Complexity of World Politics: Methodological Aspects

2015 ◽  
pp. 58-67
Author(s):  
E. Zinov'eva ◽  
A. Kazantsev
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Complex Systems ◽  
Complexity Theory ◽  
Complex Adaptive Systems ◽  
Adaptive Systems ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Traditional Theory ◽  
The World

The article addresses the use of complexity theory in the analysis of international relations. Complexity theory points to the inherent unpredictability of world relations theories. The current international system has reached such complexity level of politics that it cannot be analyzed on the basis of linear rationality used in the international standard, which leads to non-deterministic causality. The article discusses the evolution and basic tenets of the complexity theory, approaches to the world politics analysis established within its framework. The complexity research methodology focuses on actors and their values, interests and beliefs, as well as on the nature of interactions between them. In this regard, complexity theory is closely related to the modern constructivist theory of international relations. Today, the number of international actors is increasing, which increases the complexity of the world system. Therefore, analytical methodology should take into account the role of non-state actors as well as the high complexity of contemporary world politics, which is multi-layered and dynamic. In this respect, the complexity theory is associated with contemporary neoliberalism. Agent-oriented computer-based modeling is the main and a very promising scientific methodology applied to the study of complex adaptive systems, including world politics. In the complexity theory, this modeling implies the simulation of agent behavior (in this regard, agents are international relations actors), based on the simulation of the patterns, according to which agents process the information using adaptive mechanisms or behavior limiting norms and rules. In general, in terms of the complexity theory, foreign policy issues are always multidimensional, decisions have unintended consequences and are never simple. However, complex systems can be controlled, and even their structure can be altered. Still, there are no unambiguous tools of influencing the situation, and all recommendations should be taken with caution. The authors conclude that the complexity theory offers new explanations, research directions and practical perspectives for international relations research. Agent-oriented computer simulation also allows the incorporation into the analysis of a significant part of the knowledge accumulated in the international relations traditional theory framework. Acknowledgements. The article was prepared as a part of the project № 14-18-02973 “Long-Term Prognosis of the International Relations Development” fi nanced by the Russian Scientifi c Foundation. The authors express gratitude to M.M. Chaikovskii, Dr. Sci. (Physics and Mathematics), for the consultations on the mathematical aspects of the complex systems analysis.

scholarly journals Conceptual Fundamentals of Post-Westphalian International Relations

2020 ◽  
Vol 12(48) (4) ◽  
pp. 69-85
Author(s):  
Alla Kyrydon ◽  
Sergiy Troyan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
International Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Structure Changes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Conceptual approaches to understanding the current stage of the evolution of international relations were put in place during the destruction of the bipolar world of the Cold War and the formation of new foundations of the world and international order. The distinctiveness of this process is that the collapse of the postwar system took place in peaceful conditions. Most often, two terms are used to describe the interconnectedness and interdependence of world politics after the fall of the Iron Curtain: the post-bipolar (post-westphalian) international system or international relations after the end of the Cold War. Two terms, post-bipolar international system and international relations after the end of the Cold War, have common features, which usually allows them to be used as synonyms and makes them the most popular when choosing a common comprehensive definition for the modern international relations. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the global bipolar system put on the agenda issues that cannot be resolved within the traditional terms “poles,” “balance of power,” “configuration of the balance of power” etc. The world has entered a period of uncertainty and growing risks. the global international system is experiencing profound shocks associated with the transformation of its structure, changes in its interaction with the environment, which accordingly affects its regional and peripheral dimensions. In modern post-bipolar relations of shaky equilibrium, there is an obvious focus on the transformation of the world international order into a “post-American world” with the critical dynamics of relations between old and new actors at the global level. The question of the further evolution of the entire system of international relations in the post-bipolar world and the tendency of its transformation from a confrontational to a system of cooperation remains open.

scholarly journals The Beginning of the Post-modern Geopolitical Epoch and the Peculiarities of the System of Contemporary International Relations in the 21st Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 111-118
Author(s):  
George Zviadadze
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
21St Century ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Order System ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The World ◽  
Characteristic Features

After transformation of unipolarity and reformatting world order system, a question been forwarded on how new system is to be founded on. As it is known classical international relations system developed since Westphalia Agreement of 1648 has been composed mainly by the state as key actors of international politics. The system has been developed two type of regimes: soft bipolarity and balance of power interchanged in several period of time consequently. One of the characteristic features of globalization is a fundamental change of the international system and world order. It differs from the world of post-Cold War period with the stance of different actors of international relations on each other as well as with the forms of sharing power and that of interconnections. In that context there were four phases of the international relations systems: the system of Westphalia, the system of Vienna, the system of Versailles, the system of Yalta-Potsdam and later international relations were transformed into bipolarity one. Since demolishing classical Cold War order and entering into new epoch of anarchic scenario, the states as key actors of the system have been diminishing in favour of so-called “nonstate actors”. However, in the international system of the 21st century, the nationstate still has particular functions. It represents the dominant element of the world politics which can influence the behaviour of the population and non-state actors.

scholarly journals A New Look of World Politics: Reformatting the Post-Bipolar Space

2016 ◽  
pp. 7-12
Author(s):  
K. P. Borishpolets
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Ukrainian Crisis ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Qualitative Changes

The article evaluates the qualitative changes in world politics during 2014-2015.In the last two years the system of international relations encountered significant difficulties. Contradictions accumulated in different spheres of world politics that were usually treated as latent, arose in the agenda. The starting point of this transformation was the Ukrainian crisis. However, the further events force one to reassess not only its direct consequences but also wide processes at the global level. One of them is deterioration of relations between Russia and Western countries, increase of influence of large non-Western markets and strengthening of turbulence in developing countries. Project of the unipolar regulation, promoted by the US, demonstrates its ineffectiveness. The main point here is inability of the US to secure the stability of the international system without real consensus of all world powers. We witness an active blend of traditional and new challenges to the international security that decreases the controllability of the situation, first of all in regional segments of the world, Middle East and Europe in particular. These processes give ground for reformatting of the world development, and post-bipolar world politics is gaining a new face. We speak not about going back to pre-crisis order, but about step-by-step elimination of the American hegemony in global and regional decision-making. There will be deepening of the fragmentation of the world politics and growth of strife of the international relations that may continue in the mid-term perspective.

scholarly journals Understanding The Dynamic of International System Through The Lens of Complex System Approach

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Indra Kusumawardhana
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Complex Systems ◽  
System Approach ◽  
International System ◽  
Transition Process ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Ir Study ◽  
The Cold War

The International Relations Study has undergone many changes in its dynamics,especially in view of the dynamic conditions of world politics. It directly influences the development of the IR study. This paper discusses how the theory of complex systems explain the dynamics of the international system after the end of the Cold War. Through the theory, the author seeks to see the changes that occur in interstate interaction, especially in the framework of thinking about the interests of each country. Interaction between countries then encourage the existence of different systems between one another, depending on how the country chooses interaction groups. The author also seeks the inter-state interaction that formed into an international system can be studied from the transition process to change the direction of interaction to see how the true international system is formed through the views of the theory of complex systems.

Frustrated sovereigns: the agency that makes the world go around

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 787-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Epstein ◽  
Thomas Lindemann ◽  
Ole Jacob Sending
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Symbolic Structure ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Dynamic ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Do So

AbstractIn this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, tomisrecognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Our point of departure is not only that the desire for recognition is key social dynamic, but that thefailureto obtain this recognition is built into this very desire. It is a crucial factor for understanding how international actors behave, including, but not only, states.Thus understood, the desire for recognition is not simply a desire for social goods, for status or for statehood, but for more agency – more capacity to act. We explore the logic of misrecognition and show how the international system is a symbolic structure that is ordained by an unrealisable ideal of what we call ‘sovereign agency’.

Constructing Identity in “Glocal” Politics

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
M. A. Muqtedar Khan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Important Concept ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This paper seeks to understand the impact of current global politicaland socioeconomic conditions on the construction of identity. I advancean argument based on a two-step logic. First, I challenge the characterizationof current socioeconomic conditions as one of globalization bymarshaling arguments and evidence that strongly suggest that along withglobalization, there are simultaneous processes of localization proliferatingin the world today. I contend that current conditions are indicative ofthings far exceeding the scope of globalization and that they can bedescribed more accurately as ccglocalization.~H’2a ving established thisclaim, I show how the processes of glocalization affect the constructionof Muslim identity.Why do I explore the relationship between glocalization and identityconstruction? Because it is significant. Those conversant with current theoreticaldebates within the discipline of international relations’ are awarethat identity has emerged as a significant explanatory construct in internationalrelations theory in the post-Cold War era.4 In this article, I discussthe emergence of identity as an important concept in world politics.The contemporary field of international relations is defined by threephilosophically distinct research programs? rationalists: constructivists,’and interpretivists.’ The moot issue is essentially a search for the mostimportant variable that can help explain or understand the behavior ofinternational actors and subsequently explain the nature of world politicsin order to minimize war and maximize peace.Rationalists contend that actors are basically rational actors who seekthe maximization of their interests, interests being understood primarilyin material terms and often calculated by utility functions maximizinggiven preferences? Interpretivists include postmodernists, critical theorists,and feminists, all of whom argue that basically the extant worldpolitical praxis or discourses “constitute” international agents and therebydetermine their actions, even as they reproduce world politics by ...

Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The World ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

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.

scholarly journals The hierarchical society: the politics of self-determination and the constitution of new states after 1919

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-396
Author(s):  
Maja Spanu
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of

International Relations scholarship disconnects the history of the so-called expansion of international society from the presence of hierarchies within it. In contrast, this article argues that these developments may in fact be premised on hierarchical arrangements whereby new states are subject to international tutelage as the price of acceptance to international society. It shows that hierarchies within international society are deeply entrenched with the politics of self-determination as international society expands. I substantiate this argument with primary and secondary material on the Minority Treaty provisions imposed on the new states in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe admitted to the League of Nations after World War I. The implications of this claim for International Relations scholarship are twofold. First, my argument contributes to debates on the making of the international system of states by showing that the process of expansion of international society is premised on hierarchy, among and within states. Second, it speaks to the growing body of scholarship on hierarchy in world politics by historicising where hierarchies come from, examining how diverse hierarchies are nested and intersect, and revealing how different actors navigate these hierarchies.

Another Geopolitics? International Relations and the Boundaries of World Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regan Burles
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
Ecological Theories ◽  
Problems And Solutions ◽  
Shed Light

Abstract Geopolitics has become a key site for articulating the limits of existing theories of international relations and exploring possibilities for alternative political formations that respond to the challenges posed by massive ecological change and global patterns of violence and inequality. This essay addresses three recent books on geopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene: Simon Dalby's Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability (2020), Jairus Victor Grove's Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (2019), and Bruno Latour's Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018). The review outlines and compares how these authors pose contemporary geopolitics as a problem and offer political ecology as the ground for an alternative geopolitics. The essay considers these books in the context of critiques of world politics in international relations to shed light on both the contributions and the limits of political ecological theories of global politics. I argue that the books under review encounter problems and solutions posed in Kant's critical and political writings in relation to the concepts of epigenesis and teleology. These provoke questions about the ontological conceptions of order that enable claims to world political authority in the form of a global international system coextensive with the earth's surface.

Islamic International Relations Towards a Theoretical Framework

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gubara Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The World

The Western originators of the multi-disciplinary social sciences and their successors, including most major Western social intellectuals, excluded religion as an explanation for the world and its affairs. They held that religion had no role to play in modern society or in rational elucidations for the way world politics or/and relations work. Expectedly, they also focused most of their studies on the West, where religion’s effect was least apparent and argued that its influence in the non-West was a primitive residue that would vanish with its modernization, the Muslim world in particular. Paradoxically, modernity has caused a resurgence or a revival of religion, including Islam. As an alternative approach to this Western-centric stance and while focusing on Islam, the paper argues that religion is not a thing of the past and that Islam has its visions of international relations between Muslim and non-Muslim states or abodes: peace, war, truce or treaty, and preaching (da’wah).

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