, the belief within international relations theory that war can be eliminated either by perfecting man or by perfecting government. Utopianism is, of course, a key concept in science fiction. The chapter then looks at Jack Kroll's review of Close Encounters, which demonstrates how so many of the political criticisms surrounding the film stem from the time of its initial reception, and how its cultural denotation as ‘transcendent’ science fiction was immediately recognised and accepted by some — but not all — critics. The chapter also details the synopsis of the film.


Author(s):  
James Loxton

This introductory chapter presents the central puzzle of the book and sets the stage for the chapters to come. The first section defines the terms “conservative party” and “party-building.” The second section discusses the rise of the “new right” in Latin America during the 1980s. The third section presents data on new conservative parties formed in the region between 1978 and 2010. It highlights the puzzling fact that all of the successful cases (e.g., UDI in Chile, ARENA in El Salvador) were authoritarian successor parties, while those with more democratic origins (e.g., UCEDE in Argentina, PAN in Guatemala) failed. The fourth section briefly lays out the book’s argument about authoritarian inheritance and counterrevolutionary struggle. The fifth section considers potential alternative explanations. The final two sections discuss research design and provide a road map for the rest of the book.


Author(s):  
Peter Marcus Kristensen

This chapter traces the travelogue—and marginalization in particular—of peaceful change in International Relations (IR) after the world wars. It argues that its marginalization is explained not (only) by its intellectual merits but also by political, institutional, and material changes that were unfavorable to the peaceful change agenda. The first section outlines how the changing geopolitical context, bipolarity and nuclear weapons, meant that the overarching concern of great powers was to stabilize and consolidate, not change, the order. The second section argues that the conflation of peaceful change with an appeasement policy and the 1938 Munich Agreement contributed to political and intellectual stigma in the postwar era. The third section argues that decolonization changed the articulation of the problem: where interwar articulations were primarily concerned with peaceful change through colonial redistribution, in effect to maintain European peace and supremacy, some postwar articulations used it in the anticolonial struggle to argue for revision of the imperial and colonial legacies of international law. The fourth section turns toward institutional changes, pointing to the demise of the interdisciplinary International Studies Conference (ISC) along with the postwar disciplinarization of IR within political science, which excluded much of the international law discourse that had earlier informed peaceful change. The fifth section argues that intellectual developments, notably the postwar stigma on interwar IR as “idealist,” contributed to the marginalization of some versions of peaceful change, while realist and neorealist versions survived. The final two sections trace two such ostensibly “idealist” lineages: peaceful change in international law and in (neo)functionalist IR.


2002 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATERINA DALACOURA

How do the terms ‘community’ and ‘communitarianism’ apply in non-Western contexts? How useful are they as social science terms in understanding Iranian and, generally, Middle Eastern politics? What is the impact of communitarianism as a political project in one of the few countries where it has been tried, namely Iran after the Revolution of 1979? This article seeks answers to these questions as a way of modestly advancing the liberal-communitarian debate in international relations theory. Its argument, built on limited but precise evidence, is that the concept of ‘community’ suffers from irremediable conceptual problems and ambiguities and that the project of communitarianism has pernicious political implications. The critique is in three parts. The first points to the inapplicability of the term ‘community’ to national society and its superfluousness as a social science term, using Iran and the Middle East as testing grounds. The second part develops the anti-essentialist argument on Islam and culture as a way of refuting the essence of ‘community’. The third part is an exposition of the links between ‘community’ as a political project in Iran with ideology, hierarchy and corruption.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 59-75
Author(s):  
JAROSLAV KLÁTIK ◽  
◽  
LIBOR KLIMEK

The work deals with implementation of electronic monitoring of sentenced persons in the Slovak Republic. It is divided into eight sections. The first section introduces restorative justice as a prerequisite of electronic monitoring in criminal proceedings. While the second section points out at the absence of legal regulation of electronic monitoring of sentenced persons at European level, the third section points out at recommendations of the Council of Europe addressed to European States. The fourth section analyses relevant alternative punishments in Slovak criminal justice. The fifth section introduces early beginnings of implementation of concerned system - the pilot project “Electronic Personnel Monitoring System” of the Ministry of Justice of the Slovak Republic. While the sixth section is focused on Slovak national law regulating electronic monitoring of sentenced persons - the Act No. 78/2015 Coll. on Control of the Enforcement of Certain Decisions by Technical Instruments, the seventh section is focused on further amendments of Slovak national law - namely the Act No. 321/2018 Coll. and the Act No. 214/2019 Coll. The last eight section introduces costs of system implementation and its operation.


Author(s):  
Abraham A. Singer

This chapter introduces the main argument of the book, describing key concepts such as the idea of “norm-governed productivity,” the use of norms to structure cooperation instead of prices. It then defines the concept of the corporation, describing the institution’s key features, and lays out the general structure of the book. Finally, it considers some conceptual and methodological issues that frame the rest of the book: the distinction between economic and political approaches, and the problem of trying to subsume the topic wholly into one or the other; and an argument for why a normative analysis of the corporation has to take certain features of markets and capitalism for granted.


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