scholarly journals Kant, the Republican Peace, and Moral Guidance in International Law

1994 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 39-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecelia Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Ideal

Just as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes became etched into the minds of international relations scholars as the oracles of realpolitik during the Cold War, Immanuel Kant appears to be well on his way to becoming the prophet of “progressive international reform” in the post—Cold War era. Not only has Kant's thought provided the underpinnings of one of the major traditions of international law, but there is a groundswell of interest among international relations scholars today in the question of whether contemporary events, particularly the proliferation of republican states and attempts to create them, signal the march forward to the Kantian ideal of republican peace. Yet, prior to asking what contemporary events signify for the attainment of the Kantian ideal, we should analyze the conflicting interpretions fo Kantian political thought so as to understand the meaning and implications of the ideal itself. Such a task is not merely pedantie—it is necessary to determine the utility of political philosophy for providing understanding and guidance in the real world.

Europe after the Cold War: interstate order or post-sovereign regional system?

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 201-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM WALLACE
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
World Politics ◽  
State System ◽  
Global State ◽  
European State ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Regional System ◽  
The Cold War

The changing structure of European order poses, for any student of international relations, some fundamental questions about the evolution of world politics. Concepts of European order and of the European state system are, after all, central to accepted ideas of international relations. Out of the series of conflicts and negotiations—religious wars, coalitions to resist first the Hapsburg and then the Bourbon attempt at European hegemony—developed ideas and practices which still structure the contemporary global state system: the equality of states; international law as regulating relations among sovereign and equal states; domestic sovereignty as exclusive, without external oversight of the rules of domestic order. The ‘modern’ state system, modern scholars now agree, did not spring fully-clothed from the Treaty of Westphalia at the close of the Thirty Years' War; it evolved through a succession of treaties and conferences, from 1555 to 1714. It remains acceptable, nevertheless, to describe the European state order as built around the Westphalian system.

Republican security theory revisited

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 2269-2292 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORG KUSTERMANS
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractRepublicanism is getting increasing attention in International Relations. Engaging Daniel Deudney'sRepublican Security Theory, it is argued that republicanism should be interpreted in ideological terms, that it is a polysemous tradition of political thought, and that it matters because it is socially embodied in world political practice. Special attention is given to republicanism's relationship to the question of technology. A short case study of the Cold War illustrates the central claims of the argument.

scholarly journals Catch Flies with Honey, not Vinegar: A Prescriptive Analysis of the Western Response to the 2014 Ukraine Conflict

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Michael Lakusta
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Crimean Peninsula ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
International Response ◽  
Proxy War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Economic Ties

After the 2014 Euromaidan protests and deposition of the Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and proceeded to wage a proxy war through pro-Russian seperatists. As a result of these actions, international relations with Russia have sunk to the lowest levels since the Cold War. The deterioration of international relations has included individual and sector-level sanctions being employed between the West and Russia. These sanctions have been implemented with the aim of signaling intolerance of Russia's actions in Ukraine, and to promote reform of its aggressive policies in Eastern Europe. To date, these sanctions have not altered Russian policy, but rather have isolated Russia and pushed it towards increased South American and Asian economic ties. Furthermore, the current economic trough Russia is experiencing is not entirely a result of international sanctions, but is instead largely due to the drop in global oil and gas prices between 2014 and 2017. As such, sanctions are not an effective long-term tool with which to penalize Russia. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the international response to the Ukrainian conflict while emphasizing the importance of Russo-West reconciliation via economic integration. To respond effectively to aggressive Russian foreign policy, it is important to consider the innter workings of the Putin Administration and its post-Cold War political economy. With a focus on mutual interests, this precriptive review puts the Ukrainian conflict and current slump of relations into their proper contexts, while also pushing for the reconsideration of maintaining ineffective retaliatory sanctions.

scholarly journals After International Law: Anthropology Beyond the “Age of Human Rights”

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 289-293
Author(s):  
Mark Goodale
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
The Cold War

This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the Cold War. It argues that anthropological research has made important contributions to the wider understanding of international law as a mechanism for social and political change, a framework for protecting vulnerable populations, and a language through which collective identities can be expressed and valorized. Yet, over time, international law has lost many of these expansive functions, a shift that anthropologists have also studied, although with greater reluctance and difficulty. The essay explains the ways in which particular categories of international law, such as human rights and international criminal justice, grew dramatically in importance and power during the 1990s and early 2000s, a shift whose complexities anthropologists studied at the local level. As the essay also explains, anthropological research began to detect a weakening in human rights implementation and respect for international legal norms, a countervailing shift that has broader implications for the possibilities for international cooperation and the resolution of conflicts, among others. At the same time, the retreat of international law from its highpoint in the early post-Cold War years has given way to the reemergence of non-legal strategies for advancing change and accounting for past injustices, including strategies based on social confrontation, moral shaming, and even violence.

Norms of Self-Determination: Thinking Sovereignty Through

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 195-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Third World ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Way

This essay is an exploration of the contemporary normative conditions of thinking about the problem of sovereignty. Specifically it is a consideration of some aspects of the way in which the problem of Third World sovereignty has been taken up and argued out in international relations theory and international law on the legal-political terrain of self-determination. The essay traces the transformation of the norm of self-determination as an anti-colonial standard to its post-Cold War re-composition as a norm of democratic governance.

scholarly journals The Future of World Order: Building a Community of Common Destiny

2017 ◽  
Vol 03 (02) ◽  
pp. 159-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Yakunin
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Common Destiny

This article briefly examines the political and ideological aspects of Western countries’ post-Cold War approach to the world order. The Western triumph in the Cold War is generally attributed to reasons that are largely erroneous. The ongoing crises in international relations reveal structural inconsistencies, which have been present in the United States’ foreign strategy since the collapse of the Soviet Union and have contributed to the subsequent erosion of the global order. The article analyzes the new trends of globalization resulting from the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It concludes that Russia and China have now largely recognized Washington’s failure to establish a unipolar world system and to legitimize it through various political and media mechanisms and techniques. It suggests that it is only through the solidary development that both China and Russia are currently championing with their recent grand integration initiatives that a more successful and sustainable multipolar world benefiting every nation on the planet can be built and maintained.

War for Peace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murad Idris
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Sayyid Qutb ◽  
The Ideal

Peace is the elimination of war, but peace also authorizes war. We are informed today that this universal ideal can only be secured by the wars that it eliminates. The paradoxical position of peace—opposed to war, authorizing war—is encapsulated by the claim that “war is for the sake of peace.” War for Peace is a genealogy of the political theoretic logics and morals of “peace.” It examines peace in political theory, as an ideal that authorizes war, in the writings of ten thinkers, from ancient to contemporary thought: Plato, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Ibn Khaldūn, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and Sayyid Quṭb. It argues that the ideal of peace functions parasitically, provincially, and polemically. In its parasitical structure, peace is accompanied by other ideals, such as friendship, security, concord, and law, which reduces it to a politics of consensus. In its provincial structure, the universalized content of peace reflects its idealizers’ desires, fears, interests, and constructions of the globe. In its polemical structure, the idealization of peace is the product of antagonisms and it then enables hostility. As idealizations of peace are disseminated across political thought, a core that valorizes peace and necessitates war insistently remains. War for Peace uncovers the genealogical basis of peace’s moralities and the political functions of its idealizations, historically and into the present.

Security Studies and the end of the Cold War

1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
National Security ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Military Threat ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

The end of the cold war has generated numerous reflections on the nature of the world in its aftermath. The reduced military threat to American security has triggered proposals for expanding the concept of national security to include nonmilitary threats to national well-being. Some go further and call for a fundamental reexamination of the concepts, theories, and assumptions used to analyze security problems. In order to lay the groundwork for such a reexamination, the emergence and evolution of security studies as a subfield of international relations is surveyed, the adequacy of the field for coping with the post—cold war world is assessed, and proposals for the future of security studies are discussed. It is argued that a strong case can be made for reintegration of security studies with the study of international politics and foreign policy.

The Ukraine Crisis, Cold War II, and International Law

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris N. Mamlyuk
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
The United States ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Ukraine Crisis ◽  
Great Game ◽  
Transit Routes

The Ukraine crisis has, yet again, called into question the coherence and stability of international law both as a language for mediating particular types of international disputes—such as conflicts between the so-called Great Powers— and as a set of institutions capable of serving asforafor the resolution of these disputes. Given the scale and intensity of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the magnitude of its regional and global repercussions, a number of policymakers and historians have already made compelling arguments for why the conflict may be the most significant threat to global order since the end of the Cold War—perhaps even since the Cuban Missile Crisis. While policymakers in the U.S. and Russia have cautioned against drawing Cold War parallels, numerous analysts in both countries have proclaimed the start of a new Cold War in light of the rapid deterioration in relations between Moscow and Washington. Beyond bilateral U.S.–Russia relations, and in the words of Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, Cold War Two (hereinafter “CWII”) has “effectively put an end to the interregnum of [post-Cold War] partnership and cooperation betweenthe Westand Russia.” While sharing the view that a new Cold War has erupted, this article suggest that its causes are far deeper and its likely battlegrounds are far wider than mere antagonism between the United States and Russia over the fate of Ukraine, To the extent that CWII has begun, it may mark a return to interbloc rivalry, East versus West, or even Great Game geopolitics. To complement these frames, the present conflict may also be understood by viewing it through the prism of political economy, particularly the study of “new-statism,” or the new developmental state within the broader context of the development of global capitalism. Thinking of CWII this way allows one to ask whether CWII is actually a war between Western liberal capitalism and various systems of state capitalism, of which Russia's is but one. To be even more precise, one can also ask whether the conflict is better thought of as a contest between different state capitalisms for control over key trade or transit routes, production locales, and markets. Tribes, states, and empires have always waged mortal combat over these material matters. CWII—whether it has started or soon will—will likely rest on similar considerations. And yet, despite the seriousness of the threat, there has been remarkably little academic discussion, and much less public debate, regarding the configuration of global power flows that has contributed to this crisis or the role, and limitations of law in structuring our political imaginations in response to these challenges. This Article is an attempt to call attention to several serious aspects of the Ukraine crisis which have hitherto been underanalyzed, namely the role of information warfare in exacerbating its magnitude.

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