Inter-American Politics: Limited Thoughts on the Unthinkable

1964 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-156
Author(s):  
Daniel Goldrich

These are four books on inter-American relations, the focus necessarily requiring the authors to make an assessment of intra-national politics as well. With one partial exception (Powelson), none of them is based on anything approaching a theoretical orientation, and the frame of reference is not that of systematic empirical inquiry. Their value then for the student of comparative politics or international relations is extremely limited. All (except Vianna Moog) share a diffuse commitment to the prevailing U.S. value system which constrains their ability to define Latin American political realities. It is to this point that most of the present essay is directed.

Author(s):  
Laura Kropff Causa

Drawing from Latin-American and Argentinean ethnic studies, in dialogue with African philosophy and African youth studies, this essay addresses collective agency as it emerges at the intersection of age and ethnicity within national formations of otherness. These formations organize how people live and define who must die and how. The aim is to develop a theoretical input to enrich the debate on the concept of intersectionality. The essay focuses on how young Mapuche activism dismantles and/or reproduces identities and experiences available to Mapuche youth in contemporary Argentina. This activism gained prominence recently due to a neoliberal change in national politics that rearranged the relationship between the nation and its internal others in order to legitimize violent repression of social protest. Within this context, young Mapuche activists (mainly male) are portrayed as a public menace.


1926 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-30
Author(s):  
Percy Alvin Martin

To students of international relations it has become almost a commonplace that among the most significant and permanent results of the World War has been the changed international status of the republics of Latin America. As a result of the war and post-war developments in these states, the traditional New World isolation in South America, as well as in North America, is a thing of the past. To our leading sister republics is no longer applicable the half-contemptuous phrase, current in the far-off days before 1914, that Latin America stands on the margin of international life. The new place in the comity of nations won by a number of these states is evidenced—to take one of the most obvious examples—by the raising of the legations of certain non-American powers to the rank of embassies, either during or immediately after the war. In the case of Brazil, for instance, where prior to 1914 only the United States maintained an ambassador, at the present time Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, and Japan maintain diplomatic representatives of this rank.Yet all things considered one of the most fruitful developments in the domain of international relations has been the share taken by our southern neighbors in the work of the League of Nations. All of the Latin American republics which severed relations with Germany or declared war against that country were entitled to participate in the Peace Conference. As a consequence, eleven of these states affixed their signatures to the Treaty of Versailles, an action subsequently ratified in all cases except Ecuador.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-545
Author(s):  
Mark Beeson

AbstractOne of the more striking, surprising, and optimism-inducing features of the contemporary international system has been the decline of interstate war. The key question for students of international relations and comparative politics is how this happy state of affairs came about. In short, was this a universal phenomenon or did some regions play a more important and pioneering role in bringing about peaceful change? As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay suggests that Western Europe generally and the European Union in particular played pivotal roles in transforming the international system and the behavior of policymakers. This helped to create the material and ideational conditions in which other parts of the world could replicate this experience, making war less likely and peaceful change more feasible. This argument is developed by comparing the experiences of the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their respective institutional offshoots. The essay uses this comparative historical analysis to assess both regions’ capacity to cope with new security challenges, particularly the declining confidence in institutionalized cooperation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (02) ◽  
pp. 468-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin R. Graham ◽  
Charles R. Shipan ◽  
Craig Volden

ABSTRACTWhat factors inhibit or facilitate cross-subfield conversations in political science? This article draws on diffusion scholarship to gain insight into cross-subfield communication. Diffusion scholarship represents a case where such communication might be expected, given that similar diffusion processes are analyzed in American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. We identify nearly 800 journal articles published on diffusion within political science between 1958 and 2008. Using network analysis we investigate the degree to which three “common culprits”—terminology, methodological approach, and journal type—influence levels of integration. We find the highest levels of integration among scholars using similar terms to describe diffusion processes, sharing a methodological approach (especially in quantitative scholarship), and publishing in a common set of subfield journals. These findings shed light on when cross-subfield communication is likely to occur with ease and when barriers may prove prohibitive.


1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-49
Author(s):  
John Bendix ◽  
Niklaus Steiner

Although political asylum has been at the forefront of contemporaryGerman politics for over two decades, it has not been much discussedin political science. Studying asylum is important, however,because it challenges assertions in both comparative politics andinternational relations that national interest drives decision-making.Political parties use national interest arguments to justify claims thatonly their agenda is best for the country, and governments arguesimilarly when questions about corporatist bargaining practices arise.More theoretically, realists in international relations have positedthat because some values “are preferable to others … it is possible todiscover, cumulate, and objectify a single national interest.” Whileinitially associated with Hans Morgenthau’s equating of nationalinterest to power, particularly in foreign policy, this position hassince been extended to argue that states can be seen as unitary rationalactors who carefully calculate the costs of alternative courses ofaction in their efforts to maximize expected utility.


1991 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-43
Author(s):  
Allen Lynch

Please bear with a specialist in international relations commenting on a series of presentations in comparative politics and economics. I will first try to identify a set of issues that arise from the presentations, and then I will spend a few minutes giving some of my own reflections on those issues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 265-270
Author(s):  
Igor Olegovich Trubitszyn

The author made an attempt to study the role of the descendants of the nobility in the new socio-economic and political realities of Russia at the end of the XX - first decades of the XXI century. The author focuses on the processes of recreation and subsequent activities of noble societies. The basis of the source base was a series of interviews with the descendants of the nobility living in the territory of the Russian Federation and in the countries of the post-Soviet space. The research identified the stages of development of the noble organizations, the main aspects of their activities. A comparative analysis was carried out with the pre-revolutionary noble corporate organization, which made it possible to characterize the main ideals of this social group and to make a comparative analysis with the value system of the class of the pre-revolutionary period. The range of problems faced by noble societies in modern Russia is highlighted. The results of the study can be used to comprehensively characterize the activities of corporations of the nobility in Russia, as well as the activities of the descendants of the nobility in the modern world.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document