Minority Rights

2018 ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Level ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Rights Issues

It has often been noted that the political claims of minorities and indigenous peoples are marginalized within traditional state-centric international political theory; but perhaps more surprisingly, they are also marginalized within much contemporary cosmopolitan political theory. In this chapter, I will argue that neither cosmopolitanism nor statism as currently theorized is well equipped to evaluate the normative claims at stake in many minority rights issues. I begin by discussing how the “minority question” arose as an issue within international relations—that is, why minorities have been seen as a problem and a threat to international order—and how international actors have historically attempted to contain the problem, often in ways that were deeply unjust to minorities. I will then consider recent efforts to advance a pro-minority agenda at the international level, and how this agenda helps reveal some of the limits of both cosmopolitan and statist approaches to IPT.

Just War Theory in Times of Individual Rights

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-232
Author(s):  
Janina Dill
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Just War ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Radical Revision

Just war theory (JWT) has undergone a radical revision over the last two decades. This chapter discusses the implications of this reformulation for the role of JWT in International Political Theory (IPT) and for JWT’s strategic usefulness. Revisionists’ consistent prioritization of individual rights means JWT now follows the strictures of justified violence according to contemporary IPT. At the same time, the collective nature of war makes it impossible for anyone but the omniscient attacker to properly protect individual rights and thus to directly implement revisionist prescriptions. I argue that revisionism is strategically relevant not in spite of, but because of this lack of practicability on the battlefield. It highlights the impossibility of waging war in accordance with widespread expectations of moral appropriateness, which largely follow the strictures of justified violence according to contemporary IPT. This is a crucial limitation to the political utility of force in twenty-first-century international relations.

International Law and International Political Theory

2018 ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
Gerry Simpson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
War Crimes Trials ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
International Diplomacy ◽  
The Way

This chapter probes the way in which description, prescription, and critique form a congeries of approaches that together, in turn, produce an intellectual field that might be described as the political theory of international law (though it is hardly one thing, and some of it refuses altogether the injunctions of traditional political theory). All of this will lead to an examination of two particular problems of international diplomacy to which political theories of international law appear to have responded: namely, intervention and war crimes trials, and an engagement with two interdisciplinary turns (to History and to International Relations) through which international law has enlivened its habits of thought and theoretical inclinations.

scholarly journals International Political Theory Meets International Public Policy

2018 ◽  
pp. 480-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Barry
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
International Political Theory

How should International Political Theory (IPT) relate to public policy? Should theorists aspire for their work to be policy-relevant, and if so in what sense? When can we legitimately criticize a theory for failing to be relevant to practice? In this chapter, I argue that it counts heavily against a theory if it is not precise enough to guide policy and reform given certain empirical assumptions, but that theorists should be very cautious when engaging with questions of policy and institutional design. Some principles of IPT can be criticized for being insufficiently precise, but a degree of abstraction from concrete policy recommendations is a virtue, rather than a vice, of IPT. I discuss this issue with reference to John Rawls’s principle of a duty of assistance.

scholarly journals Regional order and peaceful change: Security communities as a via media in international relations theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 519-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Koschut
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Security Community ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
International Political Theory ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
Community Concept

The security community concept generally inhabits a rather small niche in the study of International Relations, as the logic of community fundamentally challenges the prevailing logic of anarchy. In this article, it is argued both on ontological and theoretical grounds that the concept’s intellectual heritage and depth transcends the boundaries of existing theories. In this sense, the concept of security community serves as a via media by linking different strands of International Relations theory together and by bridging various theoretical gaps. This argument will be developed in two steps. Firstly, it will be shown that the security community framework developed by Karl W Deutsch is deeply rooted in International Political Theory without belonging to one particular branch. By locating the concept in International Political Theory, an exercise that has been neglected by the security community literature; it will be secondly demonstrated that the concept of security community takes the middle ground between specific strands of International Relations theory, as these strands are ultimately based on concepts of moral philosophy.

A Political Theory of Decolonization

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-36
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Integration ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anticolonial Nationalism

This chapter sketches a political theory of decolonization that rethinks how anticolonial nationalism posed the problem of empire to expand our sense of its aims and trajectories. Drawing on recent histories of international law as well as the political thought of Black Atlantic worldmakers, it reconceives empire as processes of unequal international integration that took an increasingly racialized form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Confronted with a racialized international order, anticolonial nationalists turned to projects of worldmaking that would secure the conditions of international nondomination. It argues that attention to the specificity of political projects that emerged out of the legacy of imperialism provides a postcolonial approach to contemporary cosmopolitanism. A postcolonial cosmopolitanism entails a critical diagnosis of the persistence of empire and a normative orientation that retains the anti-imperial aspiration for a domination-free international order.

Thomas Hobbes and the external relations of states

1979 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 196-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Forsyth
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Realist Approach ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
External Relations

Hobbes' conception of relations between states has attracted attention from two directions. Students of political theory who have focused on Hobbes have from time to time looked beyond their central preoccupations and noted briefly the relevance of his doctrine for the international arena. The external relations of Leviathan are for them on the fringe of Hobbes' theory. Students of international relations on the other hand invoke Hobbes' name frequently as a kind of shorthand for a particular approach to the international world, one that is also associated with Machiavelli, and usually called the ‘realist’ approach. By contrast with the political theorists, they tend to look from the outside into Hobbes’ theory and to ask whether and how far the ‘domestic’ situation of individuals in a Hobbesian state of nature bears an analogy with the ‘external’ situation of states in relationship to one another.

scholarly journals Incorporating Indigenous Nations into International Political Economy

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel L. Wellhausen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Theory Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Context ◽  
Indigenous Nations ◽  
Indian Nations

This comment elaborates on and extends the roundtable’s discussion by turning to the context of Indigenous peoples. Even setting aside normative motivations, expanded study of Indigenous peoples provides clear opportunities for theory development in international political economy and international relations more broadly. For example, the legal status of American Indian Nations’ 326 unique political jurisdictions can inform the political economy of marginalized identity groups in a non-Westphalian but nonetheless international context.

scholarly journals International relations between balance of power and balance of threat (theoretical framework)

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-298
Author(s):  
م.د.حيدر زاير العامري
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Hard Power ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The U.S

The international order have been changed during the modern and contemporary history, and however those changing in international order doesn't go to beyond several concepts such as " balance of power";" conflict"; "power" and " threaten", which all those are depending on the fundamentals or basic terms which was called " power" or" hard power". In this time, we can say that the political relations among the effective units could be analyzed according to the concept of " balance of threaten" instead of the classic concept which had called " balance of power" that the scholars used to describe the international relations . In conclusion , the concept of " balance of threaten" has a significant importance in the studies of the international relations especially after the attack of 11 september at the U.S.

Contesting the “Corrupt Elites,” Creating the “Pure People,” and Renegotiating the Hierarchies of the International Order? Populism and Foreign Policy-Making in Turkey and Hungary

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fulya Hisarlıoğlu ◽  
Lerna K Yanık ◽  
Umut Korkut ◽  
İlke Civelekoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
International System ◽  
International Order ◽  
Vertical Stratification ◽  
International Level ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article explores the link between populism and hierarchies in international relations by examining the recent foreign policy-making in Turkey and Hungary—two countries run by populist leaders. We argue that when populists bring populism into foreign policy, they do so by contesting the “corrupt elites” of the international order and, simultaneously, attempt to create the “pure people” transnationally. The populists contest the “eliteness” and leadership status of these “elites” and the international order and its institutions, that is, the “establishment,” that these “elites” have come to represent by challenging them both in discourse and in action. The creation of the “pure people” happens by discursively demarcating the “underprivileged” of the international order as a subcategory based on religion and supplementing them with aid, thus mimicking the distributive strategies of populism, this time at the international level. We illustrate that when populist leaders, insert populism into foreign policies of their respective states, through contesting the “corrupt elites” and creating the “pure people,” the built-in vertical stratification mechanisms of populism that stems from the antagonistic binaries inherent to populism provide them with the necessary superiority and inferiority labels allowing them to renegotiate hierarchies in the international system in an attempt to modify the existing ones or to create new ones.

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